The GOP’s Winter Of Discontent Is Still Going In 2023
January 3rd was supposed to be a very different day.
The US Senate was supposed to be firmly in GOP hands and a robust Republican majority in the US House of Representatives should’ve slowed the Biden agenda to a grinding halt.
But the ghosts of the November 8th, 2022 midterms haunt the GOP in 2023 as a negligible and perhaps ungovernable Republican majority failed to produce a speaker after three ballots – something unheard of in the modern political era.
And with the adjournment after an exhausting day of voting, Kevin McCarthy finds himself facing the unpleasant reality for a second time that he will be denied the speaker’s gavel.
And it appears no amount of in-caucus compromise will get him to where he needs to be. Any additional concessions that would check the speaker’s authority would make holding the office untenable.
If McCarthy ends up not speaker it should be attributed to the Republicans’ underperformance across the board in the mid-terms as it was essentially lost on November 8th and only made official January 3rd.
The slight margin of control made the dissenting forces in his own party caucus that much more influential while a majority of 25 or more would have resulted in an easy election as the never-Kevins would’ve been diluted.
But that didn’t happen.
And the humiliation that McCarthy has been subjected to has by extension been felt by the party as a whole.
While the inside-baseball politicos, some of whom have done no favors for our party’s image, might be enjoying the spectacle those outside the beltway have a much different read: that we’re incompetent and unable to achieve very much.
And by default the fiasco has infused Democrats with a morale a boost at a time when they should be the ones feeling deflated.
Never had a party that has surrendered the speaker’s gavel simultaneously looked so triumphant.
Even in victory the GOP has managed to come off like losers. And we can’t blame the “fake news” media for this narrative.
Perhaps one of the ironies lost or rather not even considered in the McCarthy narrative is his background as a Republican activist, as he once chaired the Young Republican National Federation.
McCarthy cultivated and won the trust of young conservative activists who then elected him to lead the national YRs. As chairman McCarthy helped a number of young Republicans win their elections to local, state, and party offices.
Though not a majority of his caucus, enough of McCarthy’s fellow Republicans in Congress have dug their political trenches against his election as speaker, determined that their foxholes not become their graves they can’t afford to give in and it’s unlikely they will relent.
The Bakersfield Republican needs to make a difficult choice in the speaker’s race: a controlled collapse or a total collapse.
McCarthy ‘s intra-party adversaries have made him the issue and thus he’s in a position to call their bluff by stepping out and supporting an alternative who will be able to create a stable political opposition in a less than favorable political landscape.
If at that juncture the opposition continues to be contrarian in their posture then it would reflect poorly on them and their credibility will erode quickly.
The alternative to this is something out of the 1920 Republican National Convention that resulted in the surprise nomination of Warren Harding, who history showed was not prepared to deal with the corrupting dynamics of the office.
By staying the course McCarthy would be playing chicken with not just his own ambitions but the interests of the party.
We can’t afford a “Speaker Harding” confronting a radical and reckless White House presided over by an executive who is clearly not running on all cylinders.
The Republican Party needs to be led by a known quantity and not an untested and unvetted mystery stand-in. We need certainty and a clear path forward, not surprise and intrigue.
McCarthy ‘s allies aren’t going to make that call for him; they’re his friends who understand how much he’s given of himself over the years and how disappointed he was when Paul Ryan leapfrogged him after John Boehner’s exit.
A dozen and change dissenters blocked McCarthy from winning speaker; it’s on Kevin to remove himself from the race.
McCarthy is a very adept fundraiser who fully understands campaigns and politics and this does not need to be the end of the road for his career. With his background leading the Young Republicans he’d do a phenomenal job running the RNC.
As Ronna Romney McDaniel’s tenure running the national GOP is the reason why McCarthy failed to wrap up the speaker’s election on the first ballot, it’d only be appropriate for him to be charged with fixing the party management problems.
The longer this speaker’s election plays out, the riskier the outcome. And the GOP’s margin for error at this point is at a decimal.
It’s one thing for the spoilers to win the day but they don’t need to spoil the next two years.