Republicans are definitely not riding a massive red wave into town for the restart of Congress this week, as they had planned. That failure has thrown both the House and Senate Republican conferences into open warfare. Over on the Senate side, still-minority leader Mitch McConnell has what’s basically a Freedom Caucus problem—they’re not just in the House anymore—challenging his position. Over on the other side of Capitol Hill, the OG Freedom Caucus maniacs are plotting against Kevin McCarthy, even while votes are still being counted and we don’t know which party will have the majority.
Republicans are set to have a razor-thin majority when the dust settles, giving the maniacs an opening to either oust McCarthy or force him to bend to their will. Leadership elections are supposed to be held Tuesday, and just like in the Senate, the maniacs are trying to postpone that vote until the real election is decided. One Republican, anonymous of course, told Politico that if McCarthy doesn’t agree to delay, they’re going to nominate Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) for speaker to demonstrate that McCarthy can’t get 218 votes.
They’ve got a raft of power-grabbing rules reforms they want McCarthy to agree to, all of which would restrain his power and increase the chaos in the House. The number one thing they want is to restore the motion to vacate the chair—the procedure they used to force then-Speaker John Boehner to resign back in 2015. After that debacle, the House voted on a new rule to allow only the leadership of the opposition party to call what is basically a vote of no confidence in the Speaker. The maniacs want to open it up again to any member who has a grievance.
There are dozens of other proposals from them addressing their long lists of grievances, many of which would make trying to do things like fund the government and avoid shutdowns much, much harder. All of them would effectively neuter the Speaker, giving the maniacs veto power over pretty much anything, and most of which exist in a vacuum of unreality, oblivious to the existence of the Senate. Biggs, the former Freedom Caucus chair they’re pushing to oppose McCarthy, is holding a forum Monday to discuss all these rule changes, featuring former Trump chief of staff and coup co-conspirator Mark Meadows.
These guys have always lived in a bizarre bubble in which the only thing that mattered was the House and how they could use it as a cudgel for whatever havoc they were trying to wreak to destroy the Democrats. If they had ever put as much time and effort into actually governing policy proposals as they had plots to control the House, they might have actually achieved something like repealing and replacing Obamacare.
Meanwhile, many of masterminds behind the fake electors scheme for overturning the 2020 election (including SCOTUS spouse Ginni Thomas) are agitating for a delay in both House and Senate leadership decisions in a letter to leadership, backing up the maniacs. One of the letter signers, Russ Vought (former budget guy for Trump and now head of one of the grift groups), talked about it with Trump ally Steve Bannon. “This is about building to January,” he said as quoted by Politico.
“And we have an opportunity to have a paradigm-shattering victory [on] the speakership,” Vought added, “to either be able to get Jim Jordan in as speaker—I don’t care if he’s not running right now—or to have a coalitional-style government where every decision goes through HFC.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) is not running. In fact, he skipped the new member orientation for the Freedom Caucus put on by Meadows. Jordan doesn’t want to be leader. He wants to chair the Judiciary Committee, where he can have hearings and yell about Hunter Biden—that’s the whole of his ambition.
That’s official: “These palace intrigue stories are premature, and they are still counting votes. What I can tell you for sure is that Mr. Jordan looks forward to chairing the Judiciary Committee next Congress,” Jordan spokesperson Russell Dye told Politico,
McCarthy seems pretty unlikely to back down entirely and will have something like 50 days to consolidate power. That’s fifty days in which almost anything could happen, including Democrats taking the House and whatever moderates are left in the GOP conference getting so sick of the machinations of their colleagues, they decide to work with Democrats. It’s all about who can get 218 votes, after all, particularly when the margin for the majority, no matter which side wins, will be tiny.
None of this, however, is about a governing philosophy or even modest policy goals for the GOP maniacs. It never has been. It’s always been about power and grievances and payback. The big loss last Tuesday only fed those destructive instincts.
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Holy crap, what an amazing week! Where do we even begin this week's episode of The Downballot? Well, we know exactly where: abortion. Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard recap Tuesday's extraordinary results, starting with a clear-eyed examination of the issue that animated Democrats as never before—and that pundits got so badly wrong. They also discuss candidate quality (still really important!), Democratic meddling in GOP primaries (good for democracy, actually), and "soft" Biden disapprovers (lots of them voted for Democrats).
