Dysfunction Defines The GOP: "Abnormal, Unhealthy Interpersonal Interaction Within A Group"
What will the Republican Party dysfunction and chaos in the House— plus general GOP infighting— meaning at the ballot box. We may get a hint in 4 weeks in Virginia, where their entire legislature is up for grabs anywhere Republicans are desperately trying to hold onto their slim majority in the House and flip the Senate, which has been the bulwark against one party control and against Youngkin’s plan to end abortion and turn Virginia into a red vest version of DeSantis’ Florida. That chaos and dysfunction is an accurate reflection of a hefty part of a radicalized GOP base. Texas’ senior senator, John Cornyn complained yesterday that “These insurgents have no plan and now they’ve created even more chaos and it’s not good for the House, it’s not good for Republicans and they have no clear path forward. A handful [of] House members just want to blow up the institution and themselves in the process. Sad.” He’s tuned into his Senate colleagues and his donors, but not to his Texas base.
On Tuesday evening, Carl Hulse noted that “in today’s Republican Party, doing the right thing is considered a transgression, not a virtue— a sign of unforgivable allegiance to the political establishment. That was the central problem for McCarthy, and for his eventual successor. House Republicans, beholden to a base that reveres Trump and detests compromise, have become ungovernable. And it is doubtful that his precipitous downfall will break the fever. There is a bloc of House Republicans who will brook no compromise even if it means shutting down the government and stirring chaos, as they wanted to do last weekend rather than accepting a spending compromise that kept the government open but excluded their priorities on border security and deep spending cuts. The eight who brought down McCarthy are just a small fraction of the 221 Republicans who serve in the House, but they represent a broad and influential strain in the contemporary Republican Party, one that rewards lawmakers willing to confront Biden and Democrats and isn’t concerned with the consequences. Shutdown votes are good votes with that electorate.”
Very conservative North Dakota Republican Kelly Armstrong said that “The incentive structure in this town is completely broken… we have descended to a place where clicks, TV hits and the never-ending quest for the most mediocre taste of celebrity drives decisions and encourages juvenile behavior.” He was talking about members of his own party, not about Democrats.
Trump could have helped stop the dysfunction and chaos— but they are his trademark, so why would be. He let his ally go down to an ignominious end— at the hands of MAGAt acolytes. Yesterday, a team of Washington Post reporters wrote that “as McCarthy’s speakership teetered on the brink Tuesday, Trump stayed resolutely on the sidelines… One person close to Trump, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to comment candidly, suggested that the outcome might have been different if McCarthy had endorsed Trump early on in the former president’s quest for the 2024 nomination. Trump signaled over the weekend that he would not weigh in directly on the contentious Capitol Hill showdown. During a campaign stop in Iowa on Sunday, he said he had ‘always had a great relationship’ with McCarthy. ‘He said very nice things about me and the job I’ve done, so I appreciate that,’ Trump added. After McCarthy was removed in the historic vote, Gaetz suggested that Trump was on his side: ‘I would say that my conversations with the former president leave me with great confidence that I’m doing the right thing.’” In Trump’s life, loyalty has always been a one way street.
McHenry’s plan is to hold a debate among the candidates for speaker— right now 3 far right crackpots: Steve “I’m David Duke without the baggage” Scalise (R-LA), Gym Jordan (R-OH) and Kevin Hern (R-OK)— on Tuesday and then begin the voting on Wednesday. There’s talk about a vote to expel Matt Gaetz from the Republican conference, but that’s not going to happen.
No one takes McHenry seriously but it’s not likely that the fractious conference will be able to elect anyone so he may wind up as speaker, at least though the next shut down threat in 42 days. Politico editor John Harris made an apt observation yesterday: The House GOP Is a Failed State. “For a quarter-century,” he wrote, “every Republican to ascend to the speakership has descended from it with his standing diminished. It’s a line that travels from Newt Gingrich to Dennis Hastert to John Boehner to Paul Ryan to McCarthy… McCarthy’s ouster is dramatic evidence, if redundant, about the state of the modern GOP. A party that used to have an instinctual orientation toward authority and order— Democrats fall in love, went the old chestnut, while Republicans fall in line— is now animated by something akin to nihilism. The politics of contempt so skillfully exploited by Donald Trump is turned inward on hapless would-be leaders like McCarthy with no less ferocity than it is turned outward on liberals and the media…The House GOP now resembles a failed state. The party elects leaders with no capacity to lead members who have no interest in being led. McCarthy is like one of the succession of short-lived Soviet leaders who followed the long reign of Leonid Brezhnev, before the radical disruption of Mikhail Gorbachev at the end of the Cold War.”
