After 20 very long, very loud years of sermons on the dangers of terrorism, it seems the Republican party has no choice but to negotiate with 20 political suicide bombers just to operate a government. I’m overdosing on poetic justice, frothing at the mouth as I slip into elysium.
As I write, the American House of Representatives assembles for a third day of voting for Speaker. McCarthy has lost six seven eight consecutive rounds of Speaker confirmation votes and seems likely to lose a seventh eighth ninth. This is the funniest thing to happen to a Speaker in a hundred years, and the humiliation does not seem likely to end any time soon.
Here are the concessions McCarthy has made so far:
If McCarthy wins, any single member of the House can initiate a “Motion to Vacate,” which forces a vote on whether to keep or remove the Speaker of the House. This means any member of the Freedom Caucus can force a repeat of this farce as often as they want to.
A restoration of “open rules” on all major bills that allows rank-and-file members to propose amendments without committee approval. This means Boebert and Gaetz can force the house to vote on whatever amendments they think would be fun on any given day
The creation of a House Select Committee (like the Church Committee) on “Weaponization of the Federal Government.” This will essentially recreate the Twitter Files on the floor of congress, but with every media outlet to the left of Fox News
The Congressional Leadership Fund can no longer spend money in GOP open primaries to advance one (relatively sane) candidate over another (batshit) one.
Don’t cry for McCarthy. The minority leader made his bones pretending to be the thing Freedom Caucus members actually are: a hard-line government obstructionist, soldier in the war against the demon liquor of government spending and the evil libs who push it. The would-be Speaker is a sheep in wolf’s clothing and his fellow wolves, knowing this, are demanding that he howl. But he can only bleat pathetically, and so the wolves laugh and circle and lick their bloody chops.
Whether or not McCarthy eventually wears them down, the Freedom Wolves have already won. They’ve established dominance. These monsters ate the midterms and they’ll eat you next if you don’t sit down and shut up and do as you are told.
It is insane that the Freedom Caucus is ascendent and not neutered, in the same way and for the same reason that it is insane that the GOP failed so spectacularly at the ballot box last year. Nothing makes any goddamn sense anymore because the rules are changing. Too often people interpret “War is politics by other means” to mean “War and politics are the same genre of thing.” They are not. War is not politics, Clausewitz says so directly; war is a different and incompatible tactic to achieve the same genre of ends.
As McCarthy is discovering in real time, there’s no room for a politician in a war zone.
Let’s back up.
The GOP adopted a far-right strategy for the 2022 midterms: pick absolute lunatics and hammer home the culture wars. To say the strategy failed would be an understatement. And so, conservatives woke up on November 9th with Occam’s Razor pressed hard against their throats.
The simplest, most coherent explanation for what happened at the ballot box is that MAGA is to blame. Back in October, Mitch McConnell saw the writing on the wall. “Candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome,” the Senate minority leader said in what to many ears sounds like an accurate and prescient take.
Here’s an alternate theory, the one I heard at TPUSA’s AmericaFest last month: establishment Republican RINOs torpedoed perfectly good candidates by not believing in them hard enough.
.“I watched [McConnell’s] statement live and I was sick to my stomach,” Byron Donalds told the crowd at AmFest – yes, the Byron Donalds, the ambitious camera-ready Florida representative that the Freedom Wolves are promoting for Speaker in exchange for his defection from McCarthy in Round 2, a man that – not to brag – I called out as a possible vice presidential pick back in October when I still thought Trump might win the ‘24 primary. He probably won’t be Speaker, but he’s certainly going to be someone.
“Leaders never sit around and complain about who they have on the field,” Donalds continued. “They go win with what is on the field.” This declaration came after multiple sports analogies, which I did not understand and will not attempt to relay here, only that those metaphors included Bill Belichick as an example of a coach who encouraged his team to do their best and I understand exactly enough football to know why this is funny.
The point is that the abysmal midterm performance is the establishment’s fault, not the conservatives who triumphed in the primaries and faceplanted in the general.
The RINOS didn’t believe hard enough with their hearts or their wallets. “[Mark Kelly] outspent me $70 million to $10 million hard dollars,” Blake Masters, who ran for the Arizona senate seat and lost, told the AmFest crowd the day after Donalds spoke. “I couldn't erase 70 million, not without establishment help. The honest truth is I was abandoned by the establishment.”
