What they want is to dismantle the federal government.
In the 2023 Congress, the GOP has 222 House seats, and needs 218 to elect a speaker.
Because of intraparty divisions, it isn’t enough. At this writing (Wednesday, January 4, 2023), five roll calls have fallen short of producing a majority of those present and voting for GOP speaker candidate Kevin McCarthy — far short. Twenty of his members refuse to support him.
Two possible paths are that 212 Democrats join forces with 6 or more moderate Republicans to elect Fred Upton (see story here) or some other moderate GOPer as speaker. Upton, who retired from Congress last year, isn’t currently a representative but doesn’t have to be; anyone can be speaker, whether they’re a House member or not.
The other path is that McCarthy makes a devil’s bargain with the GOP holdouts. He’s trying, but they want more than he’s offered so far. Everyone American should hope and pray he doesn’t give them what they want.
This is what they want:
“The dissidents who have challenged Mr. McCarthy have pressed for a balanced federal budget — one that would not permit any deficit spending — as well as for special rules that would make it easier for lawmakers to zero out federal offices and fire government workers, and would make it much harder to secure earmarks to direct federal money to individual projects. They want to heavily fortify the United States border with Mexico and dismantle the Internal Revenue Service, getting rid of federal income taxes and replacing them with a consumption tax.”
(This story ran in the Seattle Times, but is paywalled there, so I’m linking to it here.)
Those are stupid and dangerous demands:
- Deficit spending is an essential recession-fighting tool; cutting back government spending during an economic downturn is how you turn a recession into a depression.
- Do you really want to give a few radical congressmen the ability to defund the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at the behest of polluting industries? Or shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) at the request of payday lenders?
- Empowering politicians to fire career government employees for political reasons, or simply because they don’t like them, is repugnant.
It’s even worse than just that. The holdouts are ultra-conservatives who hate government and want to destroy it. Their bigger goal is to “defund, disrupt and dismantle the federal government, and overhaul the way Congress works to make it easier to do so.”
The vast majority of adult Americans didn’t vote for this, and would vote against it. The 20 House GOP holdouts constitute 3.75% of the 535 representatives and senators, and most of them were elected to Congress from gerrymandered districts. They’re no way representative of our nation and its people. This tiny minority of extremists is blackmailing McCarthy to get outsized power over all our lives. If they succeed, we will be living under tyranny.
Another reason why they shouldn’t succeed is because what they want is wrong, destructive, and nasty. These are the kind of people you have to stand up and say “no” to. So far McCarthy hasn’t given them everything they want, but he’s weakening and offering them more and more (see story here), and he’s already offered them too much. Because of that, he’s no longer a viable candidate for speaker.
The Democrats must be careful not to be foolish here. They’re reveling the moment (see story here), and so are members of the liberal media (story here), but waiting too long to play the alternative hand could backfire, as it risks McCarthy striking an ugly deal with the extremists. If it’s possible to reach a deal with moderate Republican lawmakers (see, e.g., story here) on an acceptable speaker who hasn’t sold his soul to turn the gavel into a sledgehammer, they need to lock that in while they still can.
There’s a third conceivable path, that of Democrats providing McCarthy with votes in exchange for concessions to them (see story here). But I believe McCarthy is already too compromised to be supported by Democrats on any terms. He also has a history Democrats shouldn’t countenance: He excused Trump’s insurrection, refused to participate in the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation, and declined to discipline members of his caucus who promoted violence against Democrats. I don’t see how Democrats could support him, even with clothespins on their noses.