It’s Déjà Vu for the Disarrayed GOP
It was supposed to produce a consensus candidate, but so much for that.
On Wednesday, Republicans in the House met behind closed doors to vote by secret ballot. Who would be the next Speaker: Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) (aka “David Duke without the baggage”) or Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) (aka the second recent GOP leader embroiled in a wrestling team molestation scandal)? No matter! Democracy would prevail, and by majority vote, the GOP conference would select its new leader.
After a day of arm twisting and vote whipping, and an endorsement of Jordan by ex-president Trump, the vote was 113 to 99 in favor of Scalise. It was a close one, but Scalise took the lead, and Jordan has since endorsed him and even offered to put his name up for nomination to the full House on a floor vote.
All wrapped up, right?
Not so fast. Despite the urgent need for leadership in the House, and at a time when funding for three countries (including our own) is on the line, the Speaker pro tempore, Rep. Patrick McHenry, gaveled out the session, softly this time, without a House floor vote for a new Speaker.
Why? Scalise needed 217 votes to become Speaker. That meant he could only afford to lose four votes. And he knew that, once again, there weren’t enough to carry him through. The GOP wanted to avoid yet another embarrassing, public loss.
If this sounds terribly familiar, this is the precise situation ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) faced in January, when it took 15 rounds of balloting and a series of humiliating concessions to elect him, including the one that felled him in the end: allowing a single member to bring a motion to vacate the chair.
How is it that, after all of this, the GOP finds itself right back where it was in January, and the nation is once again without a House that can move any critical legislation forward? Let’s take a look at what was and remains at the heart of GOP dysfunction and paralysis. It would be more comical if it weren’t also very dangerous, with implications not only for the U.S. but for two regions now engulfed in conflict.
A broken coalition
It’s helpful to think of the GOP as a fragile governing coalition made up of center-right, right-wing and far-right ideologues. Because that coalition holds only a five seat majority, it gives ideologues effective veto power and enormous leverage. After all, the far right doesn’t really want to govern. They would prefer to burn the whole place down. That means those in the GOP who actually want power over the direction of the government are effectively held hostage by those who merely want to be flamethrowers.
Any new Speaker wishing to gain the votes needed to lead the conference will face many of the same demands that the extremists made with McCarthy. They can demand that he not work with the Democrats on the budget, that Ukraine aid be withheld, that the impeachment inquiry continue, and on and on.
For example, following a meeting with Scalise, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) wrote on the X Platform, “Surprises are for little children, not Congress” and that he had “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”—meaning in this case a larger budget bill that packages many smaller appropriations bills together.
“Anyone who thought that the same problems that caused the chaos last week would magically disappear today now know how wrong they were,” Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) said.
Many on the far right see Scalise as another continuation of the just toppled leadership. He was, after all, McCarthy’s No. 2 guy, even if the former Speaker really didn’t like or trust him to do a good job. (As the New York Times noted, “Over the past year, Mr. Scalise has been marginalized by Mr. McCarthy, who has privately described him to colleagues as ineffective, checked out and reluctant to take positions, and cut him out of all major decision making.”)
While continuity would normally seem a good thing to seek in leadership, among the extremists it is not. “The House GOP Conference is broken. So we oust Kevin McCarthy and all other leaders are rewarded with promotions? How does that make sense or change anything? We need to chart a different path forward,” Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-PA) wrote on the X platform. Smucker intends to vote for Jordan on the floor.
Declared Rep. Lauren Boebert (Q-CO), who is probably eager not to be seen offering any other smiling man a hand, “I will be voting for Jim Jordan to be Speaker of the House on the floor when the vote is called.” She added, “The American people deserve a real change in leadership, not a continuation of the status quo.”
Among self-described moderates in the GOP, there is palpable frustration. “These folks are destroying our conference and apparently want to be in the minority,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) told CNN’s Maju Raju. “They don’t respect the customs of the House that have gone on for over two centuries.”
Sour grapes
Recent moves by hardliners to eject Speaker McCarthy have left a bitterness among his allies in the party, many of whom still can’t seem to process that their leader is out. Some of them are prepared to work out their disappointment and anger in public on the House floor and have stated that they will cast their votes for McCarthy, even though he is not running.
“I’m only voting for @SpeakerMcCarthy,” declared Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-FL) on the X Platform. “McCarthy is a proven leader & should have NEVER been removed in the first place. Our party has plunged into chaos, our Congress is at a standstill, and our country has paid the price.”
