07 January 23
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The question of how to handle the McCarthy holdouts will plague us for far longer than this speaker vote—and Democrats aren’t going to enjoy it as much.
And so, a handful Republican members-elect continue to stand in the way of Kevin McCarthy’s gavel. The reasons for their intransigence are difficult to coherently parse, though McCarthy has drummed up all sorts of last-minute red-meat concessions aimed toward the most aggressive actors in the GOP. He has, for instance, promised floor votes to a litany of culture-war stunt bills, and offered to add a number of Freedom Caucus wingnuts to various oversight committees. It’s a continuation of a strategy favored by McCarthy ever since he ascended to congressional leadership—a long, deleterious pattern of chronic, fearful appeasement to the most vulgar associates of his coalition. And honestly? You can’t say he doesn’t do the work. McCarthy’s pinned tweet outlines his priorities for the upcoming session, which includes multi-paragraph sections dedicated to Hunter Biden’s laptop, the COVID lab leak hypothesis, and also “woke ideology.” Last year, McCarthy pressured Republican consultants to freeze out Liz Cheney during her reelection bid simply because she had the temerity to vote for a Trump impeachment after Jan. 6. And yet, after all of this debasement—his prostrating surrender to every whim of the MAGA base—they’ve eagerly thrown him to the wolves. The caucus wants his head, and nobody, especially not McCarthy, should be surprised.
Negotiations have lacked traction, because it’s an impossible problem to solve. The truth is that the MAGA dead-enders don’t hold substantial policy differences from Kevin McCarthy. Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, and Matt Gaetz aren’t pursuing many structural reforms or legislative pivots—the kind of stuff that could be hammered out around a bargaining table. No, the primary reason McCarthy finds himself in such an unenviable position is simpler than any negotiation. It is just that despite all of his overtures to the unhinged members of his party, he will never be a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool maniac. The members of Congress who are hostaging his speakership are election deniers and certification objectors; they are in the hallowed halls of Washington primarily to wreak chaos and promote their own brands. And they can sense the Beltway insincerity in McCarthy’s gestalt. He is simply too much of a politician to ever garner their trust. They don’t care about doing the job, and that will permanently put them at odds with someone like McCarthy; someone who believes that the U.S. government should be functional.
For seven years now, Republicans have believed they could manage the unserious, ungovernable, incoherent sway in their party. They’ve leveraged MAGA derangement to squeeze out electoral victories while still accomplishing the party’s goals (tax cuts, the elevation of anti-abortion conservatives to the Supreme Court, punitive immigration policy). But the nihilism of the post-Trump conservative milieu has finally caught up with the GOP. The Freedom Caucus group stands out mostly for its incoherence. One of the Freedom Caucus’s few concrete demands is a more streamlined pathway to hold votes on the speakership. The takeaway here is that they’re not really interested in listening to anyone—and at this point, that includes even Donald Trump, whose urgings for them to line up behind McCarthy have gone unheeded.
This group does share many of the former president’s basic inclinations: an intrinsic disinterest in the act of governing, a deep appreciation for evincing fealty from whoever currently occupies their enemy’s list. And, sure, some of them are still interested in MAGA: Gaetz even went as far to nominate Trump himself during the 11th ballot. But Trump’s hold on American politics—on both the far right of the party that used to answer to him and on the voters themselves—is slipping. American people giddily deflated MAGA hubris in the midterms; they flocked to the polls with the intention of voting for anyone who resembled the status quo. (Who would’ve thought mainstream Americans would prefer a former astronaut to the reptilian aura of Blake Masters?)
That means the hardliners are wildly out of step from the general American polity, and somehow more stubborn than ever before. It is telling, as the National Review pointed out, that even Marjorie Taylor Greene is supporting McCarthy’s nomination. If one of the most QAnon-friendly agents in Congress has run out of patience with the hardliners, then the movement has become truly fractious. The rickety axioms they stand for—a vague, underlying paranoia about the utility of Washington—have made it so they no longer represent much of anything to anyone. Yes, progressives can enjoy the schadenfreude of watching a handful of malcontents call the shots in this clownish incarnation of the GOP—at last the worm has turned. But the long-term consequences, for everyone in this country, is that a small fixture of nihilists have carved out enough leverage on Capitol Hill to demand conciliation at every turn. Their demands will only get more flippant and petty from here.
In the meantime, it seems like McCarthy will continue to churn through roll calls, steadily losing ground, until he either capitulates or steps aside, or the sun explodes. It is a fitting terminus to one of the more embarrassing sagas in modern American political history. The MAGA contingency was never going to be satisfied by simply taking an inch; there is no way to bargain with a fundamentally undemocratic bastion of power. How do you negotiate with a group of policymakers who don’t believe in anything? That is the uncomfortable question that Republicans and Democrats alike are going to be answering for a long, long time.
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