(Trends Wide) — Kevin McCarthy is the latest Republican leader to discover that his party’s inexorable march toward its far-right extremists is impossible to get ahead of.
The Californian, who has lost a staggering 11 consecutive House roll call votes as of Thursday night, in his bid to become Speaker of the House, was the first major Republican leader to embrace the former president. Donald Trump after the insurrection of January 6, 2021.
But on the two-year anniversary (which falls this Friday) of the worst attack on American democracy in the modern era, he is discovering that even that supposed career-enhancing gamble is insufficient to unlock the votes of Trump’s heirs in the chaotic wing. of the Republican Party.
McCarthy is becoming the latest example of a political leader consumed by a revolution that the radicals of “Make America Great Again” politics helped organize. For the radical lawmakers now blocking his promotion to his dream job, McCarthy has become the political powerhouse he once condemned.
Republicans gained control of the House by democratic means in a free and fair election. But his much smaller-than-expected majority offers an added advantage to the kind of pro-Trump extremists many voters seemed to reject in last year’s midterm elections.
But not even Trump himself, the author of the election denial scam that led to the insurrection and who was once able to move the GOP in the House with a single phone call, was able to rally MAGA fundamentalists in the House. to get them to vote for McCarthy. His failure to do so suggests waning influence for the former president after his shaky launch of a 2024 White House bid and a disastrous midterm election campaign for his chosen candidates. This situation in the House could show that the wildest manifestations of Trumpism no longer need Trump himself.
Two years ago, dozens of House Republicans refused to certify President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, and many spent years appeasing Trump’s lawless behavior. However, after bringing democracy to the brink, the Republican Party controls half of the Capitol, or is expected to if it eventually agrees and elects a Speaker of the House.
In another surreal scene on Capitol Hill this week, one such Republican, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — who downplayed the insurrection, saying the rioters would have “won” if she had been in charge — complains about the extremism of some of them. his colleagues who oppose McCarthy.
“That’s not serious. I don’t think that’s leadership, and I really see it more as obstruction than progress,” she told Trends Wide’s Manu Raju on Thursday.
incentives for chaos
But even after the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2023, the right-wing media machine and a still-angry voter base mean there are strong political incentives for disruptive politicians in the image of the former president.
Two of them, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Matt Gaetz of Florida, are leading the fight to block McCarthy. The deadlock in the House Speaker election is not just a new indication of the turmoil still rocking the Republican Party after the far-right ousted two Republican leaders earlier. It suggests that the new Republican majority in the House will be permanently dysfunctional, and given the ability of a few lawmakers to stop the chamber at any time, chaotic political crises are likely to dominate the next two years.
Trump may no longer be in the White House, but the circus-like politics he built on a foundation of rebellion in the Republican Party is back and has embroiled Washington once again. In a sign of how bad things are, the impasse over majority leader has prevented the GOP from even taking power properly since lawmakers cannot be sworn in before a leader has been chosen.
Far-right Republicans have blocked McCarthy’s dream of becoming Speaker of the House in multiple humiliating roll-call votes. The standoff is rooted in the same extremist ideological strain of Republican politics as Trumpism, which again has a vehicle in Washington now that the GOP has a slice of power.
The conditions that provoked and empowered this small group of right-wing political opportunists are only possible thanks to the former president’s poisoned legacy. McCarthy stands to lose just four Republican votes to his run for president, and the slim Republican majority gives extremists great leverage.
But that narrow margin, which will also put the majority in a precarious position on laws that must be passed, such as government funding and raising the debt ceiling later on, is a direct result of voters feeling alienated by the incessant and false statements by the former president about false voter fraud in 2020 and that the party failed to generate the “red wave” that many Republicans had predicted.
By refusing to hand over unrestricted power to the Republican Party, and a House majority that would have been achievable for McCarthy, voters who wanted a period of calm inadvertently created a scenario that breeds the instability they seem to disdain.
A historical political farce
McCarthy has made multiple concessions to the rebels who risk knocking out the teeth as president if they elect him. But as he suffered more defeats in roll call votes Thursday afternoon, it was clear America was looking at one of his biggest political farces ever.
Not all of those ultra-conservatives blocking McCarthy are making wild claims. Some, for example, call for fuller debates, a return to regular order in committees, and more power for individual members. But even if McCarthy can deal with this faction, he still has a problem with a more extremist bloc of lawmakers.
