The GOP House of Representatives Is a Clown Show

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | October 13, 2023 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | October 13, 2023 |

It says something about how fractious the Republican House of Representatives is that they couldn’t rally around a guy — their Majority Leader — who had been shot by an anti-Trump extremist and is now undergoing blood cancer treatment. A guy like that should get at least 100 sympathy votes. However, part of the reason Republicans wouldn’t line up behind Steve Scalise as Speaker of the House is that Donald Trump suggested, on Fox News radio, that Scalise is a man “in serious trouble, from the standpoint of his cancer. I just don’t know how you can do the job when you have such a serious problem.”

Typical Trump. It wouldn’t have mattered, anyway, because many of the 99 Republicans who had voted for Jim Jordan to be the nominee for Speaker of the House wouldn’t rally behind Scalise for various reasons, political, personal, and petty. That presumably means Jim Jordan is next in line, but the House- especially moderates- will not back him in a hundred years, not only because of his extreme politics but because of the very bullshit that put them in this mess.

Representative Mike Garcia of California may have had the most gallingly hypocritical quote on the matter: “There’s an academic debate about whether we reward the tyranny of the minority in this case,” Garcia told the NYTimes. “The problem is, I think there’s enough people that would see what has happened and transpired over the last 40 hours and not support him; that we’re going to have the same problem with Jordan that we had with Scalise.”

For the Republicans — whose Presidential candidates have won the popular vote only once in the last 35 years and where Democratic Senators represent more than 20 million more people than Republican Senators despite their fairly even numbers — to complain about the “tyranny of the minority” is rich. Garcia, at least, understands that rewarding lousy behavior only begets more bad behavior. Yet, no one in that party can stand up to a guy with 91 criminal indictments against him.

Standing up to Jim Jordan, however, would only incur more chaos, which was partly sowed by Jordan himself, who was not enthusiastic about throwing his support behind Scalise. “Yesterday in conference, he gave the most disgraceful, ungracious - I can’t call it a concession speech - of all time. There were gasps in the room,” Rep. Ann Wagner said. He smiled and nodded while his lieutenants were stabbing Scalise in the back for him. “There is some deep mistrust. There are some communication problems. Some things are jacked up,” Missouri Rep. Mark Alford said.

You don’t say.

It’s not clear how the Republicans will find a way out of this mess. Kevin McCarthy is still waiting in the wings should the House decide to return to the devil they know. There is some quiet support for Interim Speaker Patrick T. McHenry, but he’s close with McCarthy (which is why he was named interim speaker), so he probably could not win over the hardliners.

There’s a reasonably significant difference between centrist Democrats and the more liberal members of the party. Those differences, however, are political, which are easier to overcome than the differences that separate the two sides in the Republican Caucus. Those differences are personal and of their personality — there are many Republican House members far less interested in governing than they are in boosting their own brand. Look at Nancy Mace this week. She’s out there wearing a Scarlet A (have you read the Scarlett Letter, Nancy Mace?) and apparently running to be Trump’s VP.

The best way out of the mess is for George Santos and a few other NY Republicans who aren’t going to win in 2024 anyway to switch parties and nominate Hakeem Jeffries.

In the meantime, it’ll be interesting to see which comes first: The AMPTP pays their actors and ends the strike, or the House chooses a speaker. Both seem inevitable, but it could go either way.