The chaotic Republican-led House of Representatives has a rather poor sense of timing. The United States is in the midst of two international emergencies and faces the threat of a government shutdown next month. President Biden’s prime-time speech on Thursday pressing for aid to Ukraine and Israel underscored the exorbitant costs of the GOP meltdown.
But the embarrassing exercise could prove to be a blessing because it’s exposing a crisis in our politics that must be confronted. The endless battle for the speakership is already encouraging new thinking and might yet lead to institutional arrangements to allow bipartisan majorities to work their will.
The House impasse was precipitated by both radicalization and division within the Republican Party. Narrow majorities in the House have enabled right-wing radicals to disable the governing system. Normal progressives and normal conservatives, in alliance with politicians closer to the center, are discovering a shared interest in keeping the nihilist right far from the levers of power.
The current crisis, after all, was initiated by a small far-right contingent, empowered by the broad popularity of Donald Trump in the party. They brought down now-former House speaker Kevin McCarthy despite his willingness to make one concession after another to the crazies, the impeachers and the Trumpists.
Republicans blame Democrats for assisting in McCarthy’s defenestration. The GOP doesn’t want to recognize that McCarthy gave Democrats no reason to save him — he flatly refused to negotiate with them in his hour of need — and many reasons to believe he’d continue to kowtow to party extremists.
The last straw came after Democrats gave more votes than Republicans did to pass McCarthy’s bill to avoid a government shutdown last month. The next day, McCarthy turned around and bizarrely claimed that Democrats “did not want the bill” and “were willing to let government shut down.” That dishonest nonsense sealed his fate.
Republicans have yet to learn the lesson of McCarthy’s fall: Because of the GOP’s splits, only an agreement with Democrats can create a majority in the House capable of governing. On the compromise measure to avert a debt ceiling crisis, House Republicans divided 149-71. On the bill to avoid a shutdown, the vote was even closer, 126-90. In their divided party, Republicans who want to avoid defaults or shutdowns or selling out Ukraine cannot do so on their own. They should formally recognize this.
Democrats are going out of their way to say they are ready to deal. “We are willing to find a bipartisan path forward so we can reopen the House,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said at a news conference on Friday, after Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) went down in his third and decisive defeat in the speakership vote. Republicans, Jeffries said, had a choice: to “embrace bipartisanship and abandon extremism.”
The Democratic rank and file has quietly been working in this direction. Rep. Annie Kuster (N.H.), chair of the New Democrat Coalition, told me that moderate Democrats “were talking to any reasonable Republican we had a relationship with” in an effort to empower Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.) to bring up bills that have broad support in both parties.
She noted that the Democrats’ conditions were minimal and hardly left-wing: to agree to avoid a government shutdown; to pass spending bills along the lines of the fiscal accord McCarthy and McHenry themselves made with Biden in May to avert a debt default; and to provide military aid to Ukraine and Israel and humanitarian aid for Palestinians.
Some middle-of-the-road Republicans were genuinely interested, Kuster said, but the plan blew up in the Republican conference on Thursday “because word got out that we [Democrats] might support the McHenry solution, and that made it unacceptable to the right.” More moderate Republicans also worried that Jordan would use a McHenry interlude to keep his own candidacy alive.
Democrats have reacted with understandable horror at the willingness of 200 Republicans to make the election-denying, insurrection-sympathizing, Trump-backed Jordan second in the line of succession for the presidency. But it’s important to recognize an additional blessing: For some two dozen Republicans — whose ranks grew through the three ballots — a Jordan speakership was too much to accept.
The iron rule of Republican politics has been that the right wing of the party plays hardball and more moderate Republicans inevitably fold. Not this time. Because of the brave souls who went public, the party caucus voted 112-86 by secret ballot on Friday afternoon to force Jordan to step aside. All friends of democratic rule should be grateful. With a regiment of nine lesser-known Republicans pondering a now wide-open speaker’s race, a new version of the McHenry option might gain appeal.
One more lesson emerged from scare tactics and threats to anti-Jordan Republicans. They matched those “unleashed against anybody who stands in the way of Donald Trump,” Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) told MSNBC’s Joy Reid, adding: “If you fail to renounce and denounce political violence in very clear and specific terms, it’s going to come back to haunt you.”
Bipartisanship is no magic elixir, but bipartisanship in pursuit of majority rule is a worthy cause. Pushing Republicans to confront extremism in their ranks is both good politics and essential for governing. The Democrats’ offer to help Republicans through their intraparty struggle will either hasten the day of reckoning or expose the GOP’s refusal to stand up to its nihilists.
