What Kevin McCarthy wrought

Plus, a note on "moderate" vs. "extreme" Republicans

Kevin McCarthy has finally succeeded in becoming Speaker of the House, winning on the 15th vote after making a string of concessions to further-right lawmakers in order to win their support. Although it took McCarthy more rounds of voting than any Speaker nominee since 1859, the country was at least spared a repeat of 1853, when the contest stretched on for two months and 133 separate ballots. Still, we’re looking at an event that hasn’t happened since before - and very close to! - the Civil War, and it probably means much more chaos to come.

A few days ago I wrote a piece in The Guardian arguing that the Speaker debacle shows that Republicans are going to be unable to govern. Their slim majority means they’re going to find it impossible to get enough of their members to agree to pass anything, setting up constant battles between the GOP’s extremist and “moderate” wings (more about that supposed moderation in a second). Clearly pretty much no legislation is going to get through this House, but there are some items on which the House has to act. And these items all involve debt, taxation, and spending, or precisely the items which most divide the GOP caucus. In the next year, these amount to the following:

1. Government funding, which expires in October - failure to pass this will result in a government shutdown, unpaid soldiers and civil servants, and missed Social Security payments;

2. The debt ceiling, which is currently good until about July, but will need raising in the several months after that to avoid a catastrophic debt default;

3. The Farm Bill, which funds subsidies for farmers and welfare programs like food stamps - it needs renewing this year and many in the GOP want to make big cuts to welfare.

The resultant Congressional politics are going to be absolutely wild. I hate the term “five-dimensional chess” but this is one of the situations where it might be warranted. Consider the various groups who are involved in passing each of these pieces of legislation:

1. The “moderate” GOP caucus, who want spending cuts in most areas except for defense, and are split internally on the other big targets for cuts, such as Social Security and Medicare;

2. The “extremist” GOP caucus, which wants radical spending cuts, and some of whom are basically just in Washington to try to destroy the government by refusing to fund it or raise the debt ceiling - ever;

3. The Democratic caucus, itself internally divided on tax, spending and welfare, but generally only willing to lend votes to the most moderate of GOP proposals;

4. The Senate, where thanks to the midterms Democrats can now afford to lose either Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema but not both, and where Republicans will be internally split, with some favoring “moderate” GOP House proposals and other the more extreme ones;

5. President Joe Biden, who can veto the sorry result of wrangling by the above and send it back to them, at which point Congress needs a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate to override the veto.

In charge of steering a large part of this process will be none other than Kevin McCarthy, who is nobody’s idea of a tactical genius or skilled conciliator. In fact, the very way by which McCarthy won the Speakership was basically just to give GOP extremists everything they wanted, and then when they still rejected him, give them some more. The result has been a series of changes to the way in which the House operates that makes it even more chaotic than it would otherwise have been. This makes McCarthy’s job enormously harder, and also makes it much more likely that he’ll be overthrown sooner rather than later.

McCarthy is operating with a loaded gun to his head right from the beginning. Pretty much the only way for him to fund the government or raise the debt ceiling is going to be to work with responsible Democrats who don’t want to see the government shut down or a worldwide economic crisis occur because the United States has defaulted on its debt. But as soon as he tries to work with Democrats, McCarthy could easily be removed as Speaker by the extremist wing of his own party. If he doesn’t try to work with Democrats, his own caucus is never on its own going to agree to act. The result will be stalemate on bills which desperately need to pass if the country is going to avoid prolonged economic agony.

What makes the situation even worse is that McCarthy has made a series of concrete promises to the extremists which basically commit him to their positions. He has promised not to raise the debt ceiling without cuts to Social Security and Medicare and to set the United States on a course to a balanced budget within ten years. Because his hostage-takers also stipulated that the latter has to happen without raising taxes, that means the government would need to make some $11tn in savings - a completely unrealistic figure which would also plunge the country into economic crisis.

McCarthy’s commitment to these goals destroys the chance of working with more centrist Republicans or Democrats to pass anything through the House. Nor is the Democratic Senate or Joe Biden going to sign off on these plans. The country is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.

Moderates vs. extremists

Another aspect of the Speaker fight which I’ve found interesting is the way that it has to some extent invented a new distinction between “moderate” and “extreme” Republicans. It’s worth remembering that when we talk about a “moderate Republican”, we are generally still talking about someone who has very extreme views by the standards of every other Western democracy. In the Trump era, this extremism was mostly expressed in an attack on democratic norms and values. But an equally important way in which the GOP is an outlier is in its views on the economy.

This fact was often submerged during the culture wars of the Trump era, but now it’s very relevant again. I actually disagree with the many commentators who say that what we’re seeing in the House now is a consequence of Trumpism - it’s better understood as an example of the forces unleashed by the Tea Party and other right-wing movements with extreme economic demands, even if it takes some aesthetic cues from Trumpism.¹

But we need to remember that McCarthy and his backers are also extremely committed to many of the same economic battles as the Freedom Caucus - they want to drastically cut government spending, they want to weaken and reduce welfare, and they are leery of raising the debt ceiling. They are “moderates” mostly on matters of style and in their refusal to push these matters so far that the world economy might implode. And McCarthy is hardly moderate on issues of democracy and norms either - in fact he traveled to Mar-a-Lago not long after January 6th to embrace Trump, only days after members of the House he now leads were almost killed by insurrectionists.

This lack of a fundamental philosophical difference between the two wings of the GOP is why it was possible for McCarthy’s backers to include figures such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, and Trump himself. At the end of the day, they’re all extremists, just to varying degrees, and the Speaker fight was as much about personality and style as anything else. And that’s another reason why the chances of them getting their act together for the country are exceedingly thin.

1. There is of course a lot of crossover between the two, and the rank and file of Tea Party members were often motivated by cultural and racial grievances, particularly against Barack Obama.