The GOP Holds Some Dangerous But Heavy Bricks
I was reading two separate stories early this morning, and it struck me that they were actually related.
The first is about the debt ceiling—a problem no one in the GOP wants to own but everyone will eventually have to address. Speaker Kevin McCarthy cobbled together exactly 217 against 215 votes, for a bill that slashes government spending across the board. It will go nowhere in the Senate—Democrats there aren’t even talking to McCarthy about his bill—but McCarthy still believes the GOP can strap bricks of dynamite to its waist in this fashion to bring President Biden to the bargaining table.
The second is about abortion rights—another problem no one in the GOP wants to own. Over the weekend, newly re-elected Republican Chair Ronna McDaniel essentially advised her caucus to swim while holding the heavy abortion issue in their hands. “[O]ur candidates across the board refused to talk about it, thinking, oh, we can just talk about the economy and ignore this big issue, and they can’t,” she said in an interview on Fox on Sunday. But this advice ignores what actually happens when the GOP does speak and act on abortion: Voters hate it, and the issue sinks them in elections.
So how are these two stories related? Let’s dive in a bit and explore why they are actually two manifestations of a larger trap the GOP has fallen into and can’t seem to escape.
The debt ceiling threat and abortion bans are extremist policies
Speaker McCarthy and Chair McDaniel both subscribe to the belief that if the GOP would just stick to its guns and present, as official policy, what its most extreme members want, somehow that is going to win over voters. This is delusional and amounts to political malpractice, even while threatening grave danger upon the economy and the well-being and reproductive rights of millions.
Take the debt ceiling bill. The proposal that ultimately emerged from the House looks like a fantasy of the far right. In fact, it’s not very different from what the Freedom Caucus extremists proposed earlier in the year, which also froze federal spending at 2022 levels. McCarthy’s bill, if passed, would impact the most vulnerable first: veterans, the disabled, children and the working poor. He knows it won’t even get a vote in the Senate. He also knows that it won’t move President Biden, who has asked repeatedly for a “clean” debt ceiling raise, just like former president Trump received from Congress each time. Still, McCarthy put it forward as if he had won a resounding mandate in the last election instead of barely scraping through with a majority. All this while he’s facing a Democratic Senate and White House.
Why would Kevin McCarthy begin with a non-starter? As commentator Matthew Yglesias observed, the sad reason is that he isn’t trying to solve the nation’s problems. He’s trying to solve his party’s problems. The bill is the result of him capitulating to the extremists to his right, who could vote to remove him at any time. During his leadership election, the far right had demanded debt ceiling hostage taking as part of their goals, and McCarthy gave them what they wanted. But now, he either must choose a compromise path that’s good for the country or a hardline one that keeps him in power. I’m not optimistic he will choose the former.
The same dynamics surround abortion bans. The proposals in state legislatures and even at the federal level (which isn’t supposed to be involved after Dobbs, remember guys?) are, in a word, draconian. They often comprise total abortion bans without exception for the life of the mother or for pregnancies resulting from incest or rape. In other cases, as in Florida, they are mistitled “heartbeat” bills that ban abortions after just six weeks, before most women even know they are pregnant. Polls consistently confirm, however, that Americans favor abortion access, particularly in the first trimester. It’s a hot-button issue for the GOP, one it has already lost badly on during critical tests in Kansas and Wisconsin in 2022 and 2023. Still, Republicans act like it’s their messaging that is faulty, not their policies.
So why would Ronna McDaniel advise Republican candidates to tell voters where they really stand, if where they really stand is so extreme? Like McCarthy, she is not really interested in resolving the question for the good of the nation and millions of women. She is merely trying to keep her party from fracturing along this very bad fault line. Abortion is now a wedge issue, as efforts to pass extremist abortion bans in the very red states of Nebraska and South Carolina demonstrated this past week. Both measures failed by one vote because in the end, less-extreme Republicans voted along with Democrats to kill the bills.
