Farcical US speaker vote may be precursor to new era of civil unrest
THE dramatic battle over the US Speaker’s gavel may well pave the way for more conflicts in the coming months.
In the most protracted struggle over the position since the advent of the Civil War, Kevin McCarthy was elected as Speaker of the US House of Representatives early on Saturday on the 15th attempt in five farcical days.
To get there, the man who was poised to be the most powerful Republican in Congress had to deal away a lot of that power to appease the far-right rebels who opposed him.
“It is the ‘Make America Great Again’ cohort, and internecine warfare” within the Trump wing of the Republican Party, said Quincy Krosby, chief global strategist at brokerage LPL Financial. Some of the concessions McCarthy made will likely not come to light as these were done behind closed doors, she said.
But the dissidents – led by Matt Gaetz, a representative from Florida who was one of the most vocal congressional supporters of former president Donald Trump – won a say on much of the speaker’s traditional purview, including seats on key committees such as the rule-making body and the tenure of the speaker.
Most of the 20 Republican lawmakers who went rogue, creating a parody of the US parliamentary system, were part of the Freedom Caucus, a group that started as an offshoot of the anti-tax Tea Party movement and later acted as a sort of cheerleading squad for Trump.
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After last week’s shenanigans, some legislators have renamed the group “chaos caucus.” From Trump, the group has learned one clear lesson: When some American democratic institution doesn’t work in your favour, simply burn it down.
It was perhaps fitting that McCarthy’s election came in the wee hours of the second anniversary of the Jan 6 insurrection attempt on the US Capitol building. On that day, Trump cried havoc and let loose the dogs of war. The events of Jan 6, 2023, proved that the havoc and the dogs have run out of Trump’s control.
On that day, and for many days earlier, Trump had called on Republicans to unite behind the man who had been primed for the job for 10 years as a senior House Republican. The only acknowledgment Trump received from the rebels was when Gaetz called out a vote for Trump during one of the ballots.
The handover of power in what the Freedom Caucus calls the “People’s House” usually happens instantaneously, with the January vote after each two-year term ending a pro-forma affair confirming the long-mooted candidate.
That’s how it was during the 10 years of Nancy Pelosi’s reign and in that of her predecessor John Boehner. And that’s how it was almost all the way back to 1859, the last time a vote for a US speaker was so bitterly opposed.
It was a week of political theatre – theatre of the absurd. The “never Kevins” of the Freedom Caucus were calling for McCarthy’s political self-immolation. The House clerk Cheryl Johnson unwittingly became a global celebrity with her increasingly jaded pronouncements of yet another failure to elect a speaker.
At one stage, New York Democrat Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez appeared to be laughing out loud at the disarray in front of her as Gaetz accused McCarthy of being a “squatter”. Members of the house erupted into applause when one holdout flipped to McCarthy’s cause during the 13th round of voting early on Friday.
Later that day, Mike Rogers, a staunch supporter of McCarthy, lunged at Gaetz and had to be physically restrained – another scene reminiscent of the fistfights that erupted in the House during the years preceding the Civil War.
Was all this theatre meaningless, or the precursor to some new era of civil unrest?
McCarthy’s authority hangs by a thread, as he agreed to restore a protocol that would allow a single disgruntled legislator to put his dismissal to a vote. His acceptance speech hit all the talking points of the Freedom Caucus – border security, and concerns about “woke indoctrination” in American schools.
The far right of the Republican Party has systematically undermined the power structure in Washington for decades. Grover Norquist, the philosophical father of the modern GOP, stated the goal as shrinking government to the size where it can be drowned in a bathtub.
If he meant this quest to be tongue-in-cheek, the Freedom Caucus has adopted it literally. There’s a tension between the electoral strategy of campaigning to be in government, and the philosophy of hating the government. The ultimate expression of that dichotomy was, of course, the holder of the nation’s highest elected office egging on a mob to overrun the seat of US democracy.
The ritual of public humiliation is as old as politics itself, but in this case, it may be more damaging to the party and the nation than to the individual. In a few months, the US Congress will debate raising the country’s debt ceiling.
This technical vote, which was for decades a routine sign-off, has been used by Republicans since the Barack Obama presidency to draw attention to mounting US debt. Economists say a failure to approve raising the ceiling could trigger a US default, one of the financial Armageddon scenarios.
“The debt ceiling debate about the government shutting down, that’s not something the market wants to see a replay of,” said Krosby of LPL Financial.
In the past, the Speaker’s unifying power has put an end to such brinksmanship. With a near-muzzled speaker, Gaetz and the “chaos caucus” will likely have a bigger say.
In the best-case scenario, Trump’s political progeny will likely cause a lasting schism in the Republican Party. In the worst-case scenario, they could bring the debt ceiling crashing down, causing needless economic destruction.
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