McCarthy, Kevin (1965- )

Subterms

    More stories

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      The People Who Broke the House

      by

      When it comes to Congress, Americans have come to expect a certain baseline of dysfunction. But I think most of us can agree that the current House Republican majority is something special. Overthrowing a speaker for the first time in history. Rejecting multiple nominees to replace him. Members publicly trashing one another. One faction’s supporters threatening opposing members.And so here we languish, with the government’s most basic functions held hostage by a conference divided over everything from ideological differences to petty personal slights: Candidate X broke his promise! Candidate Y ignores me! Candidate Z never votes for my bills! It’s like watching a pack of middle-schoolers hopped up on hormones and Skittles.To help make sense of this dark farce, it is useful to dig into the warring factions that have already destroyed the speaker dreams of multiple colleagues. Boiling down the action so far: A tiny gaggle of eight Republicans, mostly hard-right extremists, took down Kevin McCarthy. Then a larger group of hard-liners quashed the candidacy of Steve Scalise, the majority leader, before it even came up for a floor vote, with an eye toward elevating one of their own, the chronically belligerent Jim Jordan. But a coalition of moderates, institutionalists and members who just can’t stomach Mr. Jordan struck back, voting him down again and again and again — and again, if you count Friday’s closed-conference ballot effectively stripping him of the nomination.The Republicans Who Blocked Jordan and McCarthy From the SpeakershipAcross four votes in the House, both conservative and moderate Republican holdouts ousted Kevin McCarthy and denied Jim Jordan the speaker’s gavel. The colored dots show where those holdouts fall on the ideological spectrum, based on their voting records. More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Republicans Grapple With Being Speakerless, but Effectively Leaderless, Too

      by

      With a speaker fight in the House, concerns about an aging Senate leader and a 2024 front-runner who has the party in a vise grip, some G.O.P. members worry the turmoil could have long-term effects.Kevin McCarthy, the ousted speaker, was making his way through the Capitol when reporters asked what he thought of the chaos consuming House Republicans, who for nearly three weeks have been trying and failing to replace him.His answer veered into the existential. “We are,” he said on Friday, “in a very bad place right now.”That might be an understatement.In the House, Republicans are casting about for a new leader, mired in an internecine battle marked by screaming, cursing and a fresh flood of candidates. In the Senate, their party is led by Senator Mitch McConnell, who spent weeks arguing that he remained physically and mentally fit enough for the position after freezing midsentence in two public appearances. And on the 2024 campaign trail, the dominant front-runner, Donald J. Trump, faces 91 felony charges across four cases, creating a drumbeat of legal news that often overwhelms any of his party’s political messages.As national Democrats largely stand behind President Biden and his agenda — more united than in years — Republicans are divided, directionless and effectively leaderless.For years, Mr. Trump has domineered Republican politics, with a reach that could end careers, create new political stars and upend the party’s long-held ideology on issues like trade, China and federal spending. He remains the party’s nominal leader, capturing a majority of G.O.P. voters in national polling and holding a double-digit lead in early voting states.And yet his commanding position has turned Republicans into a party of one, demanding absolute loyalty to Mr. Trump and his personal feuds and pet causes, such as his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. The result is an endless loop of chaos that even some Republicans say once again threatens to define the party’s brand heading into an election in which Republicans — after struggling to meet the basic responsibilities of governing the House of Representatives — will ask voters to also put them in charge of the Senate and the White House.