As McCarthy Goes Down, Is a Fight for the Speaker’s Chair Really Such a Bad Thing?

As I write this, Kevin McCarthy has lost his fourth fifth bid for the Speaker’s seat. Via Fox News:

House GOP lawmakers for the fifth time appeared likely to come up short of the 218 votes they need to elect a new House speaker.

Republicans control 222 votes in the House and can only lose four of those votes if one of their candidates is going to win the minimum 218 votes needed to secure a majority and win the speaker’s gavel.

One of the problems with writing a column is the news cycle. Once a thing gets lodged in it, said thing is almost impossible to work around as it sets about dominating the news. The problem with that is that in no time at all, said thing has been inspected, dissected, examined, and discussed every which way until there is virtually nothing left to be said about it that has not already been said, written, tweeted, broadcasted, or whispered. Eventually, it resembles that container at the back of your fridge that has been there for almost as long as you can remember. And you don’t want to open it because of the potentially awful smell.

Case in point: the GOP dust-up over who will become Speaker of the House. That story has been whipped back and forth by the media and various pundits like a tetherball by a bunch of grade schoolers hopped up on Twinkies. But that is what the media does, after all, so no surprise there.

I know that civics is all but virtually ignored in our school systems. And I have seen plenty of “man-on-the-street” filler segments where someone could not name the three branches of government. And I would submit that is one reason why the Republican imbroglio has been of such interest. Well, that, and the fact that the media hates Republicans. But that is another story for another time.

For our VIPs: Long Live Gridlock! I Hope We Never Get Another Speaker of the House Again!

Whoever said that running a Republic was supposed to be easy? The framers of our Constitution were still very much aware of the negative impact of concentrated power. It is the reason that we have the checks and balances that are part and parcel of the three branches of government whose names no one can recall. If you paid attention in civics class, or even went to a civics class, feel free to skip ahead. If not, read on.

The three branches of government are designed to ensure that the Executive, Legislative or Judicial branches could not become too powerful and seize control. Of course, we have seen multiple incidents of a party — namely, the Democrats — expressing and sometimes fulfilling a desire to do just that through things like wanting to pack the Supreme Court or issuing executive orders. Does anyone remember, “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone”?

It is the concept of federalism: The government is supposed to be divided vertically to ensure that the power is distributed equally. The power is also supposed to be divided horizontally to keep the federal government’s grubby paws off those rights and matters that are squarely within the purview of the states. That of course means that there will be debate, there will be arguments, and theoretically, compromise. Of course, that isn’t the way things have turned out, but that is how the system is supposed to work.

I realize that there are, at this moment, very gleeful Democrats and other progressives who are simply giddy that the GOP members of the House have not been able to get their you-know-what in a single, neat pile. Doubtless, there are plans in the works to exploit this apparent weakness as much as possible. According to Fox News, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fielded the idea of McCarthy working with Democrats to create a coalition government to overcome the objections of GOP congress members who do not deem McCarthy worthy of the position.

And yes, there are Republicans who are embarrassed over the turmoil and fear this is an indicator that their party will be unable to accomplish anything with its all-too-slim majority. And the dissenters have been trying to swell their ranks since Tuesday.

Whether you view the opposition to McCarthy as a brave attempt to take on the RINOs in D.C. or the act of a group of crazy Trump supporters who are putting the fate of the nation at risk, the uncomfortable fact is that the system is designed for people to say, “Hold on there a moment, we don’t necessarily want to go with the status quo and hand over power to the preferred person.”

It’s messy and the optics can be ugly, but the argument can be made that good government is not cut-and-dried or copy-and-paste