On Tuesday night, The Washington Post's editorial board posted an opinion column pompously titled "Democrats should help elect a Republican speaker." It's one of the worst examples yet of the national media's belief that Republicans are allowed to be incompetent extremists who wreck budgets, raze federal agencies, and attempt coups, and that Democrats, being the adults, are expected to trail behind, patching the government back together again.
"This is Republicans’ mess. But it hurts the whole country. If Republicans change course — for example, by nominating a better candidate — Democrats should be willing to help them clean it up," says Post opinion-page editor David Shipley and his editorial board. So right off the bat, we've established the theme: Democracy Dies in Partisanship.
But the Post's editorial wonks don’t provide any plausible path toward that "clean up."
One option is to empower the House’s acting leader, Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.), to conduct House business while Republicans seek a permanent replacement. Another is for Republicans to bring a different candidate to the floor, one who passes basic reasonableness tests, such as wanting to keep the government running and respecting the legitimacy of the 2020 election results.
It's pleasant that we're putting opposition to an attempted coup premised on brazen, democracy-undermining hoaxes as a "basic reasonableness” test. Better yet, a candidate must not want to cause widespread economic damage by shutting down the federal government. But what Republicans haven't offered up, and the Post does not provide, is any leader who passes both tests.
The reason we are at this point is because the previous House speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, assisted the party's sedition caucus with efforts to scuttle investigations of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. McCarthy also backed buffoonish efforts by Rep. Jim Jordan and other coup-plotters to invent Democratic crimes based on the same Rudy Giuliani-pushed hoaxes used to justify the coup itself. And it didn’t help that McCarthy had just reneged on a pact with President Joe Biden, all so McCarthy could better empower hard-liners’ demands for a government shutdown.
Asking Democrats to safeguard the career of someone who enabled seditious extremism and government sabotage in order to undercut that extremism is nonsensical. Asking Democrats to ally with any of the subsequent Republican speaker "designees"—candidates who either promoted hoaxes meant to justify the coup, or signed their names to a demand that the Supreme Court do so on their behalf—is not a compromise position. The Post can offer up no Republican candidate that would pass its own test.
Democrats, meanwhile, have not made this easy. They have routinely unanimously backed their leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), for speaker, the point of which is to raise the threshold for the Republican candidate du jour to achieve a majority on the floor. This, in turn, has allowed a small number of GOP radicals to deny a majority to various speaker candidates.
This is a merry-go-round of an argument: demanding Democrats ally with past protectors of seditionists in order to thwart future protectors of seditionists. It is a poison pill that will harm whichever Democrats swallow it—and all for the sake of shielding Republicans from having to halt the ability of a handful of "radicals" to wreak such damage.
Democrats have more productive options. They, or at least a substantial number of them, could vote “present” rather than for Mr. Jeffries. This would change the math, lowering the threshold to achieve a majority. Mr. McHenry could get the votes to be temporarily in charge, or the next Tom Emmer-type could become speaker, without having to placate the far right.
Any Republican who gains the gavel with Democratic assistance, even the backhanded assistance of Democratic abstentions, will become a target of Donald Trump, his base, conservative pundits, and the same House radicals now thwarting all but the most extreme of candidates. What then?
McHenry is a backbencher most known for his vindictive personality, as was demonstrated by his immediate moves to punish Democrats for not rescuing McCarthy from the consequences of his own incompetence. He has both indicated he does not want such a position and has acted with hostility toward the Democrats who might provide it to him. What evidence is there that he would act with moderation?
Who is the next supposed Tom Emmer-type now that the ultimate Tom Emmer-type—Emmer himself—could muster no more than four hours and 10 minutes of rule?
Either outcome would help Democrats and, more importantly, the country. The House could get on with funding the government, which would otherwise have to close next month, as well as approving more aid to Israel and Ukraine.
That is a Democratic priority, not a Republican one. And which Republican candidate would agree to "get on with funding the government" when even McCarthy would not promise it?
In a Post op-ed, Mr. Jeffries proposed a grand power-sharing agreement between the parties in the House. Republicans would not effectively sacrifice their majority for Democratic help. If Democrats cooperated without demanding big, public concessions in return, Republican worries that they would, in effect, end up co-ruling with the minority party would be less pronounced.
Whining about the negotiation tactics of Democrats while Republican extremists chew the limbs off each new “speaker designee” is the sort of reflexive both-sidesism that has placated and enabled Republicanism's descent into fascism. The pretense of being offended that Democrats would demand "big, public concessions" rather than facilitate the continued incompetence and continued enabling of far-right radicals, which are the only terms that each successive Republican speaker designee has offered—now that is genuinely offensive in its ignorance.
The Post closes out with an assertion that proves its editorial board to be a group largely unconcerned with the realities reported in their own newspaper’s pages.
The fact remains that, if just a handful of Democrats had voted “present” on Mr. Gaetz’s motion to dethrone Mr. McCarthy, the House would have been at work for the past three weeks and Mr. McCarthy would have felt freer to govern without constant worry that hard-right obstructionists would take him down for keeping the government open, as they eventually did. Something more like the national interest would have prevailed. At some point, it should.
The premise here is that if Democrats had only worked with the least effective Republican speaker in modern history—a man who enabled the worst elements of his party, who attempted to put a House Republican deeply involved with Jan. 6 on the House committee tasked with investigating the attack, and who had just scuttled a previously negotiated government-funding pact with Democrats—McCarthy would have abandoned the hard-right obstructionists, staunchly weathered Trump’s vitriolic attacks on his character, and begun to govern.
This is so preposterous that it defies description. This is precisely the sort of farcical, intentionally naive, view-from-above editorializing that has brushed aside the radicalization of Republicanism. This kind of editorial insists that surely the new proper midpoint of politics is equidistant between dull-but-competent government stewardship and whatever circus of feral cats the far right next attempts to pass off as stewardship's proper counter.
In the end, the Post's advice amounted to nothing. Republicans chose a far-right coup backer as their new speaker, the supposed moderates caving to their hoax-riddled and seditious flank rather than abide any negotiations with Democrats that might foil such an outcome. The Post's demands that Democrats pull Republicans up from their self-made mire were thwarted by the very Republicans the Post had imagined to be amenable to the partnership—not that anything will be learned from that.
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