House of Representatives Speaker chaos

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McCarthy gives Trump credit for victory: "He was all in"

Newly-elected House Speaker Kevin McCarthy thanked former President Donald Trump for helping him get the votes, telling reporters: "I don’t think anybody should doubt his influence."

He was with me from the beginning — somebody wrote the doubt of whether he was there — and he was all in. He would call me and he would call others. And he really was — I was just talking to him tonight — helping get those final votes."

McCarthy, who spoke with Rep. Matt Gaetz on the floor between the 14th and 15th ballot, told CNN’s Manu Raju: "At the end of the night, Matt got everybody there from the point that nobody voted against the other way, so it actually helped unite people."

The new House speaker also thanked some of the core negotiators by name — Reps. Garret Graves, Patrick McHenry, Bruce Westerman, Scott Perry, Chip Roy and French Hill.

McCarthy said he is "1,000%" confident he will serve out his term, even with the new one-person threshold on the motion to vacate.

He also dismissed concerns that tonight’s drama on the floor is a taste of what is to come in the House over the next two years.

"I think by having the disruption now, really built the trust with one another and learned how to work together," he said. "What we’re going to have to find in our mindset is that we have to frontload. We have to think about and work on the bills with a microcosm of the conference before we even start writing it. And that’s really what we learned here."

As I wrote on Wednesday, those dissenters were among the most conservative, most anti-establishment Republicans in the House.

But about that deal. In order to achieve his decade-long ambition, McCarthy made several concessions that will weaken the speakership and strengthen his right-wing, anti-establishment antagonists. One point of contention had been the number of representatives it would take to trigger a “motion to vacate the chair” — essentially, a no-confidence vote in the speaker. Previously, it would have taken a majority of the Republican caucus to call that vote, but McCarthy has reportedly agreed to lower that threshold to just one member.

That sounds like a big change, but it’s really a reversion to how things used to be. Historically, one member has been the normal threshold to trigger a motion to vacate — it was that way until 2019, when Democrats raised it. And in all those years, the only time the motion actually led to a vote was in 1910, although an unsuccessful motion was also filed in 2015. Although the motion might get more use in today’s contentious Congress, it would still require a majority vote of the whole House to actually oust the speaker — meaning five Republicans would have to agree with all 213 Democrats3 for McCarthy to lose his job.

A more meaningful concession is McCarthy’s reported agreement to reserve three seats for hard-core conservatives on the House Rules Committee. The Rules Committee is one of the most powerful committees in the House — setting the rules (duh) of debates, choosing which pieces of legislation to bring up to a vote and even rewriting legislation that has already passed another committee. If the Rules Committee maintains its traditional partisan composition — nine members of the majority party, four of the minority — then it could have six McCarthy-aligned Republicans, three insurgent Republicans and four Democrats, which means that McCarthy-aligned Republicans would constitute a minority on the committee. In the words of one conservative activist, that would effectively make the Rules Committee a “European-style coalition government” where the hard-right bloc is like a third party, and McCarthy and his allies would have to negotiate with them (or Democrats) to get anything done.

This, in turn, could make it more likely that the federal government shuts down and/or defaults on its debt in 2023. The insurgent wing of the GOP was at the center of the government shutdown fight in 2013 and the debt ceiling fight in 2011, and McCarthy has agreed to fight for their preferred spending cuts here in 2023. But of course, nothing can become law without buy-in from the Democrats who still control the Senate and the White House, who are about as ideologically far removed from the conservative hardliners as it gets. So this week’s fight in Congress could presage other, even higher-stakes ones — and now, Kevin McCarthy is the lucky duck who gets to be in the middle of them.

All the talk since the midterms that Trump is losing his grip on the Republicans was just yet another example of “this time we really got him” delusion.

Good.
I hope now there are enough reasonable people from both parties to keep doing the regular work.

you can expect another shutdown fight this september, one of the compromises he had to make with the crazy caucus is that he will go along with their demand to allow the USA to sink into default rather than raise the debt limit.