“This looks like a group of 11th graders trying to pick the junior class president, and it will hurt our party long term,” said former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who is challenging Mr. Trump for the party nomination. “It’s going to be very hard to make the case that the American people should turn over control of the government to Republicans when you can’t even elect a speaker.”In recent months, the former president has focused more on his own legal peril than on his party. Flouting pressure from the Republican National Committee, Mr. Trump has largely opted out of some of the party’s biggest moments. He skipped the first two Republican primary debates for his own events and plans to skip the third, forgoing a chance to present his party’s message to an audience of millions.And he has largely taken a hands-off approach to the fight over the House speakership. Nine months ago, he helped install Mr. McCarthy as speaker. But he did not come to Mr. McCarthy’s rescue this fall when Representative Matt Gaetz led the charge to oust him. He then endorsed Representative Jim Jordan, who has failed to win enough support.Political parties out of power typically lack a strong leader. In 2016, Mr. Trump’s election plunged Democrats into years of ideological battles between a restive liberal wing and a more moderate establishment. But what’s less typical — and perhaps more politically damaging, some Republicans said — is the drawn-out, televised turmoil putting the internal dysfunction on public display.“It’s kind of a captainless pirate ship right now — a Black Pearl with no Jack Sparrow,” said Ralph Reed, a prominent social conservative leader, who argued that the issues would eventually be resolved. “But on the bright side, we will have a speaker at some point.”“These Republicans are complete idiots,” Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator, said on a radio program last week.Mr. McConnell all but threw up his hands in interviews on the Sunday talk shows. “It’s a problem,” he said on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “We’re going to do our job and hope the House can get functional here sometime soon.”And The Wall Street Journal editorial board, long a bastion of establishment Republican thought, wrote more than a week into the drama: “As the current mess in choosing another House Speaker shows, never underestimate the ability of Republicans to commit electoral suicide.”Most frustrating to some Republicans is the fact that the messy battle is largely symbolic. Democrats control the Senate and the White House, meaning that whoever becomes speaker has little chance of making their agenda into law.Still, there could be real-world political implications. As Republicans battled one another, Mr. Biden focused on an actual war. He spent much of last week building support for Israel, with a wartime visit and an Oval Office prime-time appeal for $105 billion in aid to help Israel and Ukraine — funds that face an uncertain future in a House frozen by infighting.It’s a split screen Democrats are more than happy to highlight.“The president of the United States, a Democrat, gave the strongest pro-Israel speech, at least since Harry Truman, maybe in American history,” said Representative Jake Auchincloss, a moderate Democrat from Massachusetts. “The division is on the Republican side of the aisle, where they are so fractured they can’t even elect a leader of their conference.”Mike DuHaime, a veteran Republican strategist who is advising Mr. Christie, said the inability to pick a speaker was a “new low” for Republican governance. “If you don’t have the presidency there is no clear leader of the party,” he said. “That’s natural. What’s unnatural here is that we can’t run our own caucus.”But others say that Mr. Trump, along with social media and conservative media, has turned the very incentive structure of the party upside down. With a broad swath of the conservative base firmly behind the former president, there may be little political cost in causing chaos. The eight Republicans who voted to oust Mr. McCarthy, for example, are likely to face no backlash for plunging the party into disarray. As their message is amplified across conservative media, they’re more likely to see their political stars rise, with a boost in fund-raising and attention.“What’s happening is you have people who don’t want to be led, but also want to engineer a situation where they can be betrayed and use that to rail against leadership,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican strategist and former National Republican Senatorial Committee aide.Some Republicans doubt the incident will have a lasting impact. In the summer, the party will pick a nominee at its national convention, and that person will become Republicans’ new standard-bearer.Nicole McCleskey, a Republican pollster, said the messy dust-up in the House would be forgotten by next November’s elections, washed away as just another moment of broken government amid near-record lows for voters’ trust in Congress.“People are used to Washington dysfunction, and this is just another episode,” she said. “It’s Republicans and Democrats, and they’re all dysfunctional. For voters, it’s just further evidence that Washington can’t address their problems.” More

