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      Speaker Mike Johnson Helped Efforts to Overturn The 2020 Election

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      If Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio was the most prominent public face of the congressional effort to fight the results of the 2020 election, his mentee, the newly elected Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana, was a silent but pivotal partner.The election on Wednesday of Mr. Johnson, 51, to the post second in line to the presidency has focused new attention on his behind-the-scenes role in trying to overturn the election results on behalf of former President Donald J. Trump.A social conservative, Mr. Johnson played a leading role in recruiting House Republicans to sign a legal brief supporting a lawsuit seeking to overturn the results.In December 2020, Mr. Johnson collected signatures for a legal brief in support of a Texas lawsuit, rooted in baseless claims of widespread election irregularities, that tried to throw out the results in four battleground states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.The Supreme Court ultimately rejected the suit, but not before Mr. Johnson persuaded more than 60 percent of House Republicans to sign onto the effort. He did so by telling them that the initiative had been personally blessed by Mr. Trump, and that the former president was “anxiously awaiting” to see who in Congress would defend him.A constitutional lawyer, Mr. Johnson was also a key architect of Republicans’ objections to certifying Mr. Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021. Many Republicans in Congress relied on his arguments.In 2020, Mr. Johnson embraced Mr. Trump’s wild and false claims of fraud. In a radio interview, he asserted that a software system used for voting was “suspect because it came from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.”Mr. Johnson also falsely claimed the election was “rigged.”“You know the allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion, there’s a lot of merit to that,” Mr. Johnson said.No credible evidence has ever emerged to support the conspiracy theories about Dominion and another voting machine firm having helped to ensure Mr. Trump’s defeat. In April, Fox News agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit by Dominion over reports broadcast by Fox that Dominion machines were susceptible to hacking and had flipped votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden.On the eve of the Jan. 6 votes, Mr. Johnson had honed his arguments undermining the election to be more palatable. He presented colleagues with arguments they could use to oppose the will of the voters without embracing conspiracy theories and the lies of widespread fraud pushed by Mr. Trump. Mr. Johnson instead faulted the way some states had changed voting procedures during the pandemic, saying it was unconstitutional.After a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters, believing the election was rigged, stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and injured about 150 police officers, Mr. Johnson condemned the violence. But he defended the actions of congressional Republicans in objecting to Mr. Biden’s victory.He wrote a two-page memo of talking points meant to buck up Republicans, and lamented that the violence had almost eclipsed his careful arguments. “Most of the country has also never heard the principled reason,” he wrote.Over a year later, on “Truth Be Told,” the Christian podcast he hosts with his wife, Kelly, Mr. Johnson continued to argue that he and his colleagues had been right to object to the election results.“The slates of electors were produced by a clearly unconstitutional process, period,” he said.Mr. Johnson came to Congress in 2017 with support from the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, though he has never joined the group.In an interview this year, he referred to Mr. Jordan, a co-founder of the Freedom Caucus, as a “very close friend” who “has been a mentor to me since I got here.”Mr. Johnson said Mr. Jordan called him when he was running for office, because “he knew I was a conservative,” contributed money to his campaign and invited him to Washington for a meeting with him and other Freedom Caucus members.“He started providing advice to me,” Mr. Johnson said. “So now we’ve become very close.”In 2020, the two men and their wives traveled to Israel together and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.Mr. Johnson has also made a close ally of Mr. Trump, and he served on Mr. Trump’s impeachment defense team.On Nov. 8, 2020, Mr. Johnson was onstage at a northwest Louisiana church speaking about Christianity in America when Mr. Trump called. Mr. Johnson had been in touch with the president’s team on his myriad legal challenges seeking to overturn the results, “to restore the integrity of our election process,” according to a Facebook post by Mr. Johnson recounting the exchange.“We have to keep fighting for that, Mike,” he said Mr. Trump told him.“Indeed we do, sir!” Mr. Johnson said he replied.Karoun Demirjian More

