House Republicans did not elect a Speaker yesterday.
The Freedom Caucus is the Heel in this drama.
I have written multiple times describing American politics as a version of professional wrestling characters.
The antagonist, called the Heel, represents disorder. He does what it takes to win. As one sports fan wrote me, "If you aren't cheating you aren't really trying." Fans also like the Heel, because he is such a flagrant, flamboyant bad-boy rule breaker. Little boys love knocking down a stacked pile of blocks.
Traditionally, in American legislative bodies, both parties presented themselves as Faces. That script changed after the 2010 election when Tea Party populists formed the House Freedom Caucus. They made Speaker John Boehner's life miserable, and then Speaker Paul Ryan's. They were unreasonable because they were playing a different game. They weren't pretending to be Faces, people trying to govern. They were OK with shutting down the government. They were OK with the U.S. defaulting on its debt. Now they are OK with a president rejecting election results. Their speeches criticizing McCarthy have a "burn it all down" quality. They want the swamp drained, and McCarthy and most fellow Republicans are part of the swamp. The notoriously conservative Wall Street Journal described it in an editorial yesterday:
But the GOP chaos caucus didn’t want to take yes for an answer. A few Republicans revel in making messes, including Rep. Matt Gaetz. According to Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Gaetz declared that he didn’t care if Mr. Jeffries ended up elected as a Democratic Speaker of a Republican House. This kind of peacock politics doesn’t serve Mr. Gaetz’s Florida constituents.
House Members like Marjorie Taylor Green and Matt Gaetz are outspoken and charismatic. They are stars on Fox and elsewhere on conservative media. They don't need money from the GOP nor from McCarthy. They get it in small dollars from on-line mail campaigns sent to the GOP base.
Kevin McCarthy is in a jam. The House Speakership is a job for a Face. The Speaker is a builder who creates and sustains a coalition of 218 votes. This isn't show business; it is governing a nation. McCarthy needs Heels to get to 218.
This morning McCarthy got help from Donald Trump. Trump told fellow Heels in the House to "TAKE THE VICTORY." The House majority will be Faces but the Heels will have some--maybe a great deal--of influence. "Kevin McCarthy will do a good job, and maybe even a GREAT JOB."
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12 comments:
Will they listen to Trump?
It comes as no surprise that the Insurrection Party can't even govern itself, much less the country. The only thing I don't understand is why McCarthy didn't declare he won, regardless of the election results. Isn't that the Trumplican Way?
Matt Gaetz looks like an alien on Star Trek. Maybe he was sent here to destroy the USA from within.
Boebert was a high school drop out, but supposedly she did get her GED, so that was good.
My gut tells me this is all kabuki designed to snooker the base so your WWF comparison is apt. My take on the House GOP is that every single one of them is only interested in their own lust for power, with Santos as the poster boy and heir apparent.
McCarthy will likely win today, pretending he was forced to concede, if I'm right and then rest on his laurels while the they all run amok from here on. What I find annoying is the media spending hours analyzing and speculating, none of them calling it like it is, and Democrats celebrating as if this is some kind of victory.
It's not. It's a pathetic embarrassment.
Allow us lily livered limousine liberal snowflakes this few days of Schadenfreude before Jim Jordan’s rump investigations of Hunter Biden’s laptop and the coverup of sexual abuse at the wrestling program at Ohio State University.
This is what you get when the elites (the “faces“ in Peter’s terminology) abandon the interests of the working class and working class consciousness breaks through the illusions propagated by the mainstream media and finally figures it out.
Look at how elite economic policies like globalization have destroyed the lives of the working class and ask yourself why they wouldn’t want to burn it all down.
Look at the contempt the elites express towards the working class and ask yourself why that hostility would not come right back in the other direction.
Elites should take responsibility for the well-being of the entire society. When they only take care of themselves, the ground is prepared for revolution. We have a history of that in this country.
In a free market, capitalist country, companies are allowed to manufacture their products in any country that will have them. Companies are always looking for a competitive edge. As Karl Marx explained centuries ago, those who own the means of production will exploit labor to the greatest degree possible: child labor, long hours, unsafe working conditions, no benefits and rock bottom wages.
Being in favor of party- nominating backroom deals, anti- competition and anti-free trade is communism. The USA is not a communist country.
I highly recommend taking some economics, business, political economy, political science and history classes.
Whoever is speaker of the house is third in line for the presidency if anything happened to Biden and Harris.
Scary thought.
Until the unfortunate reforms of the 1970s, political party leaders were in control of who their party nominated. To the best of my knowledge, the United States was not a communist tyranny before those reforms. Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon, were not authoritarian dictators.
More power to political party elites? Hmm
McCarthy’s failure to be elected Speaker isn’t an embarrassment. Four years of Trump’s buffoonery was an embarrassment, until it became treasonous. What we’re seeing play out now is just a harbinger of things to come - a result of failing to hold Trump and his chumps accountable. Republicans should have cleaned house after Jan. 6 if not before, but they were afraid of losing their white nationalist base.
McCarthy is an outstanding example of lust for power trumping conscience. Initially he condemned the insurrection Trump incited, but then went to Mar-a-Lago and apologized for it. Making him Speaker should be an embarrassment for Republicans, except people with no shame can’t be embarrassed.
“What we saw was the true character of the modern-day Republican Party — obsessed with power and their own personal advancement at the expense of working families and the needs of everyday Americans,” said California’s Rep. Pete Aguilar,
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