    • 125 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      The Apotheosis of Jim Jordan Is a Sight to Behold

      by

      No problem in the American system at this moment is as acute and disruptive as the one posed by the Republican Party.Yes, of course, there are any number of structural problems facing American politics.Our system of elections — first-past-the-post voting, the Electoral College, single-member districts and partisan gerrymandering — feeds into and amplifies our partisan and ideological polarization. Our system of federalism and dual sovereignty between state and national government allows for laboratories of autocracy as much as testing grounds for democracy. Our counter-majoritarian institutions and supermajority rules stymie democratic majorities and turn stability into stasis, putting terrible stress on our entire political system.But it’s hard to deal with any of those, or even just live with them, when one of our two major parties is on a downward spiral of dysfunction, with each version of itself more chaotic and deviant than the last.For years, it has been evident that the Republican Party can’t govern. When Donald Trump was in office, it was revealing to see the extent to which Republican majorities in Congress struggled to write and pass any legislation of consequence. To wit, after an unsuccessful herculean lift trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act and a successful effort to cut taxes (the lowest hanging fruit on the conservative menu), congressional Republicans essentially stopped legislating until they were dislodged from control of the House in the 2018 midterms.What’s become clear of late, in the midst of the chaos that has left the House without a speaker at a particularly fraught moment in foreign and domestic affairs, is that Republicans are as unable to organize themselves as they are incapable of leading the affairs of state.The worst of the problem of the Republican Party, however, is evident in the rise of Jim Jordan and the ascendance of the insurrection wing of the party, with only modest opposition from supposedly more reasonable Republican lawmakers.Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas, for example, has a reputation for being reasonable. He is staunchly conservative, but his feet are mostly planted in reality.Crenshaw has been publicly critical of the most disruptive and intransigent members of the House Republican conference, especially those in the House Freedom Caucus, and even wrote an essay in The Wall Street Journal condemning the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. A small gesture, all things considered, but still more than most of his colleagues could manage.Crenshaw seems like the kind of Republican who would oppose Jordan’s bid to be speaker of the House. Jordan, first elected to the House in 2006, is a far-right ideologue and conspiracy theorist whose most notable accomplishment in office was helping to organize his fellow ideologues and conspiracy theorists into the House Freedom Caucus in 2015. Jordan, who represents the Fourth District of Ohio, was one of Trump’s leading supporters in the months leading up to and following the 2020 presidential election, accusing Democrats, repeatedly, of trying to steal the election.“Jim Jordan was deeply involved in Donald Trump’s antidemocratic efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” Thomas Joscelyn, one of the authors of the final report from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, told CNN last week. “Jordan also helped organize congressional opposition to counting Biden’s certified electoral votes. None of Jordan’s efforts were rooted in legitimate objections. He simply sought to keep Donald Trump in power, contrary to the will of the American people.”Crenshaw’s stated contempt for exactly the kind of rhetoric and behavior exemplified by Jordan has not, however, stopped the Texas Republican from backing his colleague from Ohio for speaker of the House. In an interview on Sunday with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Crenshaw claimed that Jordan had “become part of the solution, not part of the problem” with regard to the chaos among House Republicans and dismissed Jordan’s contempt for the law and attempt to overturn the presidential election as non-issues. “If I held that grudge, I wouldn’t have friends in the conference,” Crenshaw said. “I was on an island there.”Crenshaw isn’t the only supposedly reasonable Republican member of Congress willing to look past the fact that the leading candidate for speaker of the House was an active participant in a scheme to subvert the Constitution and install a defeated president in office for a second term.“Even some of the Republicans who have vowed, publicly and privately, to fight him at every turn are beginning to get weak knees about supporting him, fearing that collective will is dwindling as their numbers decrease,” Politico reports. Jordan’s allies have also expressed their view that the opposition to his bid for speaker will melt away as the actual vote on the floor comes near.Once again, Republicans are confronted with a deeply transgressive figure with open contempt for the institutions of American democracy, flawed as they may be. Once again, Republicans swear they’ll resist his ascent. Once again, Republicans cave, more fearful of losing a primary — or coming in for criticism from conservative media — than they are of virtually anything else.And each time they cave, these more moderate or mainstream Republicans make the situation a little worse, for themselves and for the country. Kevin McCarthy bowed to expediency and pressure when he voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election in the House of Representatives. He did the same when he empowered the most gleeful insurrectionists in his attempt to gain the speaker’s gavel. Now he’s out, and Jim Jordan is on the rise.If he wins, Jordan may not last in the position. The kind of speaker who must twist arms and make threats using conservative media to win the job is, in the modern House, not the kind of speaker who survives long beyond the next election cycle, even if his party holds its majority.Who will replace Jim Jordan if and when he falls? It could well be someone worse. And it will probably be someone worse, because there is nothing happening inside the Republican Party right now that can keep it from falling even farther into the abyss.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

