The GOP’s Speaker Chaos: A Blessing in Disguise?

Twenty one days after Kevin McCarthy was driven from his position as Speaker, the House of Representatives still has no Speaker as various factions of the Republican caucus wage war on one another and nihilists within the fringes set out  to block anyone not willing to pander to their extreme demands.  The path forward appears uncertain as the majority of Republicans continue to be afraid to take on the bomb throwers.  It took the Republican Party several decades to become the fetid cesspool that it has become and any return to GOP sanity - if that is even possible - will unfortunately take time and will also take Republicans who have not fully drunk the far right and MAGA Kool-Aid to say "enough" and "no" to far right agendas that do not serve the interest of the majority of Americans and further national security.  An optimistic column in the Washington Post argues that the current chaos may be a blessing in disguise and may be what is necessary to force responsible Republicans, if such a thing exists, to join with Democrats to form an alliance to select a Speaker and to get needed legislation passed.  Here are excerpts: 

The chaotic Republican-led House of Representatives has a rather poor sense of timing. The United States is in the midst of two international emergencies and faces the threat of a government shutdown next month. President Biden’s prime-time speech on Thursday pressing for aid to Ukraine and Israel underscored the exorbitant costs of the GOP meltdown.

But the embarrassing exercise could prove to be a blessing because it’s exposing a crisis in our politics that must be confronted. The endless battle for the speakership is already encouraging new thinking and might yet lead to institutional arrangements to allow bipartisan majorities to work their will.

The House impasse was precipitated by both radicalization and division within the Republican Party. Narrow majorities in the House have enabled right-wing radicals to disable the governing system. Normal progressives and normal conservatives, in alliance with politicians closer to the center, are discovering a shared interest in keeping the nihilist right far from the levers of power.

The current crisis, after all, was initiated by a small far-right contingent, empowered by the broad popularity of Donald Trump in the party. They brought down now-former House speaker Kevin McCarthy despite his willingness to make one concession after another to the crazies, the impeachers and the Trumpists.

Republicans blame Democrats for assisting in McCarthy’s defenestration. The GOP doesn’t want to recognize that McCarthy gave Democrats no reason to save him — he flatly refused to negotiate with them in his hour of need — and many reasons to believe he’d continue to kowtow to party extremists.

Republicans have yet to learn the lesson of McCarthy’s fall: Because of the GOP’s splits, only an agreement with Democrats can create a majority in the House capable of governing. On the compromise measure to avert a debt ceiling crisis, House Republicans divided 149-71. On the bill to avoid a shutdown, the vote was even closer, 126-90. In their divided party, Republicans who want to avoid defaults or shutdowns or selling out Ukraine cannot do so on their own. They should formally recognize this.

Democrats are going out of their way to say they are ready to deal. “We are willing to find a bipartisan path forward so we can reopen the House,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said at a news conference on Friday, after Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) went down in his third and decisive defeat in the speakership vote. Republicans, Jeffries said, had a choice: to “embrace bipartisanship and abandon extremism.”

The Democratic rank and file has quietly been working in this direction. . . . the Democrats’ conditions were minimal and hardly left-wing: to agree to avoid a government shutdown; to pass spending bills along the lines of the fiscal accord McCarthy and McHenry themselves made with Biden in May to avert a debt default; and to provide military aid to Ukraine and Israel and humanitarian aid for Palestinians.

Some middle-of-the-road Republicans were genuinely interested, Kuster said, but the plan blew up in the Republican conference on Thursday “because word got out that we [Democrats] might support the McHenry solution, and that made it unacceptable to the right.”

Democrats have reacted with understandable horror at the willingness of 200 Republicans to make the election-denying, insurrection-sympathizing, Trump-backed Jordan second in the line of succession for the presidency. But it’s important to recognize an additional blessing: For some two dozen Republicans — whose ranks grew through the three ballots — a Jordan speakership was too much to accept.

One more lesson emerged from scare tactics and threats to anti-Jordan Republicans. They matched those “unleashed against anybody who stands in the way of Donald Trump,” Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) told MSNBC’s Joy Reid, adding: “If you fail to renounce and denounce political violence in very clear and specific terms, it’s going to come back to haunt you.”

Bipartisanship is no magic elixir, but bipartisanship in pursuit of majority rule is a worthy cause. Pushing Republicans to confront extremism in their ranks is both good politics and essential for governing. The Democrats’ offer to help Republicans through their intraparty struggle will either hasten the day of reckoning or expose the GOP’s refusal to stand up to its nihilists.