Regardless of how the current hullabaloo/Mexican standoff in the House is resolved, whether Kevin McCarthy gets the job, or some other poor emasculated schmuck takes over—a schmuckless schmuck, as it were—the odds are approximately a million to one that the House of Representatives will be all but ungovernable in 2023. Specifically, I think the Republicans will simply refuse point blank to raise the national debt ceiling, in order to force an economic collapse, just for the hell of it, leading the Biden administration to effectively rule by fiat. Wall Street will applaud, and that will be that. I don’t know if it will be trillion-dollar platinum coins or what, but it will be something.
The right wingers in the House will also be very likely to try to refuse to pass appropriation bills for parts of the government they don’t like, which will mean the Democrats will refuse to pass the Defense Department appropriations. How Uncle Joe will finesse this one is an awfully good question.
That the Republicans want to do nothing but wreck things has become so obvious that even the Wall Street Journal has figured it out:
The problem any GOP leader faces today is that too many Republicans don’t really want to hold and keep political power. They’re much more comfortable in opposition in the minority, which is easier because no hard decisions or compromises are necessary. You can rage against “the swamp” without having to do anything to change it. This is the fundamental and sorry truth behind the Speaker spectacle and the performative GOP politics of recent years.
The Republicans have been this way ever since the end of the Cold War. They hated George H. W. Bush for believing that it sometimes made sense to raise taxes, that you sometimes had to make choices, sometimes even hard choices, and do things you didn’t want to do, like, you know, think! So they quit. They were glad when Aigh Dubya lost. It felt good to be out of power, the not exactly stupid—he had an M.A. in English from Johns Hopkins—political “satirist” P. J. O’Rourke1 giggled at a conservative clambake following Clinton’s win in 1992. “Clinton may be a disaster for the rest of the nation, but he is meat on our table,” he told the crowd. Who wanted to have to make tough decisions and set priorities when you could piss on Bill and Hillary 24/7?
Yeah, the Republicans stopped thinking in 1992 and have never regretted it once. It was Newt Gingrich who first weaponized Republican nihilism back in 1993 when he threatened to shut down the government unless President Clinton agreed to a long list of non-negotiable demands. It didn’t work then, and it didn’t work again in 2011, when they tried it on President Obama. But, really, they don’t care. They just want to wreck things.
What they are wrecking, of course, is the balance of power between Congress and the presidency. Congress can only be an equal branch of government, can only stand up to the unified power of the presidency, if senators and representatives are loyal to Congress, if they see Congress as the source of their power. When they reject that loyalty, they turn themselves into 535 quibbling Lilliputians facing a single, unamused Gulliver wielding a very large stick.
The single check to the presidency now will have to come from the Supreme Court. There are 4½ votes in the Court, I think, to stomp all over whatever Uncle Joe will want to do to override a dysfunctional Congress, and 4½ to cut him some slack so that the country will have, you know, a government. Regardless of which side prevails on a given issue, the notion that the results will be “constitutional” is laughable. The Court will just have to make it up as it goes along. This is not how I expected to spend my retirement.
Afterwords
Back in 1994, when Newt Gingrich first started talking about holding the federal budget hostage, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole should have told him “That’s not how we do things around here.” He didn’t. “Responsible” Republicans have been keeping their mouth shut ever since. About 20 “grown ups” in the Republican Party should simply peel off and start voting like Democrats. But somehow I don’t see that happening.
Long take on why the Republican Party has neither shame nor soul here.
1. I never thought P. J. was as funny as a lot of people did. Although he grew up in middle-class, white-bread America, he adopted an entitled preppie veneer (at least, I thought he did) that I always found grating. Furthermore, he did a lot of “travel” writing, mostly making fun of foreigners for being, you know, “foreign”.