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      Mike Johnson helped Trump on January 6 – now he’s a threat to democracy

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      The Louisiana congressman Mike Johnson, whom Republicans in Congress elected as their speaker after more than three weeks of leaderless chaos, played a key role in Donald Trump’s attempts to subvert the results of the 2020 election.Johnson amassed enough support to win the speakership because of his allegiance to Trumpian ideals, earning him the nickname on the far right of “Maga Mike”. A litmus test of sorts for the speakership was alignment with rightwing views, including believing in a stolen election, though the firebrand approach of failed speaker candidate Jim Jordan soured moderate members, despite his election-denying bonafides.Johnson’s victory brought swift alarm from groups defending US democracy, which pointed to the prominent role Johnson will take in US politics before a crucial 2024 presidential election, and how election denialism is clearly no longer a fringe view in the Republican party.Johnson was more involved than his predecessor Kevin McCarthy in efforts to overturn the 2020 election; McCarthy tolerated and often condoned election denialism and voted against certifying the 2020 vote, but didn’t go as far as the right-most flank.Johnson, a lesser-known lawmaker, is perhaps most notable for his role in attempting to overturn Democratic president Joe Biden’s victory. His arguments against the votes, noting how states changed voting rules because of the pandemic, became a “narrow and lawyerly” way for members of Congress to object to the vote count on January 6, with Johnson as “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections”, the New York Times reported.Johnson, who is a constitutional lawyer, also circulated an amicus brief – signed by more than 100 Republican lawmakers, including McCarthy – and filed it in a Texas court case to contest the results in four swing states.A few days after the 2020 election, Johnson wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “I have just called President Trump to say this: ‘Stay strong and keep fighting, sir! The nation is depending upon your resolve. We must exhaust every available legal remedy to restore Americans’ trust in the fairness of our election system.’”Johnson’s ascension shows the state of the mainstream Republican party today – their firm denial of the 2020 election and allegiance to Trump, said Gunner Ramer, the political director for the Republican Accountability Project. A more moderate Republican speaker nominee, the congressman Tom Emmer, failed to win over Trump and the far right, who saw him as a Republican in Name Only, or Rino.Johnson’s win “speaks to the total disregard that the Republican party has had and still has for democratic institutions and the rule of law”, Ramer said. “Propping up someone like Mike Johnson should expose that fact within the Republican party.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStand Up America, a progressive advocacy group, called it a “dark day for American democracy”.“Mike Johnson’s record of election denial and his attempts to overturn the will of the people make him totally unfit to be second in line to the presidency,” the group’s founder and president, Sean Eldridge, said. “Those who have spent years trying to undermine our democracy cannot be trusted to lead it.”Already, Johnson and his supporters have made clear they don’t want to answer questions about the 2020 election. In a press conference Tuesday, when a reporter noted Johnson’s role and attempted to ask a question, she was met with boos and derision from Johnson and his allies. More

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      Mike Johnson becomes fourth Republican to be nominated for US House speaker this month

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      Mike Johnson was nominated to lead the US House of Representatives on Tuesday, though it was unclear whether he would merely become the latest hopeful to fall victim to party infighting that has paralyzed Congress for more than three weeks.Johnson, of Louisiana, is the fourth Republican this month to win the party’s nomination for the speaker’s chair, which has sat vacant since a small faction of party rebels ousted Kevin McCarthy on 3 October.Republicans’ disarray has left lawmakers unable to respond to the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, or take steps to head off a partial government shutdown that would begin on 18 November without congressional action.It was not clear whether Johnson would be able to overcome divisions that have tripped up three other candidates who had previously won the party’s nomination. In a sign of those divisions, the second-place finisher in the nominating vote was the ousted McCarthy, who secured 43 votes despite not being a declared candidate.Tom Emmer, the No. 3 House Republican, won the nomination earlier in the day, only to withdraw hours later due to opposition from the party’s right flank.Like Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan before him, Emmer’s prospects were doomed by a relatively small group of holdouts who denied him the 217 votes he needed. That high threshold and the party’s narrow 221-212 majority means that any candidate can afford to lose just four votes if Democrats remain united in opposition.“We have no capacity at the moment to come to a verdict, and that is a very distressing place to be,” congressman Marc Molinaro said.Johnson, a conservative constitutional law attorney, has billed himself as a bridge builder between the various Republican factions. The north-west Louisiana district he represents is one of the poorest in the US.“He knows everybody very well, does a great job with bringing people to the floor, talking about our policies, and that’s what we need right now,” said Kevin Hern, who withdrew his own bid to support Johnson.Johnson bested Byron Donalds, Mark Green, Roger Williams and Chuck Fleischmann in the latest Republican speaker nomination fight. In total, 14 Republicans have put their names forward for speaker this month.Emmer dropped his bid after Donald Trump urged Republicans to oppose him. Unlike many in his party, Emmer voted to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 victory over Trump after the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump earlier this month had backed Jordan’s bid for the speakership, but Republicans gave up on his attempt last week after Jordan lost three floor votes.Before that, No. 2 House Republican Steve Scalise dropped his own bid when he was unable to line up enough votes to win the job.Democrats have said they are open to a compromise candidate who would allow the chamber to function. Many Republicans have said on principle that they would not back somebody who had support from the opposition party.“We must pursue a bipartisan path forward and reopen the House,” top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries said on social media.The uncertainty has also helped to push up the US government’s borrowing costs. The government posted a record $1.7tn deficit for the most recent fiscal year, in part due to higher interest payments. More

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      Tom Emmer withdraws US House speaker bid hours after nomination

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      The Minnesota representative Tom Emmer has abandoned his bid for speaker after it became clear he had no pathway to winning the 217 votes required to become speaker. He abandoned his bid hours after getting enough votes to be the GOP nominee.Emmer is the third Republican who has withdrawn from the speakership race after initially getting the nod from a majority of the conference. Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio previously launched unsuccessful efforts.Emmer’s failure to get the speakership is the latest development in a remarkably embarrassing three weeks for House Republicans that came after they ousted Kevin McCarthy as speaker.Emmer won the nomination to be speaker shortly after noon ET on Tuesday, defeating Louisiana congressman Mike Johnson by 117-97 in a secret ballot vote. After becoming the nominee, Republicans took a non-secret roll call vote in which 26 members said they would vote against Emmer in a floor vote, according to Punchbowl News, making his pathway to getting 217 votes virtually impossible. Republicans hold a 221-212 majority in the House, meaning that whoever is eventually elected speaker needs to get the support of almost the entire conference, assuming all Democrats vote for their leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York.Johnson and Kevin Hern, the chairman of the Republican study committee and one of the eight candidates Emmer defeated on Tuesday, immediately announced they were running for speaker.Donald Trump also publicly came out against Emmer’s candidacy Tuesday afternoon.“I have many wonderful friends wanting to be Speaker of the House, and some are truly great Warriors,” Trump said in a statement posted on Truth Social, his social media network. “RINO Tom Emmer, who I do not know well, is not one of them. He never respected the Power of a Trump Endorsement, or the breadth and scope of MAGA-MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! He fought me all the way.”Emmer abruptly left a meeting of House Republicans Tuesday afternoon, shortly before it was announced he was ending his bid, Punchbowl reported.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnlike many of his colleagues, Emmer voted to certify the 2020 election in Congress. When he led House Republicans’ campaign arm, he also reportedly advised candidates to not talk about Trump on the campaign trail – something Emmer strongly denies. More

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      Who is Tom Emmer, Republicans’ latest failed House speaker hopeful?

