https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/opinion-features/when-trumpists-run-amok-capitol-hill
When Trumpists run amok on Capitol Hill
The chaos they created last week over the election of the Republican House Speaker shows how the GOP has become hostage to its fringe, and gives a preview of things to come in the US Congress in the next two years
MON, JAN 09, 2023
THE Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, the lower chamber of Congress, is in some ways the second-most powerful figure in Washington, DC, after the President.
Elected by the body’s majority party, the speaker is the political and parliamentary leader, and the administrative head of the House as well as its presiding officer. They are also the second in the US presidential line of succession, after the vice-president, and ahead of the President Pro Tempore of the US Senate.
So after the 435 members of the House failed to elect a speaker for the 118th Congress, and when the office of the speaker was vacant for four days, it meant that if for some reason both President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris had been incapacitated late last week, the current president of the US Senate, Senator Patty Murray of Washington state, would have had to take over at the White House.
Indeed, as Republican Representative Kevin McCarthy of California tried and failed repeatedly to become the speaker, the House was grinding to a halt. Its newly elected members could not be sworn in, forcing their families who came to witness the event to stay in Washington; some of the would-be members were seen carrying their babies, and even their pets, on the floor of the House.
They certainly were not able to respond to possible emergencies, could not pass bills nor adopt resolutions and perform their main role: the oversight of the federal government.
Some would call that one big mess. Others would describe it as the price of maintaining a vibrant democracy.
Only twice since 1913 has a Speaker of the House not been elected on the first ballot. The first time was 100 years ago, in 1923, following the 1922 election when Republicans lost 77 of their House seats, and their margin over Democratic members shrank from 171 to 18.
The new Congress was not sworn in until March 1923, and it did not meet for its first session until December 1923. Thirteen months had passed between the election and the vote for a new speaker. Nine rounds of voting were held before a speaker was elected, which was still less than the 133 ballots that were required in order to fill the position after the 34th Congress was elected in 1855.
The second time the speaker impasse happened was last week, when Representative McCarthy, who has been leading the House GOP since 2019 and easily won a leadership vote 188-31 last year, was fighting for his political survival until early Saturday morning (Jan 7) as a group of hard-right Republicans sought to block his bid for House Speaker.
This time the 55th speaker was elected after 15 roll-call votes and four days of never-ending negotiations and bitter infighting among Republicans that exposed a divided and dysfunctional party.
At one point, a fight nearly erupted when Republican Representative Mike Rogers of Alaska had to be restrained as he shouted at one of the last hold-outs, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, and threatened to attack him. Several of the Democratic lawmakers who seem to enjoy watching the best show in town, posted images of themselves taking popcorn to the House floor.
The political drama in Congress amounted to another political disaster to the Republicans, who failed to take over the Senate in the midterm elections and won the House by only a narrower than expected margin as they ran against a weak Democratic president facing huge economic problems, including surging inflation.
The election of Representative McCarthy as speaker should have provided the Republicans with an opportunity to celebrate their win and to introduce to Americans their agenda for the next two years, including how to deal with the continuing illegal immigration and launching investigations into scandals that allegedly involve members of the Biden family.
But since the Republicans now have, with 222 seats in hand, only 10 more seats than the Democrats, and Representative McCarthy needed 218 to get elected speaker, he had to mobilise the support of all his troops, recognising that if more than four Republicans missed the vote, he would not be able to win the speakership.
McCarthy had assumed that one or two Republican lawmakers may be opposed to his nomination. But even in his worst nightmares, the lawmaker from California, who had already started moving to the speaker’s offices last week, did not imagine that 20 Republican House members would vote at one point to deny him the speaker’s gavel, or that the Democratic House leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries from New York, would win more votes than he did.
Some of the Republican rebels harboured personal grudges against Representative McCarthy or were holding out as a way to press him to promise them committee assignments. But most of them belonged to the most hard-right wing of the party and were supporters of former president Donald Trump and the Trumpist agenda. They are in the habit of bashing any Democrat and Republican who rejects their radical positions, as “leftist” or “communist”.
Some of these Republicans, such as Representatives Lauren Boebert from Colorado and Matt Gaetz of Florida, have distrusted McCarthy, a moderate conservative Republican who has occasionally been critical of Trump. They regard him as someone who is not fully committed to Trumpism and who would be inclined to work with the Democrats. Which he would probably have to be, since the Republicans have only 10 more seats than the Democrats in the House.
But what is political common sense for anyone familiar with the workings of Congress is seen as a betrayal by the Trumpists who insist that the speaker has to promote major government spending cuts, including reduction in the aid to Ukraine, and other proposals that have no chance of being passed by the House, not to mention through the Democrat-controlled Senate.
The Trumpists’ goal is to disrupt the legislative and policy process and create the conditions for paralysis in Washington and ensure that President Biden fails to achieve his goals on the domestic and foreign policy fronts.
And the chaos they helped create last week provided a preview to what is probably going to happen in the next two years. The Trumpists succeeded in holding Congress hostage for four days, and now after the new House Speaker offered them all the concessions they demanded, they would be able to hold Congress hostage for four years – including by making it difficult to carry out some of their basic duties such as funding the government and avoiding a federal debt default.
Trump has called on his allies in the House to support Representative McCarthy, tweeting “VOTE FOR KEVIN. CLOSE THE DEAL. TAKE THE VICTORY”, and tried to create the impression that only his personal intervention saved McCarthy from a humiliating defeat.
Interestingly enough, some of the rebels, pointing out that the US Constitution does not require the speaker to actually be a member of the House, proposed that Trump be elected to the post.
The chaos on Capitol Hill seems to benefit Trump by highlighting the extent to which the Republican Party is dependent on the support of the members of his electoral base. The ex-president’s implied threat is that if the Republicans decide not to nominate him as their presidential candidate in 2024, then like the biblical character of Samson, Trump would bring down the columns holding the GOP together – even if that meant collapsing the entire Republican temple.