“GOP Chaos!” it seems like every other headline reads as the party endures yet another hunt for that impossible combination: someone who can both win the 218 Republican votes necessary to become House Speaker and who is actually willing to take what might be the most thankless job in America.
Maybe I’m just in a contrary mood today [Editor’s note: Steve is almost always feeling contrary], but as I watch the chaos, I can’t help but feel pleased.
Last week, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) — a man who literally took a bullet for the team — saw the writing on the wall and, even after winning the caucus vote, gracefully dropped out of the Speaker race when it became clear he couldn’t win 218 out of just 220 GOP votes.
Now it’s Rep. Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) turn. As you probably know already, he failed at Tuesday’s vote and at the time of this writing is still eight votes short of wielding the comically large Speaker gavel.
Meanwhile, Democrats are so united that there’s a non-zero chance that radical progressive hack Hakeem Jeffries (Got-Dam Communist-NY) could end up the next House Speaker, even with a GOP so-called majority.
How did we get here?
There’s the dirty little not-so-secret behind Democrat unity, which Republicans can only marvel at in wonder. Democrats slowly transformed themselves from a fractured mess of a party that couldn’t shoot straight (except at their own feet) in the ’70s and ’80s into a monolithic bloc (not really, but close enough for the scope of this column) that delivered one trillion-dollar legislative victory after another to presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden during their first two years in office.
What changed is that Democrats stopped sending conservative Democrats to Congress. Both parties used to be much less ideologically pure, but the Dems in particular. The South elected many conservative Democrats to the House, and Republicans (particularly in the Northeast) used to send liberals to Washington.
ASIDE: I use “liberal” here in the mid-20th-century sense. These were the old “green-eyeshade Republicans” who were happy to go along with New Deal or even Great Society programs, so long as they didn’t cost too much.
But there was a Great Sorting, particularly in the ’90s when New England went Blue and the South went Red. California with its massive Dem caucus was captured entirely by the progressive Left. Our urban centers are so solidly Democrat — thanks in no small part to race-based gerrymandering — that they’re often easy wins for hard-lefties like Ilham Omar and Jamie Raskin.
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The result? The bigger the spending bill, the easier it becomes to get all the Democrats on board. Democrat unity — and GOP supineness — has been the fiscal ruin of this country. If being a Republican is to mean anything, then today’s GOP chaos is a necessity for sorting out what that is.
Republicans shed the liberal northeasterners but have also had to make room for blue-collar Democrats who are disaffected with their old party yet aren’t fully at home in the GOP.
What does it mean to be a Republican? Is it MAGA or is it Never Trump? Is it isolationism or the promotion of our interests abroad? Is it free trade or the protection of our economic interests, particularly against China? Is it daring to touch the third rail or is it never laying a hand on our out-of-control entitlements?
Cat herders never had such a difficult job, as Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, and Jim Jordan could all tell you at considerable length.
Democrats have already gone through their Great Sorting. Now it’s the Republicans’ turn. I don’t know if the process will give us the GOP the country needs or a party somehow even more useless than the one we now have — but I do know the process is one the GOP must endure.
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