According to Boebert, the country was seeing democracy in action, even as McCarthy repeatedly amassed around 200 votes from his conference, while his various radical opponents were only able to attract around 20. (The defections made it impossible for McCarthy to win a majority of votes in the House since Democrats endorsed their own leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who routinely got more votes than McCarthy but also less than 218).
“This is not chaos. This is a constitutional republic at work. This is really something really beautiful,” Boebert said. He is correct that the disorder unfolding in the House is based on rules and procedures, the most basic elements of government that Trump had sought to disrupt with his efforts to decertify the 2020 Electoral College votes.
But his arguments fail before the reality of the behavior of the rebels. Many other Republicans have complained that it’s unclear exactly what concessions the Gaetz caucus, which has vowed never to support McCarthy, really wants.
“This ends one of two ways: Either Kevin McCarthy drops out of the race, or we build a straitjacket that he can’t evade,” Gaetz, who cast his seventh-round vote for Trump, told reporters.
In other words, the most radical hardliners will only accept a candidate who shares their brand of nihilistic, no-compromise politics that makes governing impossible.
In many ways, these lawsuits are the culmination of anti-establishment, anti-government forces first unleashed decades ago by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Republican revolution. They were also the genesis of the Tea Party’s anti-Washington movement in the 2000s. Trump then ousted much of the ruling wing of the Republican Party while effectively working to bring down institutions of government and accountability from within as president.
McCarthy’s negotiators were deep in talks Thursday night with hardliners over even more concessions, suggesting an extraordinary desire on their part to secure the glory of McCarthy’s gavel as president, no matter the cost. But given the extreme forces rocking the Republican Party and the intransigence of the Gaetz-Boebert chaos caucus, it seemed unlikely that he could create a political base that would promote some kind of stable government.
Still, a McCarthy ally, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, told Trends Wide he was confident a deal could soon clear the way for a resolution to the impasse.
“We’re going to see the fever come down a bit in the next 24 hours,” Fitzpatrick said.
The problem, however, is that people have been saying that about the Republican Party for years. And it only gets more and more extreme.
(Trends Wide) — Kevin McCarthy is the latest Republican leader to discover that his party’s inexorable march toward its far-right extremists is impossible to get ahead of.
The Californian, who has lost a staggering 11 consecutive House roll call votes as of Thursday night, in his bid to become Speaker of the House, was the first major Republican leader to embrace the former president. Donald Trump after the insurrection of January 6, 2021.
But on the two-year anniversary (which falls this Friday) of the worst attack on American democracy in the modern era, he is discovering that even that supposed career-enhancing gamble is insufficient to unlock the votes of Trump’s heirs in the chaotic wing. of the Republican Party.
McCarthy is becoming the latest example of a political leader consumed by a revolution that the radicals of “Make America Great Again” politics helped organize. For the radical lawmakers now blocking his promotion to his dream job, McCarthy has become the political powerhouse he once condemned.
Republicans gained control of the House by democratic means in a free and fair election. But his much smaller-than-expected majority offers an added advantage to the kind of pro-Trump extremists many voters seemed to reject in last year’s midterm elections.
But not even Trump himself, the author of the election denial scam that led to the insurrection and who was once able to move the GOP in the House with a single phone call, was able to rally MAGA fundamentalists in the House. to get them to vote for McCarthy. His failure to do so suggests waning influence for the former president after his shaky launch of a 2024 White House bid and a disastrous midterm election campaign for his chosen candidates. This situation in the House could show that the wildest manifestations of Trumpism no longer need Trump himself.
Two years ago, dozens of House Republicans refused to certify President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, and many spent years appeasing Trump’s lawless behavior. However, after bringing democracy to the brink, the Republican Party controls half of the Capitol, or is expected to if it eventually agrees and elects a Speaker of the House.
In another surreal scene on Capitol Hill this week, one such Republican, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — who downplayed the insurrection, saying the rioters would have “won” if she had been in charge — complains about the extremism of some of them. his colleagues who oppose McCarthy.
“That’s not serious. I don’t think that’s leadership, and I really see it more as obstruction than progress,” she told Trends Wide’s Manu Raju on Thursday.
incentives for chaos
But even after the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2023, the right-wing media machine and a still-angry voter base mean there are strong political incentives for disruptive politicians in the image of the former president.
