The Republican House of Representatives

Unless you are a Congressional scholar, it’s nearly impossible to follow all the twists and turns of the U.S. House Republican Speaker fracas. What we do know is that, at this time of dangerous crises around the world, the United States does not have a Speaker to run the Republican-majority U.S. House of Representatives. Beyond the resulting inability of the House to perform crucial functions (such as voting on important legislation), the Speaker of the House is second in the line of succession, after only the Vice President, to become President if the president cannot carry out his or her duties. Suffice it to say that it’s a catastrophe not to have a House Speaker.

You may recall that this whole mess started in early January when Republicans, after winning a very narrow House majority in last November’s elections, could not agree among themselves on electing a new Speaker, which is the majority’s responsibility. It took an unprecedented 15 rounds of voting before the Republicans finally elected Kevin McCarthy as Speaker. However, to win over his extreme MAGA colleagues, McCarthy had to agree to a number of concessions, including the ability of any one Representative, at any time, to call for a “Motion to Vacate” the Speaker’s position, which is essentially a vote of “no confidence” to remove the Speaker. Suffice it to say that “Squeaker” McCarthy was extremely weak, and probably doomed, from the start, as those MAGAs could call for such a vote anytime McCarthy did not kowtow to them.

Younger activists, a major Republican fear

Republicans have a predictable pattern: even with government nearly evenly divided, they get drunk with power, use their votes to overreach with extreme policies, and wind up alienating voters in the next election. In June 2022, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court, with three new right wing Republican justices courtesy of Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, voted along party lines to take away the right to abortion that had been established in the Court’s Roe v. Wade decision nearly 50 years earlier. This decision set off a firestorm among voters, especially younger voters, who showed up to the voting booths in droves five months later and gave the Democrats considerably better results (retaining control and actually winning a one-seat majority in the U.S, Senate, barely losing control of the House, and gaining state governorships and state legislature majorities) in an off-year election where the party in power usually does much worse.

Republicans, however, did not learn the lesson from the 2022 elections, i.e., that their extremism scared away voters. Instead, the GOP has charged ahead with even more extremist actions that could hurt them in 2024. These include: