Almost nine years ago, I wrote “don’t rely on the fact of a white line to stop a truck.” That was in reference to tech companies doing what was within the law and contract, despite objections based on what everyone thought the cultural and moral guardrails were. And that was in 2014.
Well. That certainly held up.
At this writing, we are on a sixth ballot for Speaker of the House, which is already predestined to fail. With only four or five votes to spare, the Republicans’ presumptive leader keeps coming up 20 votes short of what he needs to formally be made Speaker. And there is no obvious solution to this, because he spent the last two months groveling and offering up his hindquarters to the worst people in his party for the sake of grabbing power – and they still won’t play ball with him.
Some of this is actually structural. When Newt Gingrich tried to make himself Prime Minister of the United States in 1995, he concentrated power in the Speaker’s chair to an extent unseen since the days of the giants like Cannon and Rayburn – and more importantly, took it away from committee chairs and those with seniority. At the time, it was about undercutting the old fogey Republicans who were not on board with the bomb-throwing insurgent approach. Now, almost thirty years on, the bomb-throwing insurgents are all there is, and they are chafing at the authority of anyone who might be able to tell them no. If you felt particularly generous and charitable, you could frame this as an attempt by elements of the house GOP to return to a more committee-centric model where power devolves to individual chairs and members rather than being controlled by the iron fist of a single Speaker.
Or you could tell the truth: there are only three kinds of Congressional Republicans. Fascists, Brazilians, and those too weak to stand up to either. the motive force in the GOP are the people who came to Congress to own the libs on Fox News. There is no policy platform, there is only performative ignorance and weaponized redneckery. The one thing that has been accomplished so far is to take the metal detectors away, because this is a party for whom the terroristic mobs of January 6 were righteous American heroes. Every Republican in Congress either believe it or is too chickenshit to say they don’t.
And so now the “you will praise us for standing on your dinner table and trying to piss in our own mouths” caucus is holding Kevin McCarthy hostage with no demands, no counter-arguments, just the endless barbaric yawp of the toddler: “NO”. There’s no obvious solution, because the Republicans have a majority of the House. The sole hope is that there might somewhere be found half a dozen members who would declare themselves independent, caucus with the Democrats and flip the script entirely – because no Speaker elected with Democratic votes will survive in a GOP majority and we’ll be back where we started.
This is only really a problem for two reasons. One is because you need to pass a budget to keep the federal government open, even if it’s just a continuing resolution of the type we’ve mostly relied on for years since the GOP stopped even trying to pretend to govern in regular order. The other is the debt ceiling, a pointless construct that should long since have been eliminated after the shenanigans of 2011 (and would have been but for the Dumb Fuck Twins in WV and AZ). If we don’t have a working House of Representatives by Labor Day, we might have real problems. Well, more than we already do.
This is the natural final result of an entire party that has as its sole organizing principle “I should always get my way no matter what.” Now it’s bit them in the ass, to the cost of everyone else. At some point, the grown-ups have to take charge and put these people outside of power once and for all…because if there’s one thing the United States government has proven since 2016, it’s that no amount of lines of any color will stop a truck.