Representative Ralph Norman, one of the holdouts, told reporters that his demands of the new Speaker include a willingness to hold the full faith and credit of the government hostage to as-yet-unspecified demands. “Is he willing to shut the government down rather than raise the debt ceiling?” Norman warned. “That’s a non-negotiable item.”

While Norman appears to believe that shutting down the government and refusing to lift the debt ceiling are the same thing, they are, in fact, different and unrelated. Shutting down the government happens when Congress fails to authorize funding to keep it open. The debt ceiling is a weird quirk of U.S. law that requires Congress to hold a separate vote to authorize paying its debts after it has already incurred the debt. If Congress votes to spend more money than it raises, then refuses to pay the people who lent it the money to make up the difference, it would devalue the dollar as a global currency and possibly trigger a global financial crisis.

This vote was something of a formality, occasionally used as a prod to get Congress to pass other mutually agreeable provisions, until the Obama administration, when Republicans decided to begin using the debt ceiling as a hostage, threatening to start a crisis unless Obama accepted spending cuts. Obama disastrously misidentified these threats as an invitation to a negotiation (which he desperately wanted), only realizing too late that he was actually being extorted.

Republicans view this episode as a success and their best model for enacting spending cuts. The Republican fiscal agenda is deeply unpopular, and rather than try to enact it when they win power (the method most parties use to enact their agendas), Republicans now see Democratic administrations as the best time to advance it. The strategy is that they can force Democrats to accept unpopular spending cuts, thereby relieving Republicans of the backlash.

And while the most unhinged members of the Republican caucus have the most grandiose designs for using the debt ceiling as extortion, even the least-insane Republicans believe this method should be a routine tool to enact their agenda. The party’s mainstream position argues that Republicans should use the debt ceiling as extortion. The stance differs from the radical one in degree, not kind — mainstream Republicans want their party to confine itself to attainable demands.

Putting aside the question of whether it’s right or wrong, there is a second one of whether the mainstream Republican plan of a small, “reasonable” debt-ceiling extortion is even possible. The events of this week strongly suggest that it is not.

Even under the best of circumstances, these negotiations are inherently fraught. There’s no obvious way for either party to determine just how many schoolchildren should be denied lunches or single mothers stripped of their health insurance in return for the privilege of postponing a self-induced financial crisis. Both parties have a natural incentive to engage in brinkmanship, pushing the negotiations to the last moment. When the parties are negotiating matters like the federal budget, the deadline slips routinely. But a short-lived government shutdown has limited damage. Even a very brief debt-ceiling breach would likely have permanent costs.

In the current circumstances, a successful hostage release would be all but impossible. Imagine a Republican Speaker — any Republican Speaker — figuring out a ransom that almost the entire caucus could agree on. The intraparty dynamics virtually guarantee that anything a Republican leader could agree to would immediately be seen on the far right as too little.

All is to say that even if you think Biden ought to negotiate a debt-ceiling-ransom demand, it’s now a practical impossibility. The only way to accomplish the goal is to separate it from policy altogether. The best way to do that would have been for Democrats to lift the debt ceiling when they still had control of Congress. (Their failure to do so could potentially prove to be the decisively catastrophic choice of the last four years.) The best remaining option is for the Treasury to use its Congressionally inscribed authority to mint coins in denominations it chooses.

(Republicans would meet such a move with a lawsuit, and they can normally count on sympathetic jurists to stretch legal interpretation as far as it can go to achieve party-wide ends. But it seems doubtful that even a Republican-controlled Supreme Court would issue a ruling that would precipitate an immediate economic catastrophe.)

All this may sound implausible and difficult to imagine. But picture trying to sell a bipartisan negotiation to a member of Congress who thinks breaching the debt ceiling and keeping the government open are the same thing or that forest fires were caused by the Rothschilds via a secret space laser.

question is, why didn't the democrats fix this while they could?

The situation wasn't dangerous yet, so it payed to let the other side embrass themselves.