Over the weekend, campaigning in Iowa, Mike Pence “tore into Donald Trump and pointed to isolationism in the Republican Party as complicit in the sweeping Hamas attack on Israel, decrying American ‘retreat on the world stage.’ In a scathing rebuke, Pence faulted ‘voices of appeasement like Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis that I believe have run contrary to the tradition in our party that America is the leader of the free world.’… [He] threw down a challenge to Republicans he said have ‘embraced the language of isolationism and appeasement.’”
One might almost wonder whether or not Pence had any similar thoughts between 2016 and 2021. If he did, gesture never made them public. Yesterday, on This Week, Chris Christie told George Stephanopoulos, referring to the Hamas attack, that “the actions taken by some members of my party were wholly irresponsible, without this going on. They're now even putting a brighter light on the irresponsibility of not having someone in place.”
Do you know who Tom Cole is? For one thing, he’s the dean of the Oklahoma congressional delegation (5 very conservative Republicans), having first been elected in 2002. His south-central district has an R+35 partisan lean. There are 14 counties and last year Cole won all of them, beating him Democratic opponent in a 66.7% to 33.3% landslide. He’s not a dummy, having been a Fulbright Fellow and having taught history before embarking on a political career. He’s the chairman of the all-powerful House Rules Committee and in the unlikely event that the fever breaks and the GOP looks for compromise candidate for speaker, Cole would be a contender.
A few days ago, writing for The Atlantic, Russell Berman’s used a quote from Cole as the title of his column, We Put Sharp Knives in the Hands of Children. Berman began by reminding his readers that McCarthy’s ouster last week has “paralyzed Congress and increased the likelihood of a prolonged government shutdown in the coming weeks.” Cole, a McCarthy loyalist, told Berman that Gaetz and his 7 extremist cronies “just took out our best player” in the race for the 2024 House majority.
Berman wrote that “Cole is, like other McCarthy allies, still seething at the unprecedented vote to overthrow the speaker and is backing efforts to change the House rules so that whoever replaces McCarthy does not face the same ever-present threat. ‘We put sharp knives in the hands of children, and they used them,’ Cole said, telling Berman that “the hard-liners’ revolt against McCarthy could ‘very easily’ cost the GOP its majority next year. ‘I think these guys materially hurt our chances to hold the majority,’ Cole said. ‘That’s just the reality.’” Once again, these 8 cranks, Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Nancy Mace (R-SC), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Matt Rosendale (R-MT), Eli Crane (R-AZ), Ken Buck (R-CO), Tim Burchett (R-TN) and Bob Good (VA):
Cole worried that good candidates— especially mainstream conservatives— will be reluctant to run in 2024 and that donors will shy away from the chaos and dysfunction. “The spectacle of an internal leadership war bringing the House to a halt,” wrote Berman, “also undercuts the GOP’s credibility as a governing party, he lamented. ‘They just messed up the House. They had no exit plan, no alternative strategy, no alternative candidate.’”
[T]he issue animating the leadership race is whether to, as Cole put it, “take away the knives” and restrict the procedural tool, known as the “motion to vacate,” that Gaetz used to remove McCarthy. “We’ve driven out three speakers now with this weapon,” Cole said. Boehner resigned in 2015 after it became clear that he might lose the speakership in a floor vote, and his successor, Paul Ryan, was under increasing pressure from his right flank when he chose to retire three years later.
The Main Street Caucus, a coalition of more pragmatic and ideologically flexible Republicans, is pushing to change the rules, and a few members have said they’ll only support a candidate who promises to do so. Currently, any single lawmaker can force a vote on a motion to vacate. To raise that threshold, Republicans might need votes from Democrats, who refused to help rescue McCarthy. “I think it would get a lot of Democratic support,” Cole said. “We’d have to endure another hour of ‘I told you so.’ That’s fair enough.” Though he was critical of Democrats for voting to remove McCarthy, he said he understood why they did. “If we had the opportunity to take out [Nancy] Pelosi,” Cole said, “we probably would have done the same thing.”
He recounted a conversation with a long-serving House Democrat, Representative Bill Pascrell of New Jersey, who alluded to worries that dissident Democrats could use the same tactic to oust a future speaker in their party. “We have our nuts too,” Cole recalled him whispering in an elevator. (Pascrell did not respond to a request to comment.)
The outcome of the rules debate could determine when Republicans are able to elect a speaker, reopen the House, and repair the harm they’ve done to their chances in next year’s elections. For his part, Cole is hoping that whoever they choose can quickly win a majority in a floor vote next week. And if they don’t? “Then,” he said, “it’s really a chaotic situation.”
Yesterday, during an interview with Politico, Cole said that that spending deal McCarthy cut with the Freedom Caucus extremists is null and void now. He said it “was faulty from the beginning. It’s changed over time, and now in a sense, it doesn’t exist at all because McCarthy isn’t the speaker anymore. So we’re not really bound by this agreement now. That will be an interesting thing the new speaker will have to hash out.” David Rogers, after noting Cole’s stature, wrote that “The fact that he should speak out so directly now could embolden GOP centrists to do the same in the party fight now over who will be the next speaker. When McCarthy struck the spending deal in June, he was under assault from [extremists] angered by the less severe spending caps he had accepted as part of a bipartisan bill negotiated last spring with the White House to avert default.”
According to a statement from the DNC, Trump’s endorsement of Gym Jordan, a very far right— and very deranged— extremist as speaker is another sign that Trump “not only owns the House GOP circus, but remains its proud ringleader.”