In the end, he couldn’t even get 218 votes, a simple majority. The GOP’s Kevin McCarthy gained the House speakership in the dead of night early Saturday, but the last winner of a 15-rounder who emerged this battered and bloody was Muhammad Ali, who told reporters after 1975′s “Thrilla in Manila” that “it was like death.”
Pundits were quick to portray McCarthy’s grueling and at times comically pathetic 3 1/2-day slog to victory as a symbol of weakness and dysfunction within the not-quite-post-Donald Trump Republican Party, but the reality of what just happened on Capitol Hill is far worse than that, and I’m not sure if it’s fully set in.
The ambitious but low-wattage Californian was finally elected speaker on that 15th ballot — in the kind of gridlock that America hasn’t seen since the run-up to a Civil War that killed 600,000 people — with just 216 votes that amounted to less than 49.8% of the total, since 218 House members cast ballots for either Democratic leader Hakim Jeffries or “present” as a final show of anti-McCarthy animus.
That seems most fitting for the titular head of a political party that — while it did manage last November to win its narrow 222-212 House margin despite an atmospheric river of tailwinds like President Joe Biden’s low approval that should have created a blowout — just lost ground in the Senate and in key statehouses and has also lost the national popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.
The ability of a McCarthy-led House to stymie progress for two years against the run of play in American politics would be bad enough, but it’s a lot worse than that. To win that diminished and tarnished speaker’s plaque over his new office door, McCarthy ceded much of his power to the radical bloc of the House’s 20 or so most extreme right-wing members. He gave them not just increased visibility but power to investigate their enemies and block basic governance — and to replace the speaker on a whim. These grifters and C-list stars of their own reality shows — elected from the most extreme pro-Trump, uncompetitive districts in the United States — now wield veto power over the will of the American people.
It was all too appropriate that McCarthy credited the avatar of winning-while-losing — Trump, who gained the 2016 GOP nomination despite rarely cracking 50% in the primaries, then won the general election with 3 million fewer popular votes, and is now still leading in some 2024 Republican primary polls despite two impeachments and overlapping criminal probes — with getting him over the top. “I don’t think anybody should doubt his influence,” McCarthy said of Trump — on the second anniversary of the 45th president’s attempted coup to thwart the peaceful transfer of power that resulted in at least five deaths.
McCarthy’s exhausting election was not so much an ending as a beginning — the launch of a crisis in which the American Experiment will be held hostage for the next two years by the ever-changing moods of the most extreme whack jobs in American politics. The real fun is likely to start — according to Wall Street analysts — around August, when the government’s deficit spending is projected to bump up against the current debt ceiling of more than $31 trillion.
Although there’s a powerful argument that the debt ceiling isn’t even necessary, it nevertheless exists — and Republicans have used this, along with our complicated constitutional system of checks and balances that increasingly empowers unpopular viewpoints, in an effort to blackmail Washington toward governmental shrinkage and meltdown. Without legislation this summer, the United States faces the very real prospect of a damaging default on its debt obligations, as well as scenarios in which things like Social Security or military salaries aren’t paid.
The "Damn Yankees"-like deal of damnation that McCarthy made with congressional bomb throwers like Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert seems to ensure such a disastrous outcome, or at least a near-death experience. McCarthy reportedly promised the renegades that any debt ceiling increase would be attached to a 10-year plan to balance the budget.
That would mean an estimated $11 trillion in long-term spending cuts. Although one of two good things — mainly, massive reductions to the Pentagon’s obscenely bloated budget — might come from that, the bulk would be the decimation of government programs that are for the most part wildly popular, like Social Security and Medicare. President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats will never sign off on this legislative blackmail. More importantly, virtually none of the millions of Americans who went to the polls in November voted for this nonsense.
What’s flying under the radar here is that before Saturday, the House of Representatives was arguably the last — albeit wildly imperfect — bastion of the kind of democratic majority rule that both the Founders and the broader public have believed in since 1776. The outdated 18th-century logic of the Electoral College has meant that two presidents have been installed this century with a minority of the votes. The Senate not only mocks the supposedly cherished principle of one-person, one-vote by giving Wyoming as many seats as California, but those 100 senators maintain a filibuster rule that allows just 40% of them — often Republicans from those Wyoming-sized states — to block critical legislation. Minority presidents and the unrepresentative Senate have imposed a conservative judiciary that overturns precedent to defy popular will.
The House has, as noted above, had its own problems, such as gerrymandering which in past elections (although ironically much less so in 2022) have helped Republicans win more seats than their national popularity would predict. But the lower house has generally remained more responsive — facing voters every two years — and more diverse. McCarthy’s rule changes that cede so much power to the Gaetz-Boebert clown posse mean that the disconnect between what voters want and what our government is doing has never been greater.
It is minority rule, exemplified by Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell’s refusing to give the Supreme Court nominee of twice-majority-elected President Barack Obama even a public hearing, that created the high court that overturned nearly a half-century of reproductive freedom — even though polls show that 62% of Americans support abortion rights.
It is minority rule when the newly minted Speaker McCarthy promised in the Saturday morning darkness that he would fix “woke indoctrination in our schools” — even though a majority of Americans (53%) think it’s appropriate to teach high school students that “systemic racism is embedded in American institutions.”
It is minority rule when McCarthy says his House will pursue fossil fuel-intensive “America First” energy policies — even though surveys consistently find that two-thirds of Americans believe the exact opposite, that our government is not doing enough to combat climate change (and even as McCarthy’s home state of California is swamped by flooding of biblical proportions that is exacerbated by global warming).
Ditto for a higher minimum wage, or raising taxes on the wealthy, or free community college, or scores of other policies that are backed by the majority of U.S. voters, yet are going nowhere amid the nihilistic narcissism of the Gaetz-Boebert-McCarthy House. Even worse, Republicans continue to look for ways to increase minority rule through their favorite tool, voter suppression.
In her popular newsletter, the historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote Saturday that “the party is planning either to convince more Americans to like the extremism of the MAGA Republicans — which is unlikely — or to restrict the vote so that opposition to that extremism doesn’t matter.” She noted that Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has just signed a new law with tougher voter-ID requirements, and restrictions on curbside voting or drop boxes — all things that would make it harder to vote. In Pennsylvania, GOP lawmakers are hoping to seize on the chaos of a divided state House to ram through an amendment to require voter ID, with a likely chilling effect.
One of these days, the dam is going to break. I believe there will come a time when Americans wake up to the reality of minority rule and say that enough is enough. That time may come in August, but as a nation do we have the gumption to make those kind of radical changes — ditching the Electoral College, ending the filibuster, and a second, bulletproof kind of Voting Rights Act, and that’s a bare minimum — to finally govern by the people’s will? It would require — building on historian Eric Foner’s brilliant notion that America launched a Second Founding after the Civil War — a Third Founding. And maybe this time we can do it without 600,000 corpses littering the countryside.
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