Two of them, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Matt Gaetz of Florida, are leading the fight to block McCarthy. The deadlock in the House Speaker election is not just a new indication of the turmoil still rocking the Republican Party after the far-right ousted two Republican leaders earlier. It suggests that the new Republican majority in the House will be permanently dysfunctional, and given the ability of a few lawmakers to stop the chamber at any time, chaotic political crises are likely to dominate the next two years.
Trump may no longer be in the White House, but the circus-like politics he built on a foundation of rebellion in the Republican Party is back and has embroiled Washington once again. In a sign of how bad things are, the impasse over majority leader has prevented the GOP from even taking power properly since lawmakers cannot be sworn in before a leader has been chosen.
Far-right Republicans have blocked McCarthy’s dream of becoming Speaker of the House in multiple humiliating roll-call votes. The standoff is rooted in the same extremist ideological strain of Republican politics as Trumpism, which again has a vehicle in Washington now that the GOP has a slice of power.
The conditions that provoked and empowered this small group of right-wing political opportunists are only possible thanks to the former president’s poisoned legacy. McCarthy stands to lose just four Republican votes to his run for president, and the slim Republican majority gives extremists great leverage.
But that narrow margin, which will also put the majority in a precarious position on laws that must be passed, such as government funding and raising the debt ceiling later on, is a direct result of voters feeling alienated by the incessant and false statements by the former president about false voter fraud in 2020 and that the party failed to generate the “red wave” that many Republicans had predicted.
By refusing to hand over unrestricted power to the Republican Party, and a House majority that would have been achievable for McCarthy, voters who wanted a period of calm inadvertently created a scenario that breeds the instability they seem to disdain.
A historical political farce
McCarthy has made multiple concessions to the rebels who risk knocking out the teeth as president if they elect him. But as he suffered more defeats in roll call votes Thursday afternoon, it was clear America was looking at one of his biggest political farces ever.
Not all of those ultra-conservatives blocking McCarthy are making wild claims. Some, for example, call for fuller debates, a return to regular order in committees, and more power for individual members. But even if McCarthy can deal with this faction, he still has a problem with a more extremist bloc of lawmakers.
According to Boebert, the country was seeing democracy in action, even as McCarthy repeatedly amassed around 200 votes from his conference, while his various radical opponents were only able to attract around 20. (The defections made it impossible for McCarthy to win a majority of votes in the House since Democrats endorsed their own leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who routinely got more votes than McCarthy but also less than 218).
“This is not chaos. This is a constitutional republic at work. This is really something really beautiful,” Boebert said. He is correct that the disorder unfolding in the House is based on rules and procedures, the most basic elements of government that Trump had sought to disrupt with his efforts to decertify the 2020 Electoral College votes.
But his arguments fail before the reality of the behavior of the rebels. Many other Republicans have complained that it’s unclear exactly what concessions the Gaetz caucus, which has vowed never to support McCarthy, really wants.
“This ends one of two ways: Either Kevin McCarthy drops out of the race, or we build a straitjacket that he can’t evade,” Gaetz, who cast his seventh-round vote for Trump, told reporters.
In other words, the most radical hardliners will only accept a candidate who shares their brand of nihilistic, no-compromise politics that makes governing impossible.
In many ways, these lawsuits are the culmination of anti-establishment, anti-government forces first unleashed decades ago by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Republican revolution. They were also the genesis of the Tea Party’s anti-Washington movement in the 2000s. Trump then ousted much of the ruling wing of the Republican Party while effectively working to bring down institutions of government and accountability from within as president.
McCarthy’s negotiators were deep in talks Thursday night with hardliners over even more concessions, suggesting an extraordinary desire on their part to secure the glory of McCarthy’s gavel as president, no matter the cost. But given the extreme forces rocking the Republican Party and the intransigence of the Gaetz-Boebert chaos caucus, it seemed unlikely that he could create a political base that would promote some kind of stable government.
Still, a McCarthy ally, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, told Trends Wide he was confident a deal could soon clear the way for a resolution to the impasse.
“We’re going to see the fever come down a bit in the next 24 hours,” Fitzpatrick said.
The problem, however, is that people have been saying that about the Republican Party for years. And it only gets more and more extreme.
