The House Speaker Mess Is a New Episode in an Old Story of Dysfunctional Extremism

Part of the reason I write this blog is to use my historian skills to dig beneath the hummingbird-brained discourse of the daily news cycle. If we don’t put events into a larger context we have no hope of actually making sense of them. Political news is a constant nownownownownow of sound bytes and polls meant to attract eyeballs but not provide insight.

The current leadership crisis in the House of Representatives is a prime example. This is not a unique “unprecedented” event, but another episode in a longer history of the Republican Party’s extremism and its intentional breaking of the House as an institution.

To understand why Kevin McMcarthy got voted out even though his own party can’t agree on a successor you have to go back to at least 1989 and Newt Gingrich’s rise to House Minority Whip. As Julian Zelizer laid out in his excellent book Burning Down the House, Gingrich completely changed the Republican Party’s approach to working in the House. Instead of accepting the need to work with Democrats to get legislation passed, he went to war, successfully getting Democratic Speaker Jim Wright to resign over using a book deal as a backdoor campaign contribution. (Ironically Gingrich would do the same and would be forced to resign as Speaker himself over different issues.) Gingrich also figured out the power of CSPAN and using the House as a platform of ideological grand-standing, as opposed to legislating.

While Gingrich came into office as Speaker in 1995 with an ambitious legislative platform, his legacy is one of breaking rather than building things. The year he came into office he forced a government shutdown during budget negotiations, a surprising and unpopular move at the time that Republicans now repeat with regularity. In fact, they demand it. McCarthy went down because of his party’s perverse incentives. By working with Democrats to keep the government open, something that would have been treated as broadly admirable forty years ago, he lost his job.

Gingrich’s quest to weaponize the power of the House for partisan purposes reached its apotheosis with his impeachment of Bill Clinton in the late 90s. While he failed, Gingrich’s move made a major longterm impact. The use of impeachment as a partisan tactic helped Trump by predisposing people to not take the charges against him seriously. It also set a precedent for a Republican House to funnel their base’s assumption that any Democratic president is illegitimate into endless frivolous investigations and impeachment threats, from “Fast and Furious” to Benghazi to Hunter Biden’s laptop.

After Gingrich changed the orientation of the Speaker from legislator to partisan generalissimo, Republicans also changed the very makeup of the House via extreme gerrymandering. Gerrymandering goes back at least 200 years, but Tom DeLay in Texas pioneered tactics that took it to a whole other level after the 2000 census. Now many Republicans get to run opposed and can be as extreme as they want to be without facing any consequences from their constituents. They are incentivized to see their role as soldiers for the conservative movement, not legislators or representatives for their districts.

The problem for the people wielding power in this way is that it is inherently volatile and self-destructive. Once the Speaker of the House becomes the chief enabler of the right-wing political movement while still holding the position of chief legislator the contradictions become too intense to endure. It is impossible to do the necessary work demanded of the House by the Constitution and also to keep the whackiest reactionary bomb-throwers happy. McCarthy opted for the former and lost his job.

Again, McCarthy is not the first to fall to this dilemma, even if he was the first to go out by vote rather than resignation. Just look at the recent history of Republican Speakers: Gingrich resigned in disgrace, Boehner was pushed out by the hard right, and Paul Ryan quit in frustration. Only Hastert had a “normal” speakership, and after he retired it turned out that he was a child molester. (As a sidenote, Hastert was Speaker during the Bush years when the Republican base was more confident and subdued due to their hold on power.)

Other long term factors have made it harder for a Republican Speaker to maintain power now than even in Boehner’s time. In many ways, conservative media has been a massive benefit to Republicans. It gets their message out, puts pressure on mainstream media to conform to their narratives, and rallies their base. Gingrich’s “revolution” of 1994 probably had more to do with Rush Limbaugh than with his “Contract With America.” Nowadays, however, conservative media has helped form a base that is so ideologically extreme and uncompromising that the rank and file will not accept any compromises. Hence McCarthy could make a deal to keep the government funded (again, the most basic Constitutional task of the House) and then get run out of power.

The power of conservative media in the Republican Party is part of a larger trend of parties themselves losing power. People like Matt Gaetz simply do not have to fear reprecussions of defying leadership and burning the whole thing down. The new funding structures mean he does not have to rely on the party for campaign funding and online small-dollar contributions and super PACs have provided alternate revenue streams. The obnoxious behavior of Gaetz, Boebert, and Greene only gets them more media attention and hence more donations.

There are a couple of ways out that the current dynamic but I wouldn’t hold my breath that they will be taken. McCarthy could have saved his skin had he worked out an agreement with moderate Democrats, but instead he decided to trash Democrats on national television after they had helped him pass his continuing resolution. Again, the Speaker cannot both do his job and keep the extremists in his party happy. Jim Jordan certainly won’t be willing to work across the aisle, and he looks likely to be the next Speaker. The other solution would be for a Republican purge of the Gaetz types, but that would cause a rebellion in their base and an attack from Donald Trump, the man almost every House Republican owes fealty to. In the meantime, the chaos will continue and the mainstream press will continue to talk about all this stuff episodically and determine that “both sides” are responsible for “the divisions on Capitol Hill.”

If this country does indeed descend into authoritarianism, which I think is a 50-50 proposition at this point, I think the House no longer functioning as legislative body will be a big part of the story. The chaos we are witnessing is a perfect opportunity for someone like Trump to step in and say “nothing works, we need a strong man to fix it,” especially when the media allows people to think of this mess as a bipartisan creation. Ultimately I think Gaetz and his ilk know this. It’s time the rest of us recognize just how dangerous this situation is and that it is the culmination of decades of decline, not just the latest news story.