Craig Hudson/Sipa USA via AP Images
Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) speaks to members of the media on the first day of the 118th Congress, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, January 3, 2023.
Never have I felt the absence of H.L. Mencken more keenly. Mencken, who had the most brilliantly dyspeptic voice in American journalism of the 1920s, could savage the idiots who then populated American politics with more verve and disdain than any of his contemporaries. The ’20s were a time when such idiots were in abundance—more representatives of what Mencken termed “the booboisie” littered the landscape then than before or since.
Until, so it seems, today.
In the first two votes for Speaker of the House, Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy suffered 19 defections from GOP ranks—claiming just 203 votes instead of the 218 he needed, and running behind Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, who claimed the votes of all 212 Democrats. On the third vote, the far right’s alternative, “Freedom Caucus” leader Jim Jordan, upped his vote from 19 to 20, pulling down McCarthy’s to 202.
That’s the numbers, but it doesn’t even begin to describe the spectacle, which began when New York’s Republican caucus chair Elise Stefanik placed McCarthy’s name in nomination. It’s the caucus chair who routinely puts the party’s choice up for a vote, but in some ways, Stefanik was uniquely qualified to sing McCarthy’s praises, as she is the one member of the Republican caucus who is, by unanimous account, even more driven by ambition, divorced from all considerations of belief, than McCarthy himself. The timing was delicious: Just one day before, she had been the subject of extensive, scathing front-page profiles in both The Washington Post and The New York Times (the latter a masterful piece by long-ago Prospect writing fellow Nick Confessore), in which seemingly all her former mentors and friends expressed anger and bewilderment at her transformation from an intellectually gifted moderate to a slavish, sound-biting, non sequitur–spouting MAGA acolyte. (She’s the only leading Republican who’s endorsed Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential candidacy.)
Strictly speaking, no one can accuse McCarthy of abandoning his beliefs, as no one has ever detected any. But his willingness to make virtually any deal, no matter how absurd, to boost him higher up the careerists’ greasy poll, is the stuff of legend. Appropriately, then, in recent profiles, both McCarthy and Stefanik were repudiated by their respective mentors—Bill Thomas, who employed McCarthy in his congressional office and whom McCarthy succeeded as the Member from Bakersfield; and Paul Ryan, he of the short-lived Speakership, who gave Stefanik his master class in strategic conservatism—for subordinating every shred of conviction or decency to the stronger pull of ambition.
In nominating Hakeem Jeffries as the Democratic candidate for Speaker, caucus chair Pete Aguilar contrasted Jeffries’s record with the best-known incident of McCarthy’s self-abasement in the cause of ambition: his trip to Mar-a-Lago to get back in Donald Trump’s good graces after making some critical remarks about Trump’s role in the January 6th insurrection. Jeffries, said Aguilar, “does not grovel to a twice-impeached so-called former president.”
Aguilar was soon one-upped in his condemnation of McCarthy’s malleability, however, by Republican Matt Gaetz, who nominated “Freedom Caucus” leader Jordan for the speakership by noting that Jordan wasn’t “selling off shares of himself” to win the post.
And so, we are stuck. The last time a Speaker’s election went beyond the first ballot—100 years ago, in 1923—it was the Republican moderates and liberals (they actually existed then) who held out until winning rules concessions on the ninth ballot. Among those GOP liberals was future New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia (who having actually lost the Republican primary for his East Harlem seat a few years earlier, had asked the Socialist Party if he could be their candidate; they said yes, and he retained the seat on the Socialist line in November). In the pre–Civil War days, when parties occasionally vanished as conditions changed and constituencies fragmented (see: Federalists, Whigs), multi-ballot elections for Speaker were a frequent, if not regular, occurrence. In 1856, when the differences between North and South on the slavery issue had effectively killed the Whig Party but not yet enabled the fledgling Republican Party (then only two years old) to attain sufficient growth, the contest dragged on for 133 ballots over a period of several months.
The issue that unifies this year’s anti-McCarthy Republicans is really one of attitude. This is the wing of the party that has defined itself by Fox News ad hominem attacks, by “owning the libs” through their tweets, by casting those outside their ranks as enemies of the people and apostles of Satan—sometimes metaphorically, sometimes not. There are plenty of McCarthy supporters—Marjorie Taylor Greene, for one—who share all those attributes, but there are a hardy few who don’t, while every one of Kevin’s critics fall into this camp. Not just nativists, but revilers of immigrants; not just cultural reactionaries, but homophobes; not just critics of letting all Americans vote, but slandering those who register them and count their ballots, and casting doubt on legitimate electoral outcomes. And no wonder, since most of those outcomes in 2022 featured the rejection of democracy’s howling critics at the hands of the voters.
But that howling is what defines an exemplary Republican in the eyes (well, ears) of today’s far right. Giving credit where credit is due, McCarthy has tried to howl with the best of them, at one point speaking for more than eight hours on the House floor against the presumable horrors of some Democratic legislation. But McCarthy meandered aimlessly during his talk, vainly hoping that duration would substitute for passion. Problem is, McCarthy’s only passion is McCarthy, as his critics on both sides of the aisle—for that matter, his supporters, too—have long realized. He’s the empty suit, the hollow man, and his Republican opponents want a Speaker who fills that hollowness with rage.