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      The Minnesota congressman Tom Emmer was the third party leader to try to galvanize enough support among Republicans to be House speaker after Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio failed in their bids.But he rapidly found he was unableto muster the 217 votes he needed to get the job.He was for a few hours at the center of the ongoing crisis gripping the party and causing chaos in the heart of US government. But Emmer did not even make it to a public floor vote in the House before his support ebbed away and he dropped out – not least due to withering attacks by the former US president Donald Trump.Emmer was first elected to Congress in 2014, replacing Michele Bachmann, a far-right member of Congress who was one of the earliest members of the Tea Party. When he initially ran to replace her, he was described as “Bachmann 2.0”, by the left-leaning Mother Jones magazine, but after he was elected he said he would be more low key than she was.Emmer represents Minnesota’s sixth congressional district, which includes a partial ring of Minneapolis suburbs and extends north-west from the city. The district is solidly conservative – Donald Trump handily carried the district in 2020 by more than 17 points.Emmer broke with many of his Republican colleagues and voted to certify the 2020 election. “Simply put, Congress does not have the authority to discard an individual slate of electors certified by a state’s legislature in accordance with their constitution,” he said in a statement after certification.He did, however, sign on to a brief at the supreme court urging the justices to throw out the electoral votes from key swing states and suggested there may have been fraud as he supported Trump’s legal challenges to the election results, CNN reported.Emmer’s rise in Congress was shaped by two terms he spent as chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), the wing of the House Republicans that helps the party defend and pick up seats. During Emmer’s first term as chair in 2020, Republicans gained a net 13 seats, getting them very close to a majority. In 2022, in Emmer’s second term, Republicans gained that majority, though they didn’t pick up as many seats as expected.During the midterm elections last year, CNN reported Emmer reportedly advised candidates not to talk about Trump on the campaign trail – an accusation he strongly denies. That history, in addition to Emmer’s vote to certify the election, has reportedly cause friction with Trump, whose allies are said to be pushing to block him from the speakership.Trump himself said he was largely staying out of the speaker’s race and noted that Emmer had called him to offer praise. “I think he’s my biggest fan now,” he told reporters on Monday in New Hampshire.After Republicans won control of the House last year, Emmer won a contentious election to be the majority whip, the number three position in leadership that is in charge of counting votes. He narrowly defeated the Indiana representative Jim Banks in a contest that reportedly generated bad blood.In addition to his vote to certify the election, Emmer has also taken at least one other vote that broke with the majority of his caucus. Last year, he was one of 39 Republicans to vote in favor of having the federal government recognize same-sex marriages.Before serving in Congress, Emmer was a lawyer and state representative in Minnesota, where in 2005 he backed a bill favoring chemical castration for some sex offenders. In 2010, he ran for governor, losing by an extremely close 9,000 votes after a recount. He has seven children. More

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      House still without speaker as Republicans fail yet again to unify