The honest truth is a little more complicated than that. Masters’ old boss Peter Thiel kicked in at least $17.5 million, and The Club for Growth PAC threw in $7 million more in the final days of Master’s campaign. Nonetheless, the gist of his story is correct: Masters received no help from the Senate Leadership Fund super PAC, the McConnell-aligned leviathan that spent far more money than any other group – over $200 million – on advertising this election cycle. Kelly crushed Masters on the fundraising front, and the Democratic candidate used that advantage to carpet bomb the airwaves with political advertisements.
Still, the neglect does not explain all or even most of the midterm losses, especially high-profile candidates that received millions of dollars like Oz in Pennsylvania and Walker in Georgia. Seems like those losses might be due to something else, something we aren’t willing to mention. Something that smells faintly of hamburgers and Aqua-net.
I’ve already written about Trump’s conspicuous absence at AmericaFest, and recently wrote an obituary for the large sad boy, but nothing I write could possibly say it better than Lauren Boebert who, whilst voting for Donalds during Round 5, had this to say:
Let's stop with the campaign smears and tactics to get people to turn against us. Even having my favorite President call us and tell us we need to knock this off. I think it actually needs to be reversed. The President needs to tell Kevin McCarthy that sir, you do not have the votes, and it's time to withdraw.
The crowd made the exact “ooh” noise you would expect them to, and so did the media, and so did I. This is post-Trump MAGA, it has fractured but retains its vital essence. None of them will ever say that Trump’s deranged candidate choice cost the GOP the midterm election; they will pay him lip service until the heat death of the universe. Nevertheless, he is their silent scapegoat. For the Freedom Caucus to survive, there needs to be the slightest bit of space between themselves and their great but tainted leader.
What you are seeing on the House floor is not just a fight over the gavel. It is the first open battle of the Republican civil war. You think the speaker fight is bad, just wait for the struggle over chairmanship of the Republican National Committee. That battle will occur largely in back rooms and not on CSPAN, but if AmFest is any indication, conservatives are coming for the big seat in a big way.
“We are in the middle of a culture war in our country, fighting an enemy that is as powerful as it is relentless,” Harmeet Dhillon told an enthusiastic AmFest crowd on the final day of the conference. “Believe me, their goal is nothing less than the total destruction of everything that people in this room hold dear.”
Dhillon’s wolf credentials are solid. She served as co-chair of “Lawyers for Trump,” the legal team Trump assembled in the days before the 2020 election to ensure “election integrity.” As the former president mounted an increasingly desperate campaign to hold onto power after his election loss, Dhillon urged the Supreme Court to “just step in and do something.” She is currently working for Kari Lake as Lake challenges the results of the Arizona gubernatorial election.
“Six years ago when the current leadership took office, we had the White House, the Senate, and the House,” Dhillon pointed out. “Whether it's an unwillingness or an incapability to lead, the consequences are the same. The Republican party of today has chosen to be spectators in the political arena, not active combatants. We are not taking the fight to the left. We are sitting back and letting them punch us and weakly responding.”
Dhillon is right, though at first glance it does not seem that way. Kevin McCarthy, for example, has howled the rhetoric of war for damn near a decade. He howled it for the Tea Party, then hopped onto the Trump Train earlier than almost any other Republican congressman. His sycophantic devotion to 45 earned him the nickname “My Kevin.” McCarthy went to the mat for Trump during the former president’s first impeachment, faithfully pushed his every agenda item, and supported every Trump candidate, no matter how unhinged. He defended Marjorie Taylor Greene through the Jewish Space Lasers debacle and, when Democrats stripped her committees anyway, swore to do the same to Democrats in 2022.
After Trump lost in 2020, McCarthy declared on Laura Ingraham that the president had won. When Congress shakily reassembled on the evening of January 6th, McCarthy voted against certification of Biden’s victory in two states. Sure, he blamed the President for January 6th privately, but he voted against the second impeachment publicly and likely convinced many others to do the same.
But McCarthy also passes funding bills.
McCarthy passed the 1.7 trillion dollar funding bill last month. McCarthy will always pass the 1.7 trillion dollar funding bill, because McCarthy is a politician. And the job of a politician, ultimately, is to govern by consensus. You want that consensus to fall in your favor, of course, you’ll wring every concession out of the opposition you possibly can, but the end result will always be, by definition, a compromise that the majority can live with.
But the GOP is no place for politicians anymore.
