Trump the ringmaster is being trampled on by his own circus
The ballot for the new Speaker of the House was farcical, in large part thanks to the divisions the former president has cast through his own party.
In the Speaker’s Lobby of the US House of Representatives, two congressmen wandered in from the chamber making small talk between votes.
“How many novels are you going to get through?” asked Jeff Van Drew, a Republican from New Jersey.
“I’m reading War and Peace next. I think I have the time,” replied his companion, the Democrat Richard Neal of Massachusetts.
“I’m reading Dante’s Inferno,” Van Drew responded. “That’s how this is starting to feel.”
The lobby that sits behind the dais, with log fires and leather chairs, is lined with oil portraits of House Speakers past. Some have faded into obscurity while others are remembered as giants, including the first one, Frederick Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania, and the most recent, Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to wield the gavel.
Kevin McCarthy, elected early yesterday (Saturday) morning, will be relieved just to get his portrait in the lobby at all.
For years, the California Republican, 57, has craved the Speaker’s chair, a vital office that places the holder second in line to the presidency. But what might have been his coronation as leader of the new GOP House majority became a ritual humiliation last week, as a small group of rebels within his party blocked his path for days, plunging the 118th Congress into turmoil before it had been sworn in.
Before last week it had been a century since the House had taken more than one vote to appoint a new speaker. McCarthy lost 14, before triumphing on the 15th, making this the most protracted contest since before the American Civil War.
McCarthy launched the 14th ballot believing he had a deal in place to bring the defectors into line, only to fall one vote short as Florida’s Matt Gaetz, a ringleader of the “never Kevin” Republican mutineers, abstained at the last moment. As days of mounting fury spilled over, an ashen-faced McCarthy went to remonstrate with Gaetz on the House floor, and another GOP congressman had to be restrained from confronting the turncoat. Even the House chaplain, Margaret Kibben, had had enough. “Dear God, it seems we may be at last standing at the threshold of a new Congress,” she said, opening Friday night’s session with a prayer to break the deadlock.
Each day had brought fresh embarrassment. McCarthy moved his furniture and boxes into the vacant Speaker’s office on Tuesday, a bullish gesture of defiance to the rebellion he knew was coming. That evening Gaetz wrote to the Architect of the US Capitol, who oversees the maintenance and operation of the buildings, demanding that McCarthy vacate the office after his first three defeats. “How long will he remain there before he is considered a squatter?” Gaetz trolled.
The situation grew so farcical that Republican defectors nominated candidates for Speaker who had themselves backed McCarthy. On Thursday night one of them nominated Donald Trump, who is not a member of the chamber.
Days of meetings behind closed doors and mud-slinging on the House floor failed to break the deadlock. As frustration mounted, Republican members yelled, “What do you want?” at their rebel colleagues.
The rebels did not appear motivated by policy or ideological demands. Instead, they seemed intent on flexing their power to hold the House to ransom, regardless of the damage to their party.
Most are hardline Trump loyalists and backed the former president’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Most were also implicated in his last-ditch attempt to overturn the election result on January 6, 2021, sparking the deadly riot at the Capitol. One, Ralph Norman, called for Trump to declare martial law to stop Joe Biden becoming president in 2021.
The extremist wing of the Republican Party, which has grown in power since the 1990s, reached its apogee under Trump, with many of its leading lights becoming stars of his Make America Great Again (Maga) movement.
Without Trump at centre stage in Washington, though, the rivalries among them have been laid bare. Some prominent Maga Republicans backed McCarthy, eyeing jobs on influential House committees. Others led the rebellion against him, boosting their profiles on right-wing media in the process.
“These members ... contribute nothing to the conservative movement. They don’t write bills. They don’t think about policy ... They just want to yell and scream and then they want to make demands,” Dan Crenshaw, a Republican congressman from Texas told Fox News. “It’s like playing with children.”
Even Trump struggled to bring them to heel, no longer able to control the monster he created. He backed McCarthy, who was instrumental in bringing him back into the Republican fold after the Capitol riot. On Wednesday Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, urging Republicans to “VOTE FOR KEVIN, CLOSE THE DEAL, TAKE THE VICTORY”.
The rebels pushed back. One of the defectors, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, said that Trump - whom she called “my favourite president” - needed “to tell Kevin McCarthy that, sir, you do not have the votes, and it’s time to withdraw”.
Trump continued to work on the defectors. On Friday night Marjorie Taylor Greene, an extremist right-wing Republican who sided with McCarthy, was photographed offering her phone, with “DT” on the screen, to a rebel on the House floor, who waved it away.
McCarthy had seen the rebellion coming. In the two years since Trump left office, he sought to appease and buy off the Maga Republicans to support his candidacy. Most of the 20 rebels were re-elected at November’s midterms with the help of funds he channelled to them.
After securing victory by cutting a deal with Gaetz on the floor McCarthy was embraced by colleagues, but his triumph may prove brief and hollow.
He has caved in to almost every one of the rebels’ demands, even agreeing to lower the number of members required to force a vote to oust the Speaker, from a majority of House Republicans to five, and then finally to just one. The move effectively guarantees that he will be fighting for survival from day one, the weakest leader of the House in a century.
McCarthy also offered to place more extremist Republicans on the committee that debates legislation before it reaches the floor, handing power over the legislative process to the hard-right of the party.
His concessions have infuriated moderate Republicans, who fear the House will be ungovernable. “This is going to be an incredibly difficult place to lead,” said Dusty Johnson, the Republican congressman from South Dakota. “This is not a good look for the Republican House. ”
The chaos has left the business of government at a standstill. Proposing McCarthy for the seventh time on Thursday, John James, Michigan representative-elect, noted that more than 600 Americans had died of drug overdoses since the first vote on Tuesday. “The American people have told us, by putting a Republican majority here, that they want Republicans to lead, and they want a government that works and doesn’t embarrass them,” James told the House, “and we are failing on both missions.”
Congressional staff cannot be paid until the House is sworn in, and members were forced to cancel a meeting with General Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, to discuss the threat from China on Wednesday because they do not yet have security clearance.
McCarthy will struggle to pass contentious legislation, including approving funding for Ukraine’s military and raising America’s debt ceiling, placing the US at risk of a historic default, with disastrous consequences for the global economy.
Democrats have watched the meltdown with bewildered delight and horror. On Friday, the second anniversary of the Capitol riot, Pete Aguilar, a California Democrat, noted that by caving in, McCarthy had handed power in the House to “the same individuals who fanned the flames on January 6”.
Asked about the chaos during a visit to Kentucky on Wednesday, Biden said the Republicans’ predicament was “embarrassing” but “not my problem”. The Maga Republicans will become exactly that, however, as they prepare to launch investigations into the president, his family and a string of officials on issues such as immigration, the origins of Covid-19 and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
They also present an opportunity for Biden. Bill Clinton, destroyed by Republicans in the 1994 midterms, was able to use a dysfunctional, hardline GOP Congress to his advantage and win a second term as president in 1996. Biden is expected to deploy the same tactic, contrasting his effort to forge a bipartisan consensus that delivers for the American people with the narrow, vengeful focus of Trump and the Maga Republicans.
In Kentucky he was accompanied by the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell - a rare joint appearance. “We disagree on a lot of things but here’s what matters: he’s a man of his word,” Biden said of McConnell. “It sends an important message to the entire country: we can work together. We can get things done. We can move the nation forward if we just drop a little bit of our egos and focus on what is needed for the country.”
THE SUNDAY TIMES
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