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      After three weeks of the House having no speaker and mere hours after Tom Emmer of Minnesota won the nomination, the House still did not have a speaker on Tuesday when Emmer dropped out after just hours.Again, Republicans have failed to unify after the historic removal of Kevin McCarthy.Ahead of the Tuesday vote, seven House Republicans had launched speakership bids: Emmer, Jack Bergman of Michigan, Byron Donalds of Florida, Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, Austin Scott of Georgia and Pete Sessions of Texas. Two other declared candidates, Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania and Gary Palmer of Alabama, announced before the Tuesday vote that they would withdraw from the race.Sessions, Bergman, Scott and Hern were eliminated after the first four ballots, while Donalds dropped out following the fourth round of voting. On the fifth and final ballot, Emmer and Johnson were the only two candidates, and Emmer pulled off the win, becoming the conference’s third speaker nominee in three weeks.The final vote was 117 to 97, underscoring the significant challenge that Emmer faced in attempting to unify his deeply divided conference. An internal roll call vote taken after Emmer won the nomination indicated that more than 20 Republicans intended to oppose him on the floor, members told reporters. Although Emmer tried to allay those members’ concerns, he was unable to sway enough of his detractors to advance to a floor vote.Of the declared candidates, Emmer was arguably the best known within the conference, because of his position in House leadership. But Emmer has shown an occasional willingness to clash with Donald Trump, which raised issues with some of his House colleagues. For example, Emmer is one of just two speaker candidates, along with Scott, who voted to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election despite the former president’s false claims of widespread fraud in battleground states. However, Emmer also signed an amicus brief urging the US supreme court to invalidate the election results of four key swing states, which would have voided Biden’s victory in the presidential race.Emmer’s mixed record on election denial was not enough to assuage the concerns of Trump, who urged House Republicans to oppose the speaker nominee on Tuesday. Writing on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump warned that a vote for Emmer would be “a tragic mistake”.“I have many wonderful friends wanting to be Speaker of the House, and some are truly great Warriors,” Trump said. “Tom Emmer, who I do not know well, is not one of them.”Emmer’s nomination came four days after Jim Jordan of Ohio abandoned his speakership bid due to entrenched opposition among more moderate Republicans.The House has now been without a speaker for three weeks, since McCarthy’s ouster earlier this month. Because of Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House, any speaker candidate can only afford four defections within the party and still secure the 217 votes needed to win the gavel.As the House remains at a standstill, the chamber is unable to advance any legislation. Joe Biden has called on Congress to pass a supplemental funding package providing aid to Ukraine and Israel, but the House cannot consider such a bill until a new speaker is elected.Despite the high stakes, House Republicans have been unable to unify around a single candidate. Following McCarthy’s removal, the House majority leader, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, won the conference’s speaker nomination, but he dropped out days later amid fierce backlash from hard-right lawmakers. Jordan then won Republicans’ speaker nomination, but he was forced to withdraw after three failed floor votes.“Chaos and dysfunction continue to be the order of the day in the House Republican majority,” the House Democratic caucus chair, Pete Aguilar of California, said Tuesday. “The American people and our allies abroad can’t afford any more delays. Every day of this Maga [‘Make America Great Again’] madness is another day of not sending aid to Israel and Ukraine, not taking meaningful steps to fund our government and not making sure that we’re looking out for working families across this country.”In a potentially grim sign for Republicans’ hopes of quickly reaching a resolution to the deadlock, the hard-right House Freedom Caucus has demanded that members remain in Washington DC until a new speaker is elected, jeopardizing the chamber’s planned recess starting next week.“We must proceed with all possible speed and determination,” the caucus said in a statement released on Monday. “Intentional and unnecessary delays must end. It serves only the lobbyists of the swamp and defenders of the status quo to continue to drag out this process.” More

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      Kevin McCarthy dismissed Liz Cheney warning before January 6, book says

