Richard H. Pildes/NY Times:
Why the Fringiest Fringe of the G.O.P. Now Has So Much Power Over the Party
The Democratic Party shows one way parties can overcome these fragmenting forces that threaten to pull them apart: the specter of major electoral defeat. In the current moment of unity, it is easy to forget the bitter conflicts between more moderate and progressive wings that the party managed to overcome only in the last year.
During those months of internal party bickering, threats and name calling, public approval ratings for President Biden and Congress plummeted. It took the near-death experience of 2021 gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey for progressives to give up their demands and permit the infrastructure bill to pass on its own, eventually followed with an Inflation Reduction Act that had been significantly reduced in scope. One advantage the Democrats had was having control of the White House, which helps discipline a party since members see their electoral fates tied to the president’s success. Fewer of their members also seem more interested in performative politics than legislating.
Tim Miller/Bulwark:
Never Trumpers Understood Kevin McCarthy’s Conference Better Than He Did
Who could possibly have predicted that the leopards would eat My Kevin’s face, too?
Those of us outside the party—whose faces were long ago masticated—had the distance to see this dynamic clearly. The days where “principled conservatives” huff and puff about CUTGO for a while and then surrender to an old guard master are long gone.
We knew that there was no sacrifice, no degradation that would satisfy Kevin’s leopards. He may have been able to cobble together the votes to get into the speaker’s office for a spell. And who knows, he might still? But he was never going to lead this party.
Because they were never going to put their trust in him. They would never give up one retruth, one Newsmax hit, or one scampac fundraising email for the betterment of the party. (Forget about the country.)
Jill Lawrence/USA Today:
McCarthy speaker spectacle is no joke. It shows the Republican Party will damage America.
We’ve learned a lot this week. We’ve learned that House Republicans can’t count votes, they can’t solve problems and they apparently can’t abide each other.
What was the point of that thwarted House Republican rebellion?
Leverage, as in holding the nation hostage so a small group of nihilistic ultraconservatives, most from safe districts and most of them members of the so-called Freedom Caucus, can dictate terms to the rest of us.
And what would they do this year if they could hold America hostage by instigating a shutdown or debt crisis? They've already told us: Gift the rich with inflationary tax cuts; raise prescription prices; take back the $80 billion the under-resourced IRS just received to audit the rich, answer the phones and catch up on its backlog; cut Social Security and Medicare; shrink aid to Ukraine; and ratchet back clean energy spending.
In short, undercut most of what Democrats have done to solve actual problems.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
The awful corruption of Trump’s ‘coup lawyers’ demands accountability
Eastman and Giuliani are facing disciplinary proceedings and might even get disbarred. But if they are disciplined on overly narrow grounds — say, for making false statements — it would be a highly insufficient outcome. They should also face professional discipline that declares in some way that their efforts to undermine our constitutional order were central features of their unscrupulous professional misconduct.
Yet good-government advocates are beginning to fear that opportunity will be squandered.
…
“It’s important that any bar discipline encompasses the full range of that activity,” ethics expert Norman Eisen told me. “This was an attempted coup, not using soldiers but using lawyers. We have not seen anything like this by attorneys in American history. The bar discipline needs to be equally extensive.”
NY Times:
‘Nobody Is in Charge’: A Ragged G.O.P. Stumbles Through the Wilderness
With no unified agenda or clear leadership, Republicans face the prospect that the anti-establishment fervor that has powered the party in recent years could now devour it.
Even as Donald J. Trump rarely leaves his Florida home in what so far appears to be little more than a Potemkin presidential campaign, Republicans have failed to quell the anti-establishment fervor that accompanied his rise to power. Instead, those tumultuous political forces now threaten to devour the entire party.
Nowhere was that on more vivid display than the House floor, where 21 Republicans on Thursday stymied their party from taking control for a third day by refusing to support Representative Kevin McCarthy’s bid for speaker.
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
What the heck does ‘weaponizing the federal government’ even mean?
So if you are confused about what in the world Jordan, Roy and the other MAGA radicals are hollering about, you are not alone. Their party of nihilists insists that legitimate functions of government amount to tyranny, while their own abuse of power represents the will of “real Americans.” Whether they believe this nonsense is irrelevant; what we know is that the same delusional thinking that triggered the 2021 coup attempt is alive and well, fanned by right-wing hucksters who can dupe Americans into sending a few more bucks to fight “socialists” — or something.
HuffPost:
Kevin McCarthy’s Speaker Disaster Is A Preview Of The Next 2 Years
The open warfare among House Republicans bodes poorly for Congress' two big tasks this year: funding the government and raising the debt limit.
The House is essentially frozen without a speaker ― no members can be formally sworn in, no committee appointments can be made and no rules can be adopted. The immediate consequence is a delay to GOP plans for the new Congress: the passage of new legislation and investigations of Biden’s administration.
McCarthy doesn’t seem to have made any progress in winning over the necessary support to become speaker after three failed votes on Tuesday. The voting process is expected to resume on Wednesday. The House hasn’t needed more than one ballot to elect a speaker since December 1923. In 1855, the process took 133 ballots and two months to sort out.
“This isn’t just today. This is going to be everyday in the House Republican majority,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) warned on Tuesday. “It’s not just that they won’t be able to govern. It’s that they are going to be an embarrassing public train wreck while they refuse to govern.”
Will Bunch/Philadelphia Inquirer:
On 2nd anniversary of Jan. 6, Trump’s disciples succeed in shutting down the Capitol
Two years out, Donald Trump's narcissistic disciples are finishing what the Jan. 6, 2021, coup plotters started: shutting down U.S. governance.
As I write this on Thursday morning, Rep. Kevin McCarthy — the leader of 90% of House Republicans, who hold a slim 222-212 vote majority after 2022′s midterms — has failed so far in six votes to become House speaker, and it’s not clear what will break the gridlock caused by GOP obstructionists. It’s been fun to mock the nakedly ambitious, 40-watt Californian losing again and again like the 1972-73 76ers, but the damage that this pointless exercise is causing to the American Experiment is no laughing matter. With each failed vote, it gets harder to imagine this gang that couldn’t shoot straight passing a budget, or raising the debt ceiling, or dealing with a Ukraine-level crisis.
Jonathan Allen/NBC:
Trump’s endorsement proves worthless to Kevin McCarthy in his speaker bid
The former president's endorsement didn't move any votes.
Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., another anti-McCarthy voter, took umbrage at Trump calling recalcitrants on behalf of the beleaguered House GOP leader.
"Let’s stop with the campaign smears and tactics to get people to turn against us — even having my favorite president call us and tell us we need to knock this off," Boebert said on the House floor Wednesday. "I think it actually needs to be reversed; the president needs to tell Kevin McCarthy that, sir, you do not have the votes, and it’s time to withdraw."
McCarthy has given no indication that he plans to do that. But it was clear Wednesday — from House floor votes and interviews with Republican members — that Trump had failed to swing votes to McCarthy through either his behind-the-scenes calls to lawmakers or his big public endorsement in a Wednesday morning post to the Truth Social media platform.