FEEDING THE BEAST

Over the course of the last seven years, America has witnessed a parade of firsts.  

Last year, a former President was criminally indicted for the first time in American history.  

Over the course of that year, he became the first President to be criminally indicted a second, third and fourth time as well. 

In January 2021, again for the first time, a group of angry partisans, many armed, stormed and ransacked the US Capitol. They forced Representative, Senators and the Vice-President to run for their lives and stopped Congress from counting the electoral votes that would formalize the election of Joe Biden as president.  In that same month, again for the first time, the President who encouraged that attack -- and waited hours before even attempting to stop it -- was impeached .  

Not to be outdone, this was also the first time anyone had ever been impeached . . . 

Twice.

Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted to oust the Speaker of the House.

This too has never before happened. 

Not in the early years of the republic when the government's Constitutional foundations were uncertain. Not in the previous forty-two years of essentially divided government. Not even in the twenty-year run-up to the Civil War when the nation was coming apart at the seams.

There is a common thread to all these firsts.

The political party that birthed them gave up governing long ago. 

In its place, the party has made grievance and anger its only unassailable basis.  

The final vote to oust McCarthy was 216-210.  There are currently 433 members of the House of Representatives, two less than the mandated 435 because those seats are vacant.  Of that group, 426 were present yesterday; seven were absent (including Nancy Pelosi, who was in California attending Diane Feinstein's funeral). To avoid ouster, McCarthy had to convince 214 of them to vote against the motion to fire him.  

He fell four votes short.

McCarthy and his GOP caucus supporters should not have been surprised by this outcome.  

Eight Republicans voted to oust him.  Two of them (Representatives Burchette and Mace) offered unique reasons -- the former said McCarthy had insulted his religious beliefs and the latter claimed he had not honored agreements with her. The other six, however, claimed to oppose McCarthy because he had permitted a vote on last week's Continuing Resolution allowing the government to remain open for forty-five more days. That vote passed only because Democrats supported it (90 Republicans voted against it) and those six thought McCarthy should have shut down  the government to force the Senate into accepting draconian budget cuts at odds with the debt ceiling deal everyone had agreed to three weeks ago and to which even Senate Republicans had recommitted. 

That Gang of Eight is an interesting group.  

Seven of them (Representatives Biggs, Buck, Burchette, Crane, Gaetz, Good and Rosendale) claimed Donald Trump won the presidency in 2020 and six voted to object to the electoral count when Congress resumed its session hours after the January 6, 2021 carnage.  (Representative Crane was not in Congress on January 6 2021; he was elected in 2022; he has, however, claimed Trump won.) They are diehards.  Only Representative Mace stands outside this group.

With the diehards, facts do not matter.    

It does not matter to them that Trump lost in 2020.  

Or that the election was functionally fraud-free.  

Or that courts had rejected any claims to the contrary. 

Or that those same courts had approved all the voting rules that governed the election. 

Or that their president stoked a riot to overturn that election and silently cheered as his violent followers ransacked the seat of government in an attempt to do so.

It also does not matter to them that Democrats control the Senate, have 212 seats in the House, and would never agree to the diehards' budgetary demands.  

A normal politician would have cut a deal, gone  home, and lived to fight another day.

Yesterday's diehards, however,  are not normal.

But they do have power.

And they have that because power abhors a vacuum.

For years the GOP pretended to be the party that would rein in spending by cutting debt and deficits.  But when it actually controlled both the White House and Congress, during both the Bush II and Trump administrations, the deficit exploded. 

For years, the GOP also advanced a muscular foreign policy that supported NATO and the rules-based international order that preserved Europe's peace since 1945.  As soon, however, as Russia's Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB spy who counts the demise of the Soviet Union as history's greatest tragedy, illegally invaded Ukraine in an attempt to eliminate that country, and then committed war crimes for which he has been indicted by the International Criminal Court,  the GOP fractured.  Last week, it removed aid to Ukraine from the Continuing Resolution that kept the government opened.

For years, it also claimed that the rules on abortion should be made by the states.  But once the Supreme Court created that reality, and citizens in states the GOP controlled actually opposed the Court's decision and began protecting abortion rights, it tried to curtail those efforts and demanded federal legislation banning abortions. 

This is the policy vacuum the GOP has created.   

In its place has come MAGA denial and outrage.

This is also the world that Kevin McCarthy sought to but could not govern.

It was not for lack of trying. 

In fact, and to the contrary, McCarthy did everything he could to appease those who opposed him.  

He gave them the right to move to oust him on the motion of one member.  He gave them important seats on the Rules and Appropriations committees and thus an outsized role on what could come up for a vote and how much spending the House would allow. He approved a (baseless) impeachment inquiry against President Biden that his conference generally opposed but the diehards demanded. He tried last week until the eleventh hour to fashion a stop-gap spending bill his conference would support that could then be given to the Senate for negotiation prior to last week's September 30 deadline and likely shut down.  Before doing so, he also made clear to the diehards that he was willing to violate the spending deal he cut with Democrats and the administration three weeks ago, having advanced at least three appropriations bills that did so. 

But they opposed all of that too.

When it was over, McCarthy held a press conference announcing he would not run for Speaker when the House resumes next week.  He then blamed Nancy Pelosi for his loss. According to him, Pelosi told him last January to give the diehards the right to oust him on the motion of one member because she would back him if they ever tried to do it. As noted, Pelosi was not in Washington yesterday, nor is it clear what "backing" McCarthy would have meant had she been there.  Pelosi herself did not vote to oust McCarthy and she is also no longer the leader of the Democrats (who as a whole decided not to back McCarthy earlier in the day).  

It is not the job of Democrats to elect or preserve Republican Speakers.  

And even if it were, had McCarthy wanted their support, he could have asked for it. 

Had he done so, he would have had to promise them something in return.  

He did neither.  

He did not even try.

But had he tried . . .

The diehards would have crucified him for that  as well.

Caring not a whit about deficits or allies or even states' rights, all of which they abandoned in one form or another over the course of the last two decades, and caring also not a whit about rudimentary truth or the rule of law, both of which they abandoned in their embrace of Trump and the refusal to hold him responsible for January 6, the GOP is now  controlled by the beast that is MAGA and its angry zealots.  

At the close of yesterday's proceedings, the new Acting Speaker of the House, North Carolina Republican Patrick McHenry, gaveled the House to recess. McHenry's only power as Acting Speaker is to call the House back into session to select a new Speaker. As of now, that appears to be scheduled for no earlier than next Wednesday. Until that is done, the House cannot pass any legislation, and absent new legislation authorizing funding, the government will shut down forty-four days from today. 

Every day without a Speaker runs a day off that clock.   

Because the diehards do not have the votes they need  to get the spending cuts they demand, and are controlled by those who think compromise is a capital crime, the GOP will feed the MAGA beast by running that clock out as long as possible to force another eleventh hour confrontation. For the past eight months Kevin McCarthy fed that beast.

Yesterday . . .

It swallowed him.  

Its next victim may be the country.