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      When Liz Cheney warned fellow Republicans five days before January 6 of a “dark day” to come if they “indulged in the fantasy” that they could overturn Donald Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden, the then House GOP leader, Kevin McCarthy, swiftly slapped her down.“After Liz spoke,” the former Wyoming representative’s fellow anti-Trumper Adam Kinzinger writes in a new book, “McCarthy immediately told everyone who was listening, ‘I just want to be clear: Liz doesn’t speak for the conference. She speaks for herself.’”Five days after Cheney delivered her warning on a Republican conference call, Trump supporters attacked Congress in an attempt to block certification of Biden’s win.McCarthy’s statement, Kinzinger writes, was “unnecessary and disrespectful, and it infuriated me”.Kinzinger details McCarthy’s “notably juvenile” intervention – and even what he says were two physical blows delivered to him by McCarthy – in Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country, which will be published in the US this month. The Guardian obtained a copy.Nine deaths have been linked to the January 6 riot, more than a thousand arrests made and hundreds convicted, some with seditious conspiracy. Trump was impeached a second time for inciting the attack, and acquitted a second time when Senate Republicans stayed loyal. When the dust cleared from the January 6 attack, McCarthy was among 147 House and Senate Republicans who still voted to object to results in key states.Like Cheney, Kinzinger, from Illinois, sat on the House January 6 committee, then left office. Unlike Cheney, who was beaten by a Trump ally, Kinzinger chose to retire.Cheney has maintained a high profile, warning of the threat Trump poses as he leads polling regarding the Republican nomination next year, 91 criminal charges (17 concerning election subversion) and assorted civil threats notwithstanding, and refusing to rule out a presidential run of her own.Kinzinger has founded Country First, an organisation meant to combat Republican extremism, and become a political commentator. In his book, he says he responded to McCarthy on the 1 January 2021 conference call by issuing his own warning about the potential for violence on 6 January and “calling on McCarthy to say he wouldn’t join the group opposing the electoral college states.“He replied by coming on the line to say, ‘OK, Adam. Operator, who’s up next?’”Such a “rude and dismissive tone”, Kinzinger says, “was typical of [McCarthy’s] style, which was notably juvenile”.McCarthy briefly blamed Trump for January 6, swiftly reversed course, stayed close to the former president and became speaker of the House, only to lose the role after less than a year, in the face of a Trumpist rebellion.Kinzinger accuses McCarthy, from California, of behaving less like a party leader than “an attention-seeking high school senior who readily picked on anyone who didn’t fall in line”. And while characterising McCarthy’s dismissal of Cheney’s warning about January 6 as “a little dig”, Kinzinger also details two physical digs he says he took from McCarthy himself.“I went from being one of the boys he treated with big smiles and pats on the back to outcast as soon as I started speaking the truth about the president who would be king,” Kinzinger writes.McCarthy “responded by trying to intimidate me physically. Once, I was standing in the aisle that runs from the floor to the back of the [House] chamber. As he passed, with his security man and some of his boys, he veered towards me, hit me with his shoulder and then kept going.“If we had been in high school, I would have dropped my books, papers would have been scattered and I would have had to endure the snickers of passersby. I was startled but took it as the kind of thing Kevin did when he liked you.“Another time, I was standing at the rail that curves around the back of the last row of seats in the chamber. As he shoulder-checked me again, I thought to myself, ‘What a child.’”Kinzinger is not above robust language of his own. Describing Trump’s Senate trial over the Capitol attack, the former congressman bemoans the decision of the Republican leader in that chamber, Mitch McConnell, to vote to acquit because Trump had left office – then deliver a speech excoriating Trump nonetheless.“It took a lot of cheek, nerve, chutzpah, gall and, dare I say it, balls for McConnell to talk this way,” Kinzinger writes, “since he personally blocked the consideration of the case until Trump departed.” More

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      How the Right’s Purity Tests Are Haunting the House G.O.P.

