The Weekly Sift

I admit to having been surprised when Speaker McCarthy was voted out by the House Tuesday. Ordinarily, when I see a guy getting ready to jump out of an airplane, I expect him to have a parachute somewhere.

McCarthy had been heading towards this moment since he became speaker in January: He made impossible promises to the MAGA faction, and changed the rules to give them an easy way to get rid of him if he didn’t keep those promises. When they threatened him, he said “Bring it on!“, scheduled the vote as soon as possible, and publicly announced he wouldn’t make a deal with Democrats to save himself.

I thought: “Wow! He must have some great trick up his sleeve.” And then: nothing. Splat!

This crisis wasn’t just predictable, it was predicted. In January, Jonathan Chait envisioned the coming debt-ceiling negotiation, which he framed as a hostage-and-ransom situation [1]:

In the current circumstances, a successful hostage release would be all but impossible. Imagine a Republican Speaker — any Republican Speaker — figuring out a ransom that almost the entire caucus could agree on. The intraparty dynamics virtually guarantee that anything a Republican leader could agree to would immediately be seen on the far right as too little.

And I added:

The procedural concessions McCarthy has made mean that he can be recalled as speaker if he doesn’t negotiate a high enough ransom.

McCarthy had nine months to contemplate this scenario, and did manage to survive the debt ceiling deal in May. But the subsequent swerve to avoid a government shutdown nailed him. If he ever had a plan, he didn’t put it into operation. Even in retrospect, I can’t guess what he thought was going to happen.

This chain of events proves that I can’t be relied on to tell you what will happen next. So instead I’ll focus on what can happen and what should happen.

The Speaker pro tem. Since McCarthy’s ouster, the speaker’s chair has been occupied by a speaker pro tempore — literally “speaker for a time”. The temp is Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, and his name comes from a list that McCarthy had to provide when he became speaker.

My first thought was that McHenry would be like the temporary buildings that got built to house the military during World War II, many of which are still standing: The Republican caucus is too dysfunctional to elect a new speaker, so the temp will wield the gavel until the next Congress is seated in 2025. (With any luck, Democrats will take back the House and we’ll be done with this nonsense.)

But that doesn’t seem like a viable option without a rule change, which might be just as hard as electing a new speaker. Rule I, Clause 8(b)(3) says:

In the case of a vacancy in the Office of Speaker, the next Member on the list described in subdivision (B) shall act as Speaker pro tempore until the election of a Speaker or a Speaker pro tempore. Pending such election the Member acting as Speaker pro tempore may exercise such authorities of the Office of Speaker as may be necessary and appropriate to that end. [my emphasis]

The first version of this I saw omitted “to that end”, which (in my reading) changes everything. McHenry’s authority appears to be limited to whatever is needed to elect a new speaker. [2]

But not so fast, claims Matt Glassman of Georgetown’s Government Affairs Institute. “that end” might be interpreted not as “the election of a Speaker”, but as “act as Speaker pro tempore”. In that case, McHenry might have have broad powers. There’s no precedent for this situation, so whatever the current House allows will become the precedent.

So far, McHenry appears to be taking a narrow view of his powers, with one exception: Tossing Nancy Pelosi out of the courtesy office McCarthy allowed her doesn’t seem to serve the end of electing a new speaker. It’s trivial, but it might be a test. If the House elects a new speaker quickly, McHenry probably won’t test his powers further. If Republicans deadlock, though, the temptation to do something substantive will grow as the November 17 shutdown deadline looms. [3]

Potential speakers. So far two Republican candidates have announced themselves: Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise. Scalise is the current majority leader, and so would be the leadership’s next-man-up after McCarthy. However, Scalise is currently battling blood cancer and may not have the energy. Next up after him would be Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who is supporting Scalise and hopes to become majority leader if Scalise moves up.

Jordan is the “Freedom” Caucus candidate and has been endorsed by Trump. When he was nominated against McCarthy in January (despite claiming to support McCarthy himself), Jordan got at most 20 votes. So I have to see Jordan’s candidacy as a test of Trump’s influence; he’d never be elected on his own.

Putting this as delicately as possible, Jim Jordan is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. The nonpartisan Center for Effective Lawmaking has rated Jordan one of the least effective lawmakers in Congress (202nd out of 205 Republicans examined), based on him sponsoring very few bills and passing hardly any of them. He has a law degree from Capitol University, but has never passed a bar exam. In his memoir of his years as speaker, John Boehner called out the “political terrorists” in the Republican caucus; in a subsequent interview, he named Jordan as an example:

I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart ― never building anything, never putting anything together.

And then there’s the whole he-ignored-sexual-abuse thing from when he was a wrestling coach at Ohio State.

The Speaker needs to be a master of House procedure, skilled at forming and speaking for a consensus, and an ace vote-counter. Nancy Pelosi had those skills, which is how she managed to get so much done with a majority the same size as McCarthy’s. McCarthy lacked the skills, and Jordan seems like the antithesis of a good speaker.

Scalise has his own issues. He once billed himself as “David Duke without the baggage“. Since “the baggage” was a long history of KKK leadership, that ought to give his supporters pause.

Before he endorsed Jordan, a number of people suggested Trump himself become speaker, since the Constitution does not require the speaker to be a member of the House. However, the rules of the Republican House caucus bar anyone under indictment for serious crimes from serving in leadership, so they’d need to change that. Trump has fanned this speculation, and is still floating the idea that he might take the job temporarily, but I suspect he doesn’t want the headache of having real responsibilities.

Any of these candidates would need near-unanimity in the House GOP to get over the top, and so will probably need to make the same sorts of impossible promises McCarthy made. Presumably they’d have to prove their toughness by shutting down the government in November. But again, what possible ransom could the new speaker get from Biden and Schumer that Gaetz et al would consider enough? So aren’t we right back here by Christmas or so?

