Congratulations, Speaker McCarthy! Let the chaos begin!

Kevin McCarthy got his lifetime wish last night. Before long, we'll all wish he hadn't.

(Welcome to a special, Hell-in-a-Handbasket installment of Life Its Ownself. If you enjoy reading it, please let me know by 1) hitting the Like button at the bottom, 2) subscribing to this newsletter, and 3) recommending it to others. Also, feel free to comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.)

        

January 7, 2023

         For those of you who are not political junkies and had better things to do — which I assume is almost everybody reading this — around midnight the U.S. House of Representatives finally selected Kevin McCarthy (R-Sellout) as Speaker of the 118th Congress. Not since before the Civil War has it taken this long for the House to select a Speaker. The tragicomic labor pains that played out on national TV this week has birthed the weakest, most compromised Speaker in modern American history, both as a matter of personal character and of institutional power.

         In order to get his Precious gavel, Kevin McCarthy (R-Compromised) made a series of deals, some as yet unrevealed, that transferred his power to a pathetic troupe of election deniers, insurrectionists, grifters, suspected pedophiles and outright frauds that would make Boss Tweed blush, and that guarantee it will be almost impossible to conduct day-to-day business.

         What did the Freedom Caucus want? Some of them – Gaetz, Boebert, etc. – just want to jam the gears. For them, Congress is a stage, and they are only players. They’re more interested in Fox News appearances than committee assignments, performative outrage than governance, and no piece of important legislation ever enacted in this country will have their names on it.

The rest of them want power: seats on key committees, subcommittee chairmanships, different rules for floor debate, access to the beer keg in the Speaker’s Office. For instance, they got McCarthy to lower the threshold for a motion to vacate the chair – essentially, a no confidence vote – down to one member. Expect to see such motions as a routine matter any time McCarthy fails to jump through their hoops or, worse, cuts deals with the Democrats. Which, of course, he will have to do in a House where he has only a four-vote margin of error.

Speaking of the Democrats, they showed admirable discipline and even elán during the week, nominating new Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) for Speaker and unanimously supporting him across the 15 ballots. Having watched the Republicans humiliate McCarthy for five days, Jeffries could not resist piling on: called on to formally introduce McCarthy as Speaker, he gave a better speech than McCarthy’s.

One of the more tawdry dramas of the week was the Freedom Caucus nomination of south Florida congressman Byron Donalds as Speaker. In all fairness, Donalds, who had yet to be sworn in for his second term, has not (as far as we know) been accused of domestic abuse by more than one woman, paid for one girlfriend’s abortion or pressured another woman to have one, or speculated that he’d like to be a werewolf.

Still, his nomination to be Speaker of the House, offered on the fourth round of voting by Texas congressman and nihilistic performance artist Chip Roy, was as deeply cynical as Herschel Walker’s unsuccessful, Trump-approved run for the U.S. Senate.

One does not normally think of a freshman member as Speaker caliber. The Speaker’s job requires mastery of a complex combo of institutional history, member personalities and political skill (even if, oddly, it does not require one be a member of Congress). Donalds is not known to have any of these things, as even Chip Roy acknowledged. The sole gravamen of his nomination, Roy said, was his color: “Here we are, and for the first time in history, there have been two Black Americans placed into the nomination for speaker of the House. We do not seek to judge people by the color of their skin, but the content of their character.” The magnificent granite statue of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Washington reportedly wept during Roy’s speech.

Donalds was the Freedom Caucus’s stalking horse of the “Never Kevins” for the second day of voting and received 20 votes in three ballots. Then, he disappeared on the third day, the caucus having settled on another stalking horse and, sadly, having abandoned its dream of a truly color-blind America.  

         After McCarthy’s speech and the swearing-in of all the members, the House adjourned for the weekend. On Monday they will reconvene to adopt the House Rules for the session. The Rules will lay out the procedural changes, and the committee and subcommittee assignments, to which McCarthy agreed in his desperate week of pandering to his worst members. This will create another challenge: having promised the sun, moon and stars to the 20 dissidents to get their support, he now may face blowback from the other 200 members of the GOP caucus, some of whom may find out a promised committee assignment or subcommittee chairmanship was negotiated away.

And this is just the beginning. Driven by the fringe elements of the GOP Caucus, the House will investigate nothingburgers like Hunter Biden’s laptop and Hillary’s emails (still!) and, before it is over, impeach President Biden. In the meanwhile, it will try to cut off aid to Ukraine and default on the U.S. debt. Those planning to pay attention should lay in a stock of two supplies: popcorn to watch the weekly dramas, and Kleenex to weep for our nation.

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