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      When Casey Stengel had the misfortune to be the manager of the historically inept 1962 New York Mets, his famous plaint was, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”The question for House Republicans, mired in a weekslong demonstration of their internal dysfunction, is: Does anybody here want to play this game?It is tempting to interpret the chaos in the House as the function of a dispute between the pro- and anti-Trump elements of the party, but this isn’t quite right: The deposed speaker, Kevin McCarthy, is in no way anti-Trump. Instead, there were pre-existing trends, either represented or augmented by the rise of Donald Trump, that have undermined G.O.P. coherence and made the Republican House practically ungovernable in the current circumstances.The conservative movement has warred against the party establishment since its inception. Conservative heroes like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich rose by arraying themselves against Republican powers-that-be that they considered too timid and moderate.The Tea Party of the 2010s seemingly reflected the same tendency toward greater conservative purity. Yet, it was more populist and more disaffected with the G.O.P., which is why so many of its leaders and organizations lined up so readily behind Donald Trump.On top of this, the two losses to Barack Obama, especially the second one in 2012, convinced many Republican voters that their party was feckless and naïve. Mitt Romney was serious, civic-minded and conscientious, and got absolutely bulldozed by the Obama campaign, which portrayed him as some kind of monster.The thinking of a lot of Republicans after that was, basically, If you portray all our candidates as crude, unethical partisan haters, well, maybe we should give you one.At the same time, the power of the party establishment had atrophied thanks to all sort of factors, from campaign-finance reform to social media, while it still remained a hate object for much of the right. This made the establishment a ready target for Donald Trump in 2016, but ill-suited to fighting back against him.Mr. Trump is a little like Bernie Sanders — a forceful critic of his party’s mainstream who isn’t at his core a member of the party. (Senator Sanders isn’t a registered Democrat, while Mr. Trump became a Republican again after flitting among various affiliations and would surely quit once more if things didn’t go his way.) The difference is that Mr. Trump won the Republican nomination in a hostile takeover, whereas the Democratic Party had the antibodies to resist Mr. Sanders.Even as Mr. Trump was something new in Republican politics, he was also something familiar. Even before his rise, Republicans were much more susceptible than Democrats to nonserious presidential candidates running to increase their profile for media gigs, book sales and the like. Mr. Trump was this type of candidate on a much larger scale, and, again, happened to actually win.One way to look at it is that the very successful model that the commentator Ann Coulter forged in the world of conservative media — generate controversy and never, ever apologize — came to be replicated by candidates and officeholders.Both Vivek Ramaswamy and Matt Gaetz are creatures of politics for the sake of notoriety. It creates entirely different incentives from the traditional approach: Stoking outrage is good, blowing things up is useful, and it never pays to get caught doing the responsible thing.At the congressional level, there was a related, although distinct phenomenon. With the rise of the Tea Party, the tendency of the right flank of the House Republican caucus to make the life of the party leadership miserable became more pronounced. This was especially true in spending fights. The pattern was that the right, associated with the House Freedom Caucus after its founding in 2015, would hold out a standard of impossible purity, and then when leaders inevitability failed to meet it, denounce them as weak and traitorous.There are, of course, legitimate disagreements about tactics and priorities, and the leadership doesn’t always make the right calls. But some of these members consider the legislative process in and of itself corrupt, and refuse to participate even if they can increase the negotiating leverage of their own side or move spending deals marginally in their direction.This was a notable dynamic in the spending fight that led to the toppling of Speaker McCarthy. His fiercest critics did nothing to help keep him from having to resort to the option they found most hateful — namely, going to Democrats for a kick-the-can deal in advance of a government shutdown.Representative Gaetz, the Gavrilo Princip of the Republican meltdown, exemplifies almost all these trends. He is a House Freedom Caucus-type in his attitudes toward the leadership and his rhetoric about federal spending, but his ultimate political loyalty is to Donald Trump. He’s overwhelmingly concerned with garnering media attention. And no one has the power to bring him to heel.There’s no dealing with the likes of Mr. Gaetz because he’s operating on a different dimension from someone like Mr. McCarthy, a pragmatist and coalition-builder who is trying to move the ball incrementally. It’s the difference between politics as theater and politics as the art of the possible; politics as individual brand-building and politics as team sport.In the last Congress, Nancy Pelosi had a slim majority like Mr. McCarthy and a restive handful of members on her left flank, the so-called Squad. Yet she held it together. The difference is that Ms. Pelosi still had considerable legitimacy as a leader, which gave her the moral power to keep everyone together. It is instructive to contrast her not just with Mr. McCarthy, but with the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell. Whereas Ms. Pelosi, an institutionalist concerned with getting things done, is a legend among Democrats, Mr. McConnell, also an institutionalist concerned with getting things done, is hated by much of his party’s own base and constantly attacked by the party’s de facto leader, Donald Trump.The situation in the Republican House caucus has now developed into a sort of tribal war, where memories of real or alleged wrongs committed by the other side lead to more conflict and more bad feelings. So, establishmentarians and relative moderates were willing to take down the speaker candidacy of the House Freedom Caucus co-founder Jim Jordan, rejecting his new argument that everyone had to come together for the good of the whole.It may be that exhaustion sets in and Republicans eventually settle on a speaker, or it may be that the problem is unresolvable and they will have to find a way to govern under the speaker pro tempore, Patrick McHenry. Regardless, it’s become obvious over the last three weeks that no, not nearly enough Republicans want to play this game.Rich Lowry is the editor in chief of National Review.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More