On the flip side, some of the hardliners seem unable to accept that their favored candidate, Jordan, lost the secret ballot. Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) of the House Freedom Caucus took particular issue with the defeat of a proposal to not move the vote to the floor until someone behind closed doors could achieve 217 votes. Scalise’s allies worked to defeat that proposal on the belief that the party would rally behind him if he had the majority of the votes and they could be publicly named and shamed if they didn’t toe the line.
This was likely a miscalculation, given that most on the far right have no shame and relish their reputations as trolls. Rep. Roy has now said he is a “hard no” on Scalise because the vote to elect a speaker was “rushed” to the floor, saying Scalise made a huge “mistake” with the defeat of the motion to present a unified conference before moving the vote to the floor.
Self-interest
Then there are the members who see the crisis as an opportunity to exact concessions or the spotlight for themselves. I count both the attention-adoring Reps. Nancy Mace (R-SC) and George Santos (R-NY) in this group.
Rep. Mace showed up to work wearing a bright red A on her tank top, claiming it was her “Scarlet letter” for having voted to oust McCarthy. Awkward literary ignorance aside, Mace followed up her stunt, which gained her national headlines, with a declaration that she would not support Scalise because he had attended a white supremacist meeting in the past, and that’s where she drew a line.
Earlier, by contrast, Mace had claimed she had no awareness of and could not speak to the allegations that her favored candidate, Jim Jordan, covered up years of allegations of sexual abuse while he was an assistant coach at Ohio State University. This statement is at best curious, given that her stated reason for voting to oust Speaker McCarthy was that he failed to act on her demands regarding abuse survivors.
Rep. Santos—who is under a superseding indictment in federal court in New York that is giving even ex-president Trump a run for his charges count—also came out yesterday as a Jordan supporter. His stated reason was more personal and on brand for its whining:
It’s just past 9:40pm and I have yet to hear from the Speaker-Designate. So I’ve made my decision and after 10 months and having had 0 contact or outreach from him, I’ve 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.
We need a Speaker that leads by including every single member of the team not just some, That’s not leadership!
The GOP may come to regret not getting rid of Santos before he, too, became a flamethrower in the party.
What now?
By at least one vote counter’s tally, there are currently 12 “no” votes for Scalise and 6 more undecided. That’s far more than needed to prevent a majority, so Scalise will have to make a lot of calls and probably offer many concessions, just like his predecessor was forced to. Scalise, however, may not have McCarthy’s stamina, as he is battling blood cancer, and he certainly does not have his charisma or as much goodwill built within the ranks.
While it’s possible Scalise can pull this off with a lot of wrangling, he would face an immediate test when the question of aid to Israel and Ukraine comes up. There is talk in the White House of bundling both together for an up or down vote. This would be a major test for the power of the Putin-aligned extremists to block aid to Ukraine.
Shortly after, Scalise would face a second test as another government shutdown looms. He might try to kick the can another few months to buy time, but it’s unclear if this would be acceptable to the burn-it-down side of his coalition.
The clock is ticking, and soon Scalise will have to put his Speakership up for a vote. All of the Democrats are united behind their leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), and if any “moderates” in the GOP actually want the government to function, five of them could support his candidacy and even likely chair some key committees out of a power sharing deal.
But that is highly unlikely given their fear of MAGA retribution in the primaries. Instead, we are likely to either see some kind of repeat of the embarrassment of January, with successive failed votes, or a quick capitulation by Scalise to his hard right critics, hobbling him as a Speaker out the gate in a way even worse than what McCarthy experienced.
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A special note: Are you tired of these GOP shenanigans and ready to put Democrats back in control of the House? To do this, we will need to win some key races, especially in the 18 swing districts Joe Biden won in 2020. I’m currently raising money for Mondaire Jones, who will represent one of those districts again if we can help him! I’m attending and speaking at his fundraiser tonight in D.C. We have already raised $18,000 among my readers—which is AMAZING—and I’d love to get us to $20,000 by the time I shake his hand tonight! Read about and donate to Mondaire by clicking below. And remember, it feels great to do your part!
There is a silver lining. A majority of the GOP caucus did not go along with Trump's endorsement of Jordan. Trump gambled with that endorsement and lost. If over half the GOP caucus feels that they don't have to take their marching orders from him anymore, it's a problem for Trump.
The egocentric dysfunction inside the GOP continues, at the expense of the country. What's it gonna take for their constituents to see the dangerous precipice these extremists are taking us?
VOTE. THEM. OUT.