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Republican Speaker Fight Has Parallels in the Gingrich Era

      by

      The current chaos is not the first time Republicans have found themselves rocked by a vacancy at the top.The House speaker had been unceremoniously dumped by colleagues unhappy with his performance and overly optimistic political predictions. Those who would typically be considered next in line had made too many enemies to be able to secure the necessary numbers to take his place. The House was in utter chaos as bombs fell in the Middle East.Today’s relentless Republican turmoil over the House speakership has striking parallels to the tumult of 1998, when House G.O.P. lawmakers were also feuding over who would lead them at a crucial period.Then as now, personal vendettas and warring factions drove an extraordinary internal party fight that threw the House into chaos. The saga had multiple twists and turns as Republicans cycled through would-be speakers in rapid succession — just as the G.O.P. did this week. And in the end, they settled on a little-known congressman as a compromise choice.It’s not clear how the current speaker drama will end; Republicans left Washington on Friday after nominating their second candidate for speaker of the week, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, with plans to return on Tuesday for a vote but no certainty that he could be elected.Back in 1998, Republicans moved swiftly to fill their power vacuum in just one day, unlike the present situation, where they have let unrest fester for more than a week while struggling to overcome deep internal divisions and anoint a new leader.“That was pretty chaotic,” said Representative Harold Rogers, the Kentucky Republican who was already a veteran lawmaker at the time and is now the dean of the House as its longest-serving member. “But it didn’t last very long.”Both dramas began when a Republican speaker lost the faith of some key colleagues. Hard-right Republicans precipitated their party’s current crisis by forcing out Representative Kevin McCarthy of California from the speaker post as punishment for working with Democrats to avert a government shutdown. Twenty-five years ago, Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Georgia Republican whose closest allies were turning on him, announced he would not run again for speaker.Mr. Gingrich, whose scorched-earth tactics had returned Republicans to the majority in 1995 after four decades in the minority wilderness, was finally burned himself after predicting Republican gains in that November’s elections, only to lose seats.Representative Richard K. Armey of Texas, who held the same majority leader position then as Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana does today, was a potential replacement, as was Representative Tom DeLay, the powerful No. 3 Republican whip who was also from Texas. But both had political baggage likely to keep them from the top job, and Mr. Armey faced a fight just to remain in the No. 2 slot.Neither even bothered going through the motions of seeking their party’s nomination, as Mr. Scalise did successfully on Wednesday — only to discover quickly that he lacked the support to be elected, leading to his abrupt withdrawal.“Both of them were toxic, and they knew it,” Fred Upton, the recently retired moderate Republican from Michigan who was in the House at the time, said of Mr. Armey and Mr. DeLay.Sensing an opportunity, Robert Livingston, an ambitious Louisiana Republican who commanded a solid bloc of supporters as chairman of the Appropriations Committee, jumped into the speaker’s race and cleared the field. He won the Republican nomination without opposition in mid-November.Mr. Livingston went about setting up his new leadership operation as Republicans plunged ahead with the impeachment of President Bill Clinton growing out of his relationship with a White House intern. Many Republicans believed the impeachment push had cost them in the just-concluded election, but pursuing Mr. Clinton was a priority of Mr. DeLay, whose nickname was the Hammer, and he was not one to be deterred.Then Saturday, Dec. 19, arrived, with the House set to consider articles of impeachment even as Mr. Clinton had ordered airstrikes against Iraq over suspected weapons violations — an action that Republicans accused him of taking to stave off impeachment.Mr. Livingston, who had not yet assumed the speakership but was playing a leadership role, rose on the floor to urge Mr. Clinton to resign and spare the nation a divisive impeachment fight. But Mr. Livingston himself had acknowledged extramarital affairs a few days earlier to his colleagues. Democrats began shouting “no, no, no” as he spoke.“You resign,” shouted Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California. “You resign.”To the amazement of everyone present, Mr. Livingston did just that, saying that he would set an example for the president and that he would not run for speaker. The House was stunned as lawmakers absorbed the news — similar to the surreal atmosphere last week when it became clear that Mr. McCarthy would be removed as speaker after hard-right Republicans moved to oust him and eight of them joined Democrats in pushing through a motion to vacate the chair.Dennis Hastert became the longest-serving Republican speaker in history before Democrats won the House back in 2006. He was later convicted of paying to cover up sexual abuse.Doug Mills/The New York TimesA mad scramble was on to identify a new speaker candidate. Names of prominent and seasoned House Republicans were bandied about, but Mr. DeLay, a singular force in the chamber, was not about to accept one of them as a potential rival.He turned to a fairly innocuous Illinois Republican who had watched Mr. Livingston from the back row of the House, J. Dennis Hastert, a former wrestling coach who served as Mr. DeLay’s chief deputy and would not be a threat to usurp much of his influence. Mr. DeLay and others told Mr. Hastert that he needed to step up to unify Republicans.By the end of the day, Republicans had approved articles of impeachment against Mr. Clinton and coalesced around Mr. Hastert as the next speaker — a rapid resolution that Mr. Upton noted was lacking in the present speaker drama. He said Republicans should have moved much more quickly after the vote to depose Mr. McCarthy to install someone rather than recessing for the week.“It would have been over and done with,” Mr. Upton said.Mr. Hastert went on to be the longest-serving Republican speaker in history before Democrats won the House back in 2006. But his public career ended in disgrace when he was convicted and sentenced to 15 months in federal prison in 2016 for paying to cover up admitted sexual abuse of young wrestlers committed long before he rose to surprising power in Congress.Mr. DeLay, his patron, was forced from Congress by ethics issues but ultimately had his conviction on campaign finance violations thrown out of court. Mr. Livingston went on to become a successful Washington lobbyist. Mr. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate. Mr. Gingrich remains a voice in G.O.P. politics. And Republicans still struggle with speaker issues. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Scalise Bid for Speaker Meets Resistance From G.O.P. Factions