What national GOP messaging on abortion exists is hopelessly muddled. Some Republicans candidates are tiptoeing and equivocating around the issue because they fear voter backlash. Others, such as Mike Pence, are declaring their support for a total ban on abortion, even claiming that ending abortion is “more important than politics.” Meanwhile, leading GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, who admittedly seems to have a better understanding of where voters are on this question, is now advising the party to soften its rhetoric and blames the abortion question for the party’s miserable performance in the midterms—anything to redirect blame, I suppose. McDaniel is trying to mollify all sides by letting the abortion chips fall where they may, telling Republicans to not be afraid and to speak their hearts on the issue so that the party doesn’t have to commit to any single position on this.
The gambit is a loser on both issues
Handing policy in the form of legislation and candidate positions over to the most extreme voices doesn’t sound like a solid electoral strategy. In a normal world, there would be moderates within the GOP who could work across the aisle with centrist Democrats to fashion legislation that meets Americans where they are. This could result in, for example, agreed-upon, modest cuts in the budget to some federal programs as part of a debt ceiling bill and a federal right to abortion only up to somewhere between 15 and 24 weeks, with exceptions for the life of the mother, incest or rape, and additional protections available state by state. All far from perfect, but a compromise.
Instead of true moderates, however, there are only weak-kneed, less extreme GOP members in the House. They keep looking to McCarthy for a way through, even though they have it within their power now to stop the extremists within their own party from seizing total control of either issue.
The all points to a sad truth. McCarthy and McDaniel are damaged leaders who can barely hold their party together. Both are captive to the MAGA base and must appease it and its king. Their solution is not to stand firm but to take whatever actions needed to prevent the GOP ship from sinking. But that’s not a strategy for steaming ahead solidly and effectively with popular policies.
Neither McCarthy nor McDaniel wants to admit that what might save the Republican Party from fracturing today will likely paint them as out-of-touch extremists going into 2024. The ads are already writing themselves, particularly for the 18 House seats held by Republicans in districts Biden won in 2020. Any way you slice it, because of McCarthy, these candidates have now voted for and support deep cuts to veterans, children and Medicaid. And partly because of McDaniel, they also have no consistent, national Republican platform on abortion, so instead they must constantly distance themselves from extremist GOP abortion restrictions that their voters hate.
In short, the GOP believes it has strapped bricks of dynamite to itself and can either force a reckoning on the budget or sink the entire economic ship. But that dynamite is part of a heavier waistband, with bricks labeled “abortion bans” alongside “gun extremism,” “book bans,” and “anti-trans hate”—all losing issues for the GOP.
At some point, the House is going to have to explode that budget dynamite or pass some kind of clean debt ceiling raise, possibly without McCarthy. The only question is how much economic damage will they will choose to inflict on the economy in the process.
Once that debt ceiling ship sails, and the GOP is stuck treading other choppy political waters, all they will have left is an increasingly heavy burden of bricks representing a host of losing issues, chief among them abortion.
Good luck staying afloat.
The concern that I have is that because they know just how fucked they'd be in a fair and honest election, they will double down on their efforts to rig as many elections as they can... be it by voter bans (excuse me, "cleaning up the voter rolls"), gerrymandering ("redrawing districts to reflect demographics") or draconian voter ID laws and banning absentee / early voting ("preventing voter fraud")... and of course the always favorite closing down of polling places - after all, if they can't vote, they can't vote the wrong way.
As someone who, unfortunately, knows many a MAGA cult member, trust me. They do not understand, or choose not to understand, what the debt ceiling issue actually IS, and are all for what McCarthy is doing. Because, you know, all these people on welfare/Medicaid, etc are what is dragging us down. Tax breaks for the wealthy are absolutely fine with them. They will continue to vote against their own Interests to "own the libs" because they simply cannot get past Hunter Bidens laptop. It's very sad.