About a month ago I had an idea for an article on Kevin McCarthy’s unusually feckless leadership in the house and his tenuous position as house speaker. I put the idea away but today, now that the majority whip, you know, the guy responsible for getting 217 GOP votes in the house to vote together, has dropped out of the speaker’s race, I thought about revisiting this idea of feckless leadership.
When discussing McCarthy with
on an article she wrote, back then I originally started referring to the deals that McCarthy had made with the feces flinging nihilists on the faaaaar right as Monkey’s Paw politics. Wish to be speaker, the monkey’s paw curls a finger, and it happens… just with a heavy price attached.I think while that’s amusing it’s not quite a good enough analogy, and I settled on Payday Loan Politics. You know payday loans. You go to the place, get a loan for a few hundred dollars, and accept a 1000% APY that would make the mafia envious under your intention to pay that off quickly and not get sunk under that ruinous interest rate. Except that for a lot of people, they can’t pay that off, and have to renew the loan or let the interest rate rack up at light-speed. And that’s what happened with McCarthy. He made promises to the nihilist wing of the GOP and put the sword of Damocles over his head. The interest piled up, and when he opted to keep the government open, the interest came due and he couldn’t pay it.
That’s been the strategy of the GOP for the last 6 or 7 years though as a whole- short term gains regardless of the long term cost. The cynic in me wonders if the Republicans thought they were that close to “winning” and achieving essentially a permanent political control over the country. It wouldn’t be the first time, you can google “Republican 100 year majority” and find references to the idea going back a decade or two. The cynic in me feels like they decided to just go for it and try to rush that last step they thought they had ahead of them, all the while willfully blind to the compromises they were making along the way.
For instance, the problem with gerrymandering the crap out of a district is that if you get someone into that district you can’t control or influence because their seat is too safe, then you’ve lost that vote. The control then is funding and national party backing- If you don’t play ball, you don’t come back. But now that paradigm model is not nearly as robust as it used to be- firebrands can fundraise sufficiently and generate regional and national awareness sufficient to be able to buck the party. In these safe seats, as long as you can survive a primary, you’re untouchable.
If you then have a narrow majority, that person or group of people now control the government if they’re willing to burn it down. And Gaetz and the rest are willing to burn it all down. Eager to.
Trump himself is part of this, both as instigator and example of payday loan politics. Although he’s the result of a much larger systemic payday loan the GOP took out in it’s messaging, mode, and modus. And the balloon payment the GOP had to pay was a purging of a *lot* of the old school Republican party- Trump has ended so many Republican political careers in the last 6 or 7 years that it’s hard to keep count, but it is easily in the dozens, maybe the low hundreds.
So now we’re stuck. The country’s government is in neutral as the Republicans thrash around. I honest to god don’t know if anyone has enough political juice to hit 217 to be speaker. In the rush to gain majorities regardless of the cost, nihilists and MAGA extremists have found safe harbor and burrowed in like ticks. They are not beholden to the party to stay in office, and so they’re free to pursue their own goals- Gaetz according to reporting intends for a Florida governor run after DeSantis gets the boot.
In a nightmarish turn of events, Trump may honestly be the only Republican that could unite enough of the GOP to be elected speaker. There may be a bipartisan solution that ends up grinding out but that will probably be political suicide for anyone who engages in it on the right, who will then be replaced by more far right nihilists. Until then, it’s a game of chicken between the “mainstream” part of the party and the nihilists who aren’t under any threat at all but are a distinct minority. The far right doesn’t need to flinch, they have nothing to lose and are pretty open about wanting a government collapse, so they have a “heads I win, tales you lose” mentality. The “mainstream” party *can’t* flinch or else they’re acquiescing to an small minority of the party and that is power they will never get back.
We’re seeing the accumulation of 5000% APY interest the GOP agreed to in order to make gains in the Trump era. It’s horrifying and fascinating at the same time because the GOP has, for my life at least, been the party of patient, slow pressure, and they were making large gains from it. But Trump became the head of the party, and the ideological core that the party revolved around, and the man is terrible at delaying gratification, and it’s rubbed off on the party.
The GOP offered a blank check to anyone who could get them into power in the house. The people who signed it are exacting a heavy price.