      by

      The holdouts who refuse to back the No. 2 Republican, the party’s nominee, reflect the many competing groups inside the divided G.O.P. conference.Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, may have narrowly won his party’s nomination for speaker on Wednesday, but he is still facing an uphill battle to secure the 217 votes he needs to win the leadership post.Mr. Scalise postponed a vote on the House floor Wednesday afternoon in an effort to win over some of the remaining holdouts who have said they are either undecided on whether to support him, or will refuse to. He has a difficult path ahead of him, in part because the fractious Republican conference includes so many different factions — some overlapping and some not — that make it difficult for any one person to corral.In fact, resistance against Mr. Scalise’s speakership appeared to have grown, with lawmakers newly declaring on Wednesday evening that they were irrevocably opposed to voting for him.Many of the holdouts against Mr. Scalise do not fall neatly into any specific category. Others may prove impossible to win over altogether.The eight lawmakers who voted to oust Representative Kevin McCarthy of California from the speakership have largely lined up behind Mr. Scalise’s candidacy. But Mr. Scalise’s nomination has unlocked a new group of dissidents. If all Democrats are present and voting during the vote for speaker, Mr. Scalise can lose only four Republican votes.Here’s a broad overview of the factions not yet sold on Mr. Scalise.The McCarthy LoyalistsThese are mainstream conservative lawmakers who are close to Mr. McCarthy and are still furious that he was ousted, including Representatives Carlos Gimenez of Florida, Mike Lawler of New York and Lloyd Smucker of Pennsylvania. Mr. Gimenez suggested to reporters that he intends to vote for Mr. McCarthy on the House floor, and Mr. Lawler told CNN in an interview that he had not yet decided who he would vote for.Mainstream conservative lawmakers who are close to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy are still furious that he was ousted, and some are reluctant to back Mr. Scalise.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesHours after the vote, Mr. Smucker wrote on X that the Republican conference was “broken,” and it did not make sense to oust Mr. McCarthy and then turn around and promote those immediately underneath him in leadership. He urged his colleagues to chart a different path forward, adding, “In the meantime, I plan to vote for Jim Jordan on the floor.”Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Scalise have an icy relationship, making the prospect of switching their allegiance even more unpalatable to the former speaker’s closest allies.The UltraconservativesA number of members of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus who backed Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a co-founder of the group, have said that they will either continue to vote for Mr. Jordan on the House floor, or at least continue to oppose Mr. Scalise.Many of them have said that they are concerned that Mr. Scalise could try to force through another short-term spending bill to avert a shutdown in mid-November. Bringing up such a measure was Mr. McCarthy’s final move as speaker, and right-wing Republicans called it the final straw for his ouster.“I let Scalise know in person that he doesn’t have my vote on the floor, because he has not articulated a viable plan for avoiding an omnibus,” Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky wrote on X, using the term for a single bill that funds the entire government.These holdouts include Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Bob Good of Virginia.Still other conservatives who have long demanded fundamental changes in the way the House operates complained that Mr. Scalise appeared unwilling to accept a new way of doing business.Representative Chip Roy pledged not to vote for Mr. Scalise.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesRepresentative Chip Roy of Texas, an influential conservative who led the bloc of lawmakers who opposed Mr. McCarthy’s speakership bid in January, said he was “not happy” with how Mr. Scalise quickly shot down his bid on Wednesday to change the party’s internal rules for nominating a speaker. And Representative Michael Cloud of Texas said Mr. Scalise had tried to rush his election on the floor, calling it “underhanded.”Mr. Scalise appeared on Wednesday evening to have won over one hard-right holdout, Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida. She emerged from a meeting with the Louisiana Republican saying she would vote for him after being assured that he would prioritize issues like impeaching President Biden and defunding the office of the special counsel investigating former President Donald J. Trump.But in a reflection of the difficulty of the task ahead of Mr. Scalise, Ms. Luna tempered her endorsement hours later, and on Thursday afternoon, after Mr. Trump weighed in against Mr. Scalise, she said on X that she would not vote for him after all.“There is no consensus candidate for speaker,” she wrote. “We need to stay in Washington till we figure this out.”The Wild CardsThen there are the Republicans with their own, singular grievances. One of them is Representative Ken Buck of Colorado, a former prosecutor who has said he wants the next speaker to clearly state that the 2020 presidential election was not stolen from Mr. Trump and a commitment that the next speaker will secure deep cuts in federal spending.During closed-door discussions in the run-up to the nomination vote on Wednesday, Mr. Buck directly asked both Mr. Scalise and Mr. Jordan who won the 2020 election, and neither would flatly state that it was Mr. Biden.Representative George Santos of New York, who had originally supported Mr. Jordan for speaker, announced on X around 10 p.m. Wednesday that he had “yet to hear from the Speaker-Designate” and had “come to the conclusion that my VOTE doesn’t matter to him.”“I’m now declaring I’m an ANYONE but Scalise and come hell or high water I won’t change my mind,” wrote Mr. Santos, who has been indicted on a litany of charges including money laundering, wire fraud, and stealing the identities and credit card details of donors to his campaign.Representative Nancy Mace criticized Mr. Scalise on national television over a meeting he attended decades ago with white nationalists.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesThe group also includes Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, one of the eight Republicans who voted to oust Mr. McCarthy. She showed up to a private meeting of House Republicans on Tuesday night wearing a tank top emblazoned with a scarlet letter “A,” to represent how she said she was being marginalized for her vote.Another holdout is Representative Victoria Spartz of Indiana, who has previously floated resigning from Congress. In a statement earlier this month, she called Washington a “circus” for which she would not sacrifice her time away from her children, adding that “I cannot save this republic alone.”Ms. Spartz said she voted “present” during the closed-door G.O.P. nominating contest and did not know how she would vote on the House floor. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      The Two Candidates for House Speaker Are Even Worse Than Kevin McCarthy

