Consequences of McCarthy’s election debacle
This event of the century is only the foretaste
By Christopher Wittich
1/4/2023 7:32 am
The drama surrounding the election of the number three in the state gives an idea of what will change in Washington in the future. Republican McCarthy wants to become speaker of the House of Representatives and fails in three ballots because of his own party. This does not bode well for work in the House of Representatives.
If you walk through the complex tunnel system of the Capitol on Tuesday evening, you will see representatives whose facial expressions range from apathy to horror to self-satisfaction. Democrats can feel like winners: Their political opponents, the Republicans, are unable to get their candidate to be speaker. A group of MPs prevented the election, appalling moderate Republicans.
It’s a once-in-a-century event that’s taking place in the House of Representatives. The last time a candidate needed several ballots to get the powerful speaker post was in 1923. Exactly one hundred years later, the candidate Kevin McCarthy could only afford four dissenters, but in fact there were many more: in two ballots 19 and in one even 20 party members who refused him the vote and thus the office.
The would-be majority leader failed to organize a majority beforehand. But that would be his job as majority leader. He has to organize a majority – for laws or, in the case of the opposition, to prevent laws. But he always has to count: how many are on my side. If it’s not enough, it’s his job to convince MPs. That’s what the role wants.
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The Republican had been trying to do just that for weeks – now there’s evidence that he failed. Even if he had his things brought to the speaker’s office and called confidently into the journalists’ microphones before the first vote: “I hold the record for the longest speech ever given in plenary. I have no problem with that, either to set the record for the largest number of votes for the speaker’s post.”
But the right wing of the party is proving to McCarthy today that further ballots will not achieve anything. McCarthy knows who his opponents are by first and last name. During an election, every member of parliament has to stand up and call out the name of the candidate he or she is voting for – there is no ducking away as in a secret ballot.
But that would not be in the interest of McCarthy’s opponents. They want people in America to know what they think of him. For example, when right-wing Congressman Matt Gaetz (Ohio) proudly says into the microphone that he won’t vote for 57-year-old McCarthy because “if you want to drain the swamp, you can’t elect the biggest crocodile to be the leader,” it’s quite a reminder to someone who once went into the presidential campaign promising to “drain the lobby swamp in Washington” – Donald J. Trump.
Bob Good is among the opponents, tweeting that the American people should be more important to elected leaders than the Washington establishment’s commitment to protecting personal interests. This statement is also reminiscent of the Republican election campaign in 2016. And so the ex-president is again hovering over this event in Washington.
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Worse, Washington is paralyzed until a new House Speaker is elected. Republican MP Pete Sessions from Texas admitted in an interview with CNN that evening that the party doesn’t have that many people who could do this job. Kevin McCarthy will not give up, he insists whenever he is asked this question, both before and after the debacle of the three defeats. Family pizzas were delivered to his office in the evening. There will definitely be a lot of phone calls.
Washington experienced the first part of the tragedy on Tuesday, followed by the second on Wednesday. Republicans are proving that having a majority and using a majority are two different things. But if the Democrats no longer have a majority in Parliament and the Republicans don’t use it, the House of Representatives faces the challenge of being a pure debate house for the next two years. And when a small extreme wing of the party prevents any negotiations, every legislative initiative becomes a crucial test for the conservatives.
The aim is to pass laws there that are intended to make people’s lives better. That will be a challenge in the next two years. Today was the foretaste of it.