There's No Reason To Believe That There Will Ever Be A Single Good Day In The 118th Congress

Jonathan Bernstein reported this morning that though McCarthy “made many concessions” to win over the votes of the fascist fringe, one stands out as genuinely catastrophic— giving them 3 seats of 9 Republicans on the House Rules Committee. He predicted that it will “diminish the influence of the Republican Party within the House. It will grant a handful of extremists outsize power in Congress, reducing the Republican Party’s ability to govern.”

The deal wasn’t part of the rules package the GOP voted to accept last night but “handing seats on the Rules Committee to a small, radical faction institutionalizes their influence in a way that will come into play on every single bill the House considers, because every bill must go through that committee in order to be considered by the full House.”

In his Atlantic column this morning, Tom Nicols wrote some vaguely mainstream conservatives who have deluded themselves into hoping or even believing “that the GOP has learned its lesson, and will restrain its fringe and finally leave Donald Trump behind… Good luck with all of that. Scalise… tweeted on Sunday afternoon [that the the new GOP majority] would move in its first week to… establish a committee on the ‘weaponization of the federal government against citizens’ … The new House Judiciary chair, Jim Jordan, will lead the committee on ‘weaponization,’ virtually guaranteeing that its hearings will turn into a festival of prancing nonsense that is unlikely to do very much but enhance Jordan’s visibility while he tears into U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies at the expense of American national security. (Jordan has also dropped unsubtle hints that he intends to impeach Joe Biden.)”

Meanwhile, Jordan’s fellow leader in the Coalition of the Unhinged, Paul Gosar, also tweeted on Saturday that Republicans “will conduct a real investigation into J6. The effort to attempt a coup between traitor Gen. Mark Milley and [Nancy] Pelosi will be reviewed and exposed.” This, apparently, is a reference to when Pelosi, as speaker, called Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two days after January 6 because she was concerned that Trump might try to start a war as a diversion from his election loss. (She wasn’t alone: Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, among others, reportedly had the same concern. So did I.)

I doubt that most Republicans in Congress actually believe that the most senior military officer in the United States is a traitor. And yet, they all remain quiet— because under the GOP’s rules, any one member can move to vacate the speaker’s chair and start the whole leadership fiasco all over again, and that includes Gosar, the dentist from Arizona turned conspiracy-obsessed crank who now sits in the People’s House.

But Gosar’s gibbering raises the larger question of what else McCarthy might have agreed to while he was slicing up his political soul like a pound of cheap olive loaf. We’re in the dark— and so are many members of Congress, apparently. Punchbowl is reporting that the rules package, the first order of business about how the House will run, contains a secret three-page addendum— some sort of deal between McCarthy and his fellow Republicans that the rest of the members have not seen.

Meanwhile, Trump is taking credit for getting McCarthy the speaker’s job. And rightly so: McCarthy himself is thanking Trump. The former president, according to Politico, did not insert himself in the struggle in the House at the last minute; rather, some of the Republicans called him, and when he spoke with the recalcitrant legislators, in this account, he “tore them a new asshole” over their opposition to McCarthy. Shortly thereafter, one of the holdouts, Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, changed his vote to “present,” which lowered the number of votes McCarthy needed to win. Matt Gaetz— who in any rational Congress would be a man of no account— therefore was able to stand firm by continuing to vote “present” and thus handing the gavel to McCarthy with a minority of the votes cast by the entire House.

Of course, the Senate and the White House remain in the hands of Democrats. This fact could make the House GOP even more prone to performative nuttery, because most members know that most of the time, indulging the fringe is unlikely to have real-world legislative consequences. If Biden continues true to his political form, he’ll likely ignore most of what goes on in the House. Biden is 80 years old; his political career spans a half century of American history, and the antics of the extremists will probably remain in his peripheral vision, if he notices them at all. (The exception here is Jordan, who has made noise about going after Biden’s son Hunter. But even if those hearings take place, they are unlikely to have any major impact on policy over the next few years.)

The good news is that most of the U.S. government remains in the hands of functional adults. The bad news is that the House is headed down the rabbit hole to its own Wonderland, where things will become “curiouser and curiouser,” and its members will have to placate their extremists by believing “six impossible things before breakfast” every day.