      by

      The crisis of terror in Israel has made it even more urgent that the House of Representatives move past its schoolyard infighting, elect itself a speaker and demonstrate that the United States still has a functional government, one that can play a significant role in supporting democratic allies around the globe. So far, however, the Republican House majority has shown no indication it is up to the job.Only two candidates, Representatives Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio, are officially running for speaker. Neither seems to have a majority of Republicans locked up yet, and both are trying to appeal to the party’s worst instincts — making it clear they would perpetuate the chaos that was unleashed during the reign of Kevin McCarthy, who was overthrown by a group of far-right rebels on Oct. 3. In several ways, Mr. Scalise and Mr. Jordan would probably be worse.Both express opposition to the Biden administration’s request for additional military aid to Ukraine. Like Mr. McCarthy, both have cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 presidential race, and voted against certifying the election results, a permanent stain on their reputations. But for anyone who cares about basic governmental function, the most worrisome part is that they also seem to be repudiating the two moments when Mr. McCarthy defused a fiscal crisis in recent months — over the debt ceiling and the threatened government shutdown. They want the House to use more “leverage” in its battles against President Biden.“Leverage,” in case you missed the constant reference in the battle over Mr. McCarthy, is a Washington euphemism for blackmail. By holding the country’s credit hostage, or shutting down government functions, a small band of wrecking-ball ideologues can try to get a win on some unrelated matter. The anti-McCarthyites said he failed to use his speakership to rewrite the rules of government in Washington.“Many of us had begged the speaker, pleaded with the speaker repeatedly, to utilize the debt ceiling to leverage spending cuts and reforms,” Bob Good, Republican of Virginia, told the House before the big vote. “Instead, he negotiated an unlimited increase to the debt ceiling.”Of the two ways to achieve political success in a divided government, leverage is the poisoned choice. The more effective path, the one that used to be employed regularly in Washington, is to cut deals and make compromises with your opponents, even if they are occasionally painful and at odds with your principles. That’s how Lincoln operated, that’s how Lyndon Johnson pushed through his Great Society and civil rights bills, and it’s how Obamacare was created.But ever since Newt Gingrich’s era, the idea of compromising with the Democratic Party, of putting bills on the House floor that both sides can support, has been anathema to Republicans. Speakers from that party who do so tend to lose their jobs or quit under pressure, as John Boehner and Mr. McCarthy learned. The preferred method of dealing with Democrats now is to extort them, and though that usually fails, the mere act of trying brings great cheer to extremists who view centrists from both sides as the rotten core of the “uniparty.” (An exception occurred in 2011, when Barack Obama was forced to make massive spending cuts to prevent a default caused by Republicans.)Mr. McCarthy abandoned leverage to keep the government open through mid-November, and earlier to prevent a ruinous default. But both candidates to replace him have made it clear to their restive caucus that they intend to use the leverage he discarded.“If we stay united, we can preserve leverage for the House to secure tangible wins in our impending policy fights,” Mr. Scalise, the current majority leader, said in announcing his candidacy for speaker last week. Mr. Scalise, as a member of the leadership team, voted for the recent deal to prevent a shutdown, but the signal he sent to the rebels was unmistakable.Representative Steve Scalise of LouisianaMark Peterson for The New York TimesAnd Mr. Jordan didn’t even need to send a signal. He was one of a minority of House Republicans who voted against the shutdown deal, against the wishes of his putative ally, Mr. McCarthy, and his credentials as a legislative bomb-thrower are already impeccable. He has helped lead Republican shutdown efforts at least three times: over defunding the Affordable Care Act, over cutting money to Planned Parenthood and (during the Trump administration) over building a border wall. He told Punchbowl News a few days ago that he would insist on refusing to spend any additional money on processing new migrants, though that would violate U.S. asylum law.Donald Trump’s “Complete & Total Endorsement!” of Mr. Jordan — and his debasement of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he presented to Mr. Jordan in 2021 as a reward for feverishly defending him in his impeachments and during the Russia investigation — tell you pretty much all you need to know about what kind of leader Mr. Jordan would be.Mr. Scalise is less incendiary than Mr. Jordan, but is no more likely to end his chamber’s chaos and bring any degree of bipartisanship to the House than was Mr. McCarthy. He blamed “Soros-backed elements of the Democratic Party” for committing acts of violence against Republicans. Long after the 2020 election was over, he continued to suggest the outcome was stolen, relying on a theory about the primacy of state legislatures that was shot down by the Supreme Court. He had to apologize for speaking in 2002 at a white nationalist group headed by David Duke, but also described himself, according to a columnist, as like “David Duke without the baggage,” and opposed a holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.Republicans will spend the next few days trying to determine whether they have the votes to elect any speaker, and it’s possible their internal discord could go on for weeks. You might think that the world’s desperate need for a morally persuasive American leadership would pressure them to make a responsible decision, but given the abysmal choice they are facing, that outcome is hard to imagine.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