In short, I don’t see how House Republicans resolve this on their own.

Fantastic (but possible) solutions. Now we get to what should happen: Republican moderates, especially the 18 representing districts Biden won in 2020, should find their backbones and play the same kind of hardball the MAGA wing plays.

Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, whose district voted for Biden by 10 points in 2020, attacked Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries for not bailing out McCarthy, as if Democrats should have agreed to an imaginary deal that McCarthy refused to offer. [4] In response, AOC suggested Lawler support Jeffries for speaker, an obviously suicidal move for a Republican who would surely lose a primary challenge afterwards.

But here’s what could and should happen: Lawler (or some similar non-MAGA Republican; Michelle Goldberg suggested Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania) should announce his own candidacy for speaker together with support from a handful of fellow moderates. He should pledge not to shut down the government, to fulfill the deal McCarthy made with Biden to avoid a debt-ceiling default in May, and to pass rules that would create a more even sharing of power between the two parties. (Not full parity, but closer to it.) Then he should ask for Democratic support. If his handful of Republicans held firm and the Democrats came through, he’d be speaker, and the House could start to function again. Republicans and Democrats could negotiate with each other in good faith, rather than tee up another hostage crisis.

Jeffries appears to be open to such an arrangement:

The details would be subject to negotiation, though the principles are no secret: The House should be restructured to promote governance by consensus and facilitate up-or-down votes on bills that have strong bipartisan support. Under the current procedural landscape, a small handful of extreme members on the Rules Committee or in the House Republican conference can prevent common-sense legislation from ever seeing the light of day. That must change — perhaps in a manner consistent with bipartisan recommendations from the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress.

Maybe simply threatening such a thing could get Republicans to unite around somebody like Scalise and not shut down the government. (If Scalise did shut it down, that motion-to-vacate trick would work just as well for Lawler as it did for Gaetz.)

I don’t expect this to happen any time soon, because Republican moderates are invariably spineless. But nothing prevents it.

And if the House’s leadership vacuum stretches into November, and if the government shuts down while Biden and Schumer are still waiting to find out who they should be negotiating with, the boundaries of plausibility might shift.

Sherlock Holmes, a fictional detective looking backward to figure out what did happen, famously observed: “When you have eliminated all which is impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Something similar should hold looking forward: When you eliminate all the scenarios that can’t happen, one of the options remaining, however implausible, must be what will happen.

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[1] One theory that explains MAGA faction’s inability to formulate coherent goals during the debt-limit and shutdown negotiations is sabotage. In other words, shutting down the government isn’t a threat, it’s a goal. The analogy would be to a kidnapper who wants to kill the hostage, and so makes shifting and impossible demands.

You might wonder why MAGA Republicans would want to cause a shutdown, but the answer is pretty simple: The Biden economy has been remarkably good, especially considering the Covid disruption he inherited from Trump. Unemployment continues to be quite low, and wage increases have begun to outrun inflation. The unemployment rate has been under 4% for 21 of the last 22 months, compared to 20 months for the entire Trump administration. When Biden took office, unemployment was at 6.3%.

The rising-real-wages phenomenon is recent, though, so the public has barely noticed and isn’t giving Biden the credit he deserves. If a lengthy government shutdown starts a recession, he never will get credit.

That explains why Trump has been pounding the drum so hard for a shutdown:

The Republicans lost big on Debt Ceiling, got NOTHING, and now are worried that they will be BLAMED for the Budget Shutdown. Wrong!!! Whoever is President will be blamed. … UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!

[2] The rule suggests an in-between possibility: electing a speaker pro tem rather than taking one off a list. The pro-tem’s term might only last until a new speaker is elected, but having been elected might allow him to claim the full powers of a speaker.

[3] Politically, a government shutdown usually hurts the party that seems to be causing it, which is usually the Republicans. But this one would be even worse than the others, because it wouldn’t have any principled justification. Republicans wouldn’t be shutting down the government to cut spending or limit abortions or even hand Ukraine to their buddy Putin; they’d be shutting down the government out of sheer incompetence, because they couldn’t get their act together to elect a speaker. I can’t imagine the public taking that well.

[4] To understand what Democrats were thinking when they let McCarthy go down, here’s a tweetstorm from Democratic staffer Aaron Fritschner.

Fritschner gives McCarthy no credit for the continuing resolution that temporarily resolved the shutdown issue: McCarthy knew he needed Democratic votes to pass the CR, but sprung his proposal on them suddenly with no time to read it. Democrats manipulated the situation to get some time: Majority Leader Jeffries launched a time-wasting speech on the House floor, and Jamaal Bowman even pulled a fire alarm. Fritschner speculates that McCarthy hoped Democrats would vote his resolution down, allowing him to blame Democrats for the ensuing government shutdown.

People want us to give the guy credit for stopping a shutdown but it is still not clear to me right now sitting here writing this that he *intended* to do that.

And now that the House has until November 17, what could Democrats hope for from McCarthy?

And what is McCarthy signaling to us on funding? He’s going to steer us directly back into the crazy cuts and abortion restrictions, the Freedom Caucus setting the agenda, breaking his deal with Biden, and driving us towards a shutdown in November.

Ok we are reasonable people, maybe he’s just telling them what they have to hear and he’ll screw them at the last minute. So what’s he saying to us privately? What reason is he giving us to think any of this is going to turn out well if we help him? None.

The supposed “institutional interest” would have us not only put out Republicans’ many fires for them, it would have us do so based on our specific belief and trust that *McCarthy is lying*. Like, his lying is supposed to be a good thing, and what sells the arrangement for us.

It all called for too much trust in a guy who had (again and again) proven untrustworthy.