Kevin McCarthy Debacle Is an Insurrection by Other Means
Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., talks on the phone ahead of the ninth round of voting for speaker, as the House of Representatives meets for the third day to elect a speaker and convene the 118th Congress in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 5, 2023.
Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP
Rep. Jim Jordan, who Republican holdouts briefly tried to install as an alternative speaker this week, was also referred by the House January 6 Committee; so was McCarthy himself.
The intraparty battle for control of the House of Representatives is not a fight between pro-Trump and anti-Trump camps. There are no real anti-Trump moderates left in the Republican House caucus. This is not a matter of competing political ideologies.
The speaker’s battle would make a perfect “Seinfeld” episode: It is a fight about nothing.
And that’s what makes it so dangerous.
Neither the pro-McCarthy camp nor the anti-McCarthy insurgents have any real policy goals for how to make the government more effective. The goal of the insurgents is to stop the government from working at all. Yet that is true of McCarthy and his supporters as well.
The only thing they are really fighting over is personal political power. Nothing more. And that makes it very difficult for McCarthy to appease the Republicans who oppose him.
It is fitting that the battle for control of the House comes exactly two years after the January 6, 2021, insurrection. The speakership fight is a continuation of that struggle for personal power. This is an insurrection by other means.
Even if the speakership is decided in the coming days, this battle shows just how paralyzed Congress will be over the next two years.
This is the paralysis that the Biden administration and the Democrats in Congress tried to prepare for in December, when the frenetic activity in the House gave off an apocalyptic vibe. Every move was hurried, with an eye on the clock and the knowledge that darkness was looming.
During the lame-duck session, the House Ways and Means Committee released a report about Trump’s long-hidden tax returns; the House January 6 Committee held its final hearing and voted to issue criminal referrals of Trump and others to the Justice Department; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed a joint session of Congress; and heavily bundled legislation that included continued funding for U.S. aid to Ukraine and new legal protections for the election of American presidents worked its way across Capitol Hill and was signed into law by Biden.
None of those things could wait any longer. The insurgents were about to take over the House.
In November, Republicans suffered some of the worst midterm results for an opposition party in modern American history, thanks to their turn toward right-wing extremism. The Republican-dominated Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, and many Republican candidates in key races were election deniers…
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