    • 163 Shares119 Views

      in Elections

      The View From the Press Gallery on a ‘Surreal’ Day in the House

      by

      A congressional reporter talks about the vote to oust Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker, and what the ‘frenetic’ days ahead may look like.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Catie Edmondson, a reporter who covers Congress for The New York Times, was in the press gallery inside the House of Representatives on Tuesday, Oct. 3, when lawmakers voted to remove the Republican speaker of the house, Kevin McCarthy. In the 234-year history of the chamber, such an action had never been taken.“It was, until the last minute, hard to believe it was really happening,” Ms. Edmondson said in a recent interview.The House cannot fully function without a speaker. During a brief recess, two Republicans announced that they would run for the post, and on Monday Mr. McCarthy even indicated that he may seek to reclaim his seat.Ahead of a House session on Wednesday, when lawmakers are expected to formally begin the campaign for a new speaker, Ms. Edmondson discussed reporting from the chamber at the moment of Mr. McCarthy’s ouster. This conversation has been edited.When did you realize something extraordinary was happening?I’ll go back to the very beginning. I covered McCarthy’s election to the leadership post in January. There were 15 rounds of voting before he eventually won the gavel. Because that hard-right faction put him through the ringer in order to get him elected in the first place, there was a sense that this moment was inevitable, that McCarthy would face a challenge like this from the hard right.But it was still completely surreal to watch it unfold in real time. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida had been teasing the idea that he was going to introduce a resolution to oust McCarthy the week before. But it wasn’t quite clear to us how many Republicans he had on board.The big question was always going to be, What are Democrats going to do? Republicans have such a thin margin in the House, and our understanding was that if Democrats moved to try to give him passive support by voting present, there was a better chance he would be able to weather any sort of challenge. But it became clear, talking with Democrats late Monday night and early Tuesday morning, that they had no intention of helping McCarthy.How did you and your colleagues cover the vote in the chamber?We had our team in the gallery counting every single vote. I was sitting next to my colleague Carl Hulse, our chief Washington correspondent, who has covered Capitol Hill for decades. He had never seen anything like this, either. I was having frenetic conversations with Carl and my editor, Julie Hirschfeld Davis. We had two sets of stories ready to go: One set if McCarthy survived the challenge, and one if he didn’t.Capitol Hill’s decorum is well known. Lawmakers, acting in the public view, often guard their behavior. Could you see the gravity of this moment reflected in the behavior of House members?Once that gavel came down and the presiding officer declared the speaker’s office to be empty, we saw many Republicans looking really upset. We saw a huge crowd go up to McCarthy to shake his hand, to give him a hug. It was a singular experience to watch. It’s very rare that the House votes in the fashion that it did, where lawmakers stand up, one by one, to cast their votes. I think that added to the sense of tension and drama.What happens as the House resumes its work?We expect a flurry of activity before there is a formal vote on the House floor to elect the speaker, which House rules require. There’s going to be a candidate forum where the candidates running for speaker make their pitch. It’s going to be a pretty frenetic few days. Most people are preparing for an extended race. Maybe they’ll be able to coalesce around someone more quickly than we expect. But I think there are a lot of people who are girding for another drawn-out election.What does a typical workweek look like for a congressional reporter?I’m up on the Hill at least four days of the week. We have our desk space in the press gallery, but a lot of our time is spent roaming around the hallways, trying to buttonhole lawmakers and ask how they are thinking about voting. For pivotal votes, we sit in the press gallery in the House chamber, just over the lawmakers sitting on the House floor.Is there a skill required to do this job that you could not have anticipated?I came to the congressional team to help with our coverage of the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, now a Supreme Court justice. I thought it was a pretty crazy, chaotic, fast-moving atmosphere that would slow down at some point. It never really did. The ability to adapt and keep going is one skill that’s tricky to anticipate. The other is facial recognition — being able to identify lawmakers in the House and pull them aside. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      What We Can Do to Make the House Less Dysfunctional

