Five Thoughts On Karmic McCarthy

For now, we schadenfreude

Newly elected Kevin McCarthy receives gavel from Hakeem Jeffries. Ah, well! (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

We interrupt our regular cadence because some crazy shit just went down! To wit: House Democrats united to help Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and seven other far-right House Republicans depose Kevin McCarthy. The House currently has no duly elected speaker, and McCarthy will not seek the office again.

I have little definitive to say, and wouldn’t trust anyone who claimed they did, but I do have some passing thoughts, hunches, observations, and notes of caution, and wanted to share them with you as a placeholder until the chaos subsides.

The situation is fluid, as press flacks are fond of saying. But here’s what I’ve got.

1. Last week I wrote about what I called Democrats’ lost September. It’s obviously way too early to now say Democrats have seized the moment in October, but it’s a perfect time to draw a distinction between House and Senate Democrats. The opportunities I enumerated in that post were basically all squandered by Democrats in the Senate. They’re a special focal point for criticism because they have a majority and, thus, much more sway than House Democrats over the nation’s political agenda—and I don’t think they’re using it well. House Democrats are another story. Being the minority is much easier than being the majority because House minorities have little agenda-setting responsibility. But House Democrats are marshaling a disciplined opposition. It was not impossible or even hard to imagine a handful of House Democrats losing their nerve and saving McCarthy’s hide out of fear of the unknown. But they did the proper thing.
   

2. Standing up for yourself—basic dignity—is good politics in a much, much clearer way than, say refining the details of a policy agenda juuuust so in order to to pre-empt Republican attacks. It’s not on Dems to save Republicans from themselves, let alone a Republican like McCarthy who, like Donald Trump, treats partisan politics as a forum for abuse. If McCarthy wanted to keep his job, he could’ve made enforceable concessions to Dems. They wouldn’t even have had to be that significant! Continuing resolutions instead of government shutdowns for the next year and a half! But he wouldn’t offer them anything, so it would have been undignified to rescue him. Won’t McCarthy’s successor be worse? There’s reason to think not! McCarthy was unusually ambition-driven and honorless, but was credentialed enough to get reluctant votes from marginal members on both poles of the conference. The people genuinely worse than him will have a hard time getting 218 votes for the speakership. There’s probably a clearer path for someone less conniving than McCarthy. Not a “good” speaker, of course, but someone who’s not really part of the MAGA scene, or even someone who today counts as a GOP moderate, and might conceivably be elected with significant Dem support. Normally all these possibilities would be unthinkable, but we live in unthinkable times.

3. We should not assume the plain fact of Republican incompetence, disarray, and self-sabotage will be an in-kind political gift to Democrats. It may pan out that way, depending on how protracted the crisis is, how long media dwells on it, and how destabilizing the leadership vacuum turns out to be. But Donald Trump was disorder personified, through a pandemic he completely botched, and his polling was stable throughout; McCarthy threw the government into chaos when he tried to become speaker in the first place, and it didn’t redound to Democrats’ benefit in any measurable way. If there’s an opportunity for Democrats to capitalize on this beyond what they’ve already done, in ways that might meaningfully shift political narratives, they’d probably have to stick their necks out a bit. They could say they stand prepared to help elect a Republican speaker but only with changes to rules that prohibit hostage taking and unpredicated impeachment inquiries. And then they could make a big stink about it when Republicans refuse. I don’t know if that’d move any polls, but it’s probably worth trying. In any case, I’d rather see messaging like that than milquetoast messaging like this from the White House tonight.
   

4. If this ends without tears, it’s nevertheless a reminder that appeasing these Republicans or taking them at their word is unwise—if only because the people cutting the deals can’t be sure they’ll be around to carry them out. After Biden made concessions to McCarthy under threat of default, the party line, echoed widely in progressive media, was that Biden had out-maneuvered him. McCarthy went on to renege on that deal; and as of this weekend he seemed to be planning to hold Ukraine aid hostage to Republican border-security demands. Nevertheless, back in May, Biden called him a “good faith” negotiator. This was half coping (Biden didn’t want to admit he’d caved) and half mischief (a kiss of death for McCarthy) but it was also the wrong approach to malign actors. If you need the country know they must be stopped, warn the country. Don’t sing their praises. Ever.
   

5. This is embarrassing, and a perfect coda to my recent essay in the New York Times.