The most telling moment of this entire GOP shitshow came yesterday evening, when a reporter asked Byron Donalds whether he was concerned about political retaliation. I recommend you watch this clip at least three times, with sound, before continuing:
McMurry’s written summary of the question doesn’t quite do it justice. Here’s the whole exchange:
Reporter: "Are you worried about retribution after the fact? There were threats that folks that weren't going to vote for McCarthy would be kicked off committees. Now you've put yourself in a pretty public position opposing who -- the person that could be the speaker. Are you worried about retribution?
Donalds: “Man, I'm 6'2", 275, I'm not worried about that.”
The reporter’s question is extremely clear and the atmosphere is calm and quiet: Donalds heard the question just fine. There is no ambiguity for anyone who listened past the first eight words. The reporter is asking about political retribution. Committee assignments. Intra-party sabotage.
But Donalds heard a different question. He heard “Are you afraid you’re going to get your ass kicked?” and answered accordingly, without a whiff of metaphor. Because that’s where his head is at right now.
I have heard Donalds speak three times at two events. The man is a polished and skillful rhetorician. He is both smart and clever: a rare combination in this or any other arena. Donalds knows how to talk issues and how to talk strategy and how to weave the personal into the political. He sounds more like a politician than most of his compatriots over in the Freedom corner, and I’ve had my eye on him for a while.
In that clip above, the mask slips. Like Dhillon, like Boebert, like all of them, he is ready to go to war. Not the metaphorical kind. The kind where you do not compromise with the enemy but instead present a choice: surrender, or perish.
I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it: if you believed – really, truly believed – that the opposing party was a satanic cult of pedophiles and puppet-masters who are actively working to destroy America by renouncing God and castrating your children for sick sexual pleasure – wouldn’t you do everything you could to win?
Would you consider, even for an instant, compromising with something that demonic?
The Freedom Caucus has no interest in governing. No interest in politics or compromise: not with McCarthy, not with the party, certainly not with the Democrats. They want to restore their twisted version of an imaginary America. They want to crush evil.
They want war.
This Speaker battle is the future. It is very, very funny right now, and I strongly encourage everyone to laugh as long and as hard as they can, because it won’t be funny forever. For many, many years, people like McCarthy have loudly beaten the drums of war while quietly doing politics, but the real warriors are here now. They bought Limbaugh’s rhetoric, they took Newt Gingrich at his word. They grew up with O’Reilly and Hannity and Glenn Beck screaming in their ears and they believed everything they heard.
I should know. I grew up with those voices too.
Lauren Boebert is 36. I am 35. We both grew up in Colorado, both likely watched the same Fox News lineup in our respective living rooms each night. Hannity helped raise us both. And here we are today.
“Politically, congresswoman, you and I agree on most things,” Hannity told Lauren Boebert last night on his show, almost pleading. His hair, which I remember as brown, is gray. He looked exhausted. “We don’t disagree on many things. And I do have respect for you. But however,” Hannity said, trying to get out his final question of the interview, which was also the first question of the interview–
“Yes.” Boebert spoke over him. “Correct. And I do believe history will show I’m on the right side of this.”
“Well, you can believe in your position,” Hannity said in the voice of a patient and worn-down father. “But I’m using your words. You said to President Trump – you were very clear – ‘[McCarthy] doesn’t have 218, so you need to ask him to withdraw.’ If by Friday you and your group of 20 don’t have a name with 30 votes, is it time for you to withdraw? And if not, why do you support a double standard?”
It took Boebert a few iterations of the talking point she’d clearly drilled before the interview – McCarthy does not have 218 votes, which, Lauren, Jesus, we know – before she finally answered this patriarch of our generation.
“I will not, Sean. I will not withdraw.”
It’s what you taught us, Sean. You too, Kevin. All you sheep.
You raised us to be wolves. Don’t be surprised that wolves are what you’re getting
You're absolutely right about them wanting the war. This is already a win for them: the chaos, the obstruction... if they get a speaker of their choosing, they win. If they sabotage the entire process and stop anything from getting done, they win. The nightmare scenario where the house is still fighting over a speaker on the 4th of July is a win for them too. They sincerely believe that the country is already hopelessly compromised and if they can't reshape it from inside, they're perfectly willing to burn it all down.
I love your analogy of the sheep raising a generation of wolves. The schadenfreude is strong.
While I’d love to see a centrist compromise with Democrats (Fred Upton?), that’s not what I think is most likely. I think the wolves will wring McCarthy for every concession they can, changing the role of Speaker to “clerk of the majority”. Then they will throw there support to Steve Scalise, leaving McCarthy bleeding by the side of the road. The wolves don’t like Scalise any better than McCarthy, except that but the time they are done with McCarthy, he will be a shriveled husk.