      by

      The disarray engulfing the House of Representatives has been unprecedented, yet somehow it has also felt inevitable. No sitting speaker has ever been removed before, but the process that brought about Kevin McCarthy’s overthrow was the culmination of several related trends that have amounted to a repudiation of coalition building in American politics.That process has been overdetermined in an era of partisan polarization and geographic sorting (Americans increasingly live in communities full of like-minded partisans), but that doesn’t mean we are powerless against it. The rules of our politics should be designed to counteract our worst vices, not to reinforce them. That means we particularly need to rethink party primaries — which give our politicians all the wrong incentives.The upheaval in the House is rooted in the dynamics of an era of deadlock. American politics isn’t just polarized but nearly tied, and it has been that way for much of the past 30 years. The average House majority since 1995 has been just over 30 seats. The average over the previous century was more than 80 seats. The current Congress and the previous one, with their incredibly slim House majorities (first Democratic and then Republican), are rare in historical perspective.Such narrow majorities empower the fringes of our politics. Only eight Republican members voted to remove their speaker, but when the majority’s margin is so small (and the minority party can be relied on to play its lock-step part), a tiny tail can wag the dog. Razor-thin majorities are inherently unstable, yet neither party seems capable of broadening its appeal and therefore its coalition.Mr. McCarthy’s ouster was also a function of the centralization of power in Congress. The toppling of the speaker might suggest that House leaders are too weak, but partisan dissatisfaction with Mr. McCarthy had to do with the effectively impossible expectations members now have of party leaders. The members who rebelled against him claimed to want regular order in the House, but they also insisted that legislative outcomes must conform to strict partisan goals.These are plainly contradictory demands: Regular order involves cross-partisan negotiation and bargaining and so would result in legislative outcomes that are more durable but less ideologically satisfying. In the end, the rebels revealed their real priorities. They kicked out the speaker for passing a continuing resolution with Democratic votes, putting their weight behind the notion that party leaders must tightly control the House and prevent cross-partisan coalitions from forming. The Democrats’ unanimity in supporting the speaker’s removal evinced the same view.But perhaps above all, the tumult in the House is a function of deformed expectations of Congress itself. Members are increasingly pulled in different directions by the imperatives of legislative work and those of electoral politics.A legislature is an arena for negotiation, where differences are worked out through bargains. But our polarized political culture treats deals with the other party as betrayals of principle and failures of nerve. Traditionally, winning an election to Congress has meant winning a seat at the negotiating table, where you can represent the interests and priorities of your voters. Increasingly, it has come instead to mean winning a prominent platform for performative outrage, where you can articulate your voters’ frustrations with elite power and show them that you are working to disrupt the uses of that power.These expectations coexist, sometimes within individual members. But they point in very different directions, because the latter view does not involve traditional legislative objectives and so is not subject to the incentives that have generally facilitated Congress’s work. Instead, some members respond to the incentives of political theater, which is often at least as well served by legislative failure as success. This impulse is evident in both parties, though it is clearly most intense among a portion of congressional Republicans.Most members still have a more traditional view of their job, and most voters do too, and yet today’s most powerful electoral incentives nonetheless militate toward the more populist, performative view. That’s because electoral incentives for most members of the House now have to do with winning party primaries.This is not only because geographic sorting has made more seats safe in general elections but also because the parties have grown institutionally weak and so have little say over who runs under their banners. Whether justifiably or not, even established incumbents and swing-seat members often worry most about primary challenges and therefore about voters who do not want them to give ground or compromise. This effectively means they find it politically dangerous to do the job Congress exists to do.This is a perverse misalignment of incentives. And it contributes to the dynamics that shaped the drama in the House, because it ultimately undermines the imperative for coalition building. Our parties are deadlocked in part because neither really strives to significantly broaden its coalition — doing so would involve playing down some priorities that most energize primary voters. Power is centralized in Congress to avert unpredictable cross-partisan coalitions and more effectively stage-manage a partisan Kabuki theater.But more than anything, party primaries now leave both voters and members confused about the purpose of Congress and so disable the institution.While there are some reforms of Congress’s procedures that could help it work better — like a budget process that did not culminate in needlessly dramatic crisis moments and a committee system with more genuine legislative power — it is also increasingly clear that nominee selection reforms are in order.Primaries did not create our polarized culture war. They have been widely used to select congressional candidates in most of the country for over a century, and since the 1970s they have also dominated presidential candidate selection in both parties. But party primaries have come to interact with our embittered political culture in destructive ways. As Nick Troiano argues in a forthcoming book, primaries are bad for voters, bad for parties and bad for the country.We can’t go back to the preprimary system in which party professionals deliberated about candidate selection. No politician wants to tell his or her most intensely devoted voters that they are the problem, and in any case that older approach had its own grave deficiencies. So reformers have to look for ways forward within the primary system. They should structure primary elections in ways that incentivize actual legislative work and draw into politics a type of officeseeker inclined to appeal to a broader range of voters and to build coalitions.Ranked-choice voting in primaries could be particularly promising. A ranked-choice election allows voters to select multiple candidates in order of preference and then have their vote count on behalf of their second or third choice if their first or second choice is not among the top vote getters. In most forms, it is essentially an automatic runoff. From the point of view of candidates, such a system creates a strong reason to be many voters’ second choice, as well as the first choice of some. That naturally invites a coalition-building mind-set and could do a better job of attracting candidates capable of broad appeal both on the campaign trail and in office. It would compel politicians to feel accountable to a broader swath of voters, even in safe districts where only the primary matters.This was the experience of the Virginia Republican Party, which turned to a ranked-choice process to select its gubernatorial nominee in 2021 and through it landed on a candidate, Glenn Youngkin, capable of winning in a purple state. Similar reforms at the primary stage could plausibly help both parties, though there is reason to think that Republicans would have more to gain from deploying them, because at this point they appear to suffer more from the tendency of primaries to yield candidates who turn off winnable but uncommitted voters in the general election and who have little interest in the jobs they are elected to perform.Republicans tend to be more staunchly opposed to such proposals and to assume they would only benefit the left. The evidence so far does not support that assumption. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague Kevin Kosar argued in a recent paper, Republicans have particularly strong reasons to consider such reforms — at least in primaries.Deploying ranked-choice methods in general elections could tend to further weaken the parties, which is not the right way to take on our broken political culture. The two parties as institutions are actually moderating forces, because each has an interest in making its tent as broad as possible. But ranked-choice primaries would strengthen the parties by reinforcing their ability to nominate candidates with broad appeal and better aligning primary, general election and governing incentivesRanked-choice methods would be particularly valuable in congressional primaries because, as we have seen, Congress particularly suffers from the tendency of members to neglect coalition building and deplore negotiation. The dysfunction of the national legislature is also the source from which most other constitutional dysfunctions now radiate. But if they prove effective, similar reforms might ultimately be of use in presidential primaries as well and in primaries for state and local offices.There is no silver bullet for what ails our politics. And ideas like these should be pursued as experiments, state by state. There is always a risk that they could make things worse. But the risks we run by doing nothing are plainly mounting.Yuval Levin, a contributing Opinion writer, is the editor of National Affairs and the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream.”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