J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) is trailed by reporters as he arrives to meet with the House Republican Conference at the Capitol in Washington, October 12, 2023.
There was no House floor vote for Speaker yesterday. There won’t be a Speaker vote today either, in all likelihood. Any reasonable calculation, in fact, would lead you to the conclusion that there will never be a vote for Speaker.
The numbers are simple. To become Speaker requires a majority of the House. Democrats will vote for their own candidate, Hakeem Jeffries. That leaves the 221 Republicans, out of which you’d need 217, given two current vacancies. At first glance, there is nobody alive and eligible in America today who is able to corral those 217 votes.
What about Donald Trump, you may say. Lost in the struggles of Steve Scalise to garner the necessary support after winning yesterday’s straw vote is the fact that Jim Jordan had Trump’s full endorsement. This allegedly lockstep, top-down, authoritarian party heard the call from their leader, the man currently sweeping the GOP presidential primary, and that endorsement couldn’t even garner Jordan a majority of House Republicans. Maybe if it weren’t a secret ballot, the fear of crossing Trump would surge Republicans into the arms of his handpicked selection. But the idea that 99 measly votes for Jordan is a “serious showing” for a political movement that won the presidency and ran the government for four years is really grading on a curve.
Scalise won with 113 votes, after boasting that he would get 150 in the first round. He won a temporary reprieve when the caucus rejected a rule requiring 217 votes of support for the Speaker among Republicans before coming to the floor. But there are enough hard no votes to deny him the gavel many times over, and everybody knows it. The Speaker Steve Scalise era is as over as the Speaker Jim Jordan era. Kevin McCarthy is about two minutes from putting up posters throughout Capitol Hill that read “Miss Me Yet?” but that era is over, too.
The era of atomized self-aggrandizement is upon us. There is no advantage in the Republican Party for reaching consensus among themselves, let alone the opposition. Republican members of Congress are essentially influencers who dabble in policy on the side, and when faced with the choice they’re all too happy to give up the side hustle of policy in favor of the influencing.
Some circles of the left have informed me to stand in muted praise of this small-d democratic effort to change the rules of the swamp, in contrast with the tendency for progressive Democrats to cede to their leadership. But what’s being fought for is about as fanciful as fighting for the right to wear ice cream as a hat. The hard-liners, rooted in anti-government principles, see the opportunity to grind the institution to a halt. The conflict is the intended goal, with nothing beyond it. That’s why this could really go on indefinitely.
Caught in the crossfire are the millions of federal workers who are increasingly likely to be sent home without pay after the government almost certainly shuts down on November 17. And they may be there a while. Any foreign aid the White House wants to bundle together is just wholly unlikely to move. Border security funding, which the hard-liners profess to want, won’t move either. Neither will the sundry programs that need reauthorization, like national flood insurance and the Federal Aviation Administration (good luck with those Thanksgiving plans).
It turns out the country needs a minimally competent legislature to keep these exceedingly normal engines of government moving, or some changes to government funding rules that account for political dysfunction and don’t take out that dysfunction on innocent bystanders. We are seeing a preview of a kind of post-governance state, a taste of anarchy. Unfortunately, we’ve lost much capacity for revulsion.
