The GOP Speaker of the House Chaos Is Just a Preview of What’s to Come
There are a bunch of reasons we’re in this Speaker of the House mess. The Republicans have only a slim majority over the Democrats in the House. Due to that slim majority, the Matt Gaetzes and Lauren Boeberts of the world have been enjoying outsize power in the party and are using it to showboat, refusing to vote for more middle-of-the-road party members and acting out when things don’t go their way.
Then you have vulnerable Republicans in swing districts who could lose their seat if they vote for Jordan. Mike Lawler, who flipped a seat in New York in 2022, for instance, has been pretty vocal in being against him.
It doesn’t help that everyone is angry about their various allies getting screwed or that people who voted against Jordan have reportedly been receiving death threats. The mood is not good at the Capitol, where, according to The New York Times, House Republicans spent Thursday “fighting among themselves in closed-door meetings, trading blame and insults” as they tried to figure out what to do next. (That seems like a great use of time for some of the most powerful people in the country.)
Though Jordan initially said he’d back an effort to form a coalition with Democrats and expand the scope of interim speaker Patrick McHenry’s powers, hard-line Republicans pushed back, and Jordan announced on Thursday that he would run — yet again — on Friday. And yet again, the result was another loss, and the saga may keep going over the weekend. It’s all incredibly embarrassing. More important, the situation is emblematic of what’s happening in the entire party.
There are plenty of politicians who carry an extra-heavy dose of bravado. It’s how they whip up votes and withstand brutal election campaigns and constant bad press. But this is too much. I am not naive enough to say that the Democrats are great at governing, or even very good at it, but they aren’t in such shambles that warring ideologies within the party constantly bring the government to a standstill.
On November 17, without a speaker or unlikely legislative maneuvering, the government will shut down. Federal employees won’t get paid. Federal services won’t be funded. This is because a small group of people want the spotlight.
