I think it’s pretty wild that McCarthy could give a farewell speech to his caucus where he explicitly admitted the Democrats tried to intervene on his behalf but he refused and said he would rather get ousted than “sell his soul” and work with the other party, and then could walk out from that speech directly to a press conference where he proceeded to blame Democrats for not saving him, and the reporters who knew what he had said to his caucus didn’t say a word to call him on it.
Goes to show how dishonest he is, and how deficient a lot of Hill reporting is.
That’s normal operating procedure for the press, honestly. It wants a juicy story about clashing personalities, not serious responsibility for keeping government in check.
I actually think that the even bigger issue here is that the Congressional press corps prizes access above all else and have strong incentives not to call members liars to their faces. Anyone who called McCarthy out on this publicly at a press conference wouldn’t be able to get info from him in the future.
McCarthy is definitely dishonest, but the systemic incentives very strongly work against the idea of a Speaker relying on votes from the other party to maintain that Speakership. McCarthy was in a lose-lose situation. A Speaker that needs to court votes from the minority to maintain the position is - by definition - a weak Speaker.
An imagined, fantasy speaker is going to appear stronger that McCarthy in theory the same way that an imagined girlfriend is always going to appear better than the one you just dumped. But it's all academic until someone actually gets the job and we see what they can actually accomplish.
I think the joke is that McCarthy is no longer speaker and thus is at the absolute nadir of strength as a speaker -- any speaker, no matter how weak, would be stronger than a non-speaker.
You're making the same odd argument that MY makes in his post. The fact is that the Democrats didn't save McCarthy--as he claims Pelosi had promised she would should a motion to vacate be made. Either the Democrats made the correct decision, in which case they shouldn't have changed their mind just because McCarthy offered some sort of bribe. Or they made the wrong decision, which can't be justified on the grounds that McCarthy didn't offer a bribe. The Democrats decision was either right or wrong, irrespective of what McCarthy did or didn't offer them.
It’s not asking for a “bribe”, it’s seeking procedural and policy concessions that would allow Democratic lawmakers to introduce and pass more legislation to further what they see as either the national or their constituents’ interests, and from their perspective, that matters a lot more than which particular Republican sits in the Speaker’s chair.
Establishing that Republican leaders won’t get their support for free is a means toward achieving that goal— you can’t get anything in negotiations if the other party knows that you’ll just fold.
The world must seem very easy when you can collapse things this convoluted down to "right" and "wrong" without actual reference to the specifics of the bargaining position.
I increasingly think that most people who dislike consequentialist ethics really just dislike the fact that it requires them to do (at least estimate-level) math before they can feel self-righteous.
Well call it whatever you like, but either preserving McCarthy in office is a good thing or it isn't. If it's good thing the Democrats should have supported it--as McCarthy claims they told him they would (but who knows if that's true?). If it's a bad thing, they should have opposed it. It's a pretty momentus step to kick out a speaker for the first time in U.S. history. Particularly when his successor is likely to be someone less inclined to work with the Democrats. Doing it shouldn't depend on being paid off with further aid to Ukraine (a great idea, imo) or whatever else it is that the Democrats were looking for.
If I want you to do something, whether or not you do it would vary considerably based on the circumstances, and one of those circumstances is whether I offered you something in exchange for the service I wanted you to perform. Other circumstances are things like "how I feel about you" or "what I predict will be the long-term result of this action."
Democrats' action in the vote, like pretty much all human behavior, was the product of a multi-variable equation. McCarthy had a lot of opportunities to influence that equation, and he did so in ways that produced a particular outcome: House Democrats concluded that they should not vote to support his speakership. He could have made different choices. It is on him that he didn't.
And one of the circumstances is whether it's the right thing to do or not. This wasn't about negotiating which particular projects get included in an infrastructure bill. It's a very weighty matter to kick out a speaker. MY's framing of the Democrats' position as "We would have voted for McCarthy but he didn't offer us enough" may be accurate, but if so it doesn't seem to me to be a very creditable position. I guess I'm just surprised that he doesn't even feel obliged to address the issue of whether this was a situation in which the Democrats were right to withhold their support in the absence of a quid pro quo.
I think the disconnect here is that you seem to believe that the vote to vacate the chair falls under a more absolute ethical standard, like a thing that is intrinsically bad to do, whereas I (and, I think, MY) is evaluating the ethics / wisdom of the decision under an expected-future-outcomes (consequentialist, if you prefer that framing) approach.
If you care about this vote in terms of what it means going forward, as I do, then it seems pretty clear that promising stuff to Dems necessarily alters that equation. It also means that McCarthy's reputation for keeping or breaking such promises bears heavily on the evaluation of probable future outcomes, as does his past behavior, since it has predictive value for his future performance.
But I can see where if you thought this was a Ten-Commandments-style absolutist issue (thou shalt or shalt not), that compensation shouldn't matter. I endorse that approach in some circumstances, but I have trouble seeing how this is one of them.
Can you make that argument? What makes this, in your words, a "weighty matter"? Also, I guess, what does "weighty matter" mean?
it seems like you are arguing that the act of affirmatively voting to "vacate the chair" mid term and without a resignation is of itself an inportant act that degrades democracy in addition to any consequentialist policy outcomes.
if i have correctly summarized your argument, i disagree. in fact getting our congress to behave a bit more like a parliament may not be a bad thing. unsure.
"If it's a bad thing, they should have opposed it."
Not if they can make a deal that gets them more than McCarthy's position is worth. That's what politics is: agreeing to bad things as long as you get more-important good things too.
Anybody who believes that politicians should never do small bad things in order to achieve big good things should be forced to read “The Prince” five times.
Surely it's good or bad based on what he's prepared to empower Democrats to achieve in Congress? If the answer is "something", then the right move was to vote for him. If the answer was "nothing" (which it seems to be) then the right move was not to vote for him.
This probably goes without saying for almost everyone, but a “bribe” isn’t just a pejorative word for a negotiation you don’t like. A bribe is when someone gives an official a personal benefit - like cash (or gold bars) for taking an action using their official power. Like paying a clerk $100 to approve your permit faster or overlooking violations. The Democrats weren’t asking McCarthy to enrich them personally, they were asking for him to agree to things they legitimately are pursuing as legislators.
To the extent that McCarthy is an above-replacement speaker, it's because he's willing to moderate on some things and not have stupid shutdowns/debt ceiling fights. If he can't offer credible concessions to moderate with Dems he's not above-replacement level.
(If you think that there was a moral case to support McCarthy regardless, then I might agree with you, but I haven't seen that case)
Well, that just how polarize partisanship works, and in Congress, TANSTAAFL applies.
It's not clear - even now - whether or not it would be good for Democrats to save McCarthy without a quid pro quo given that no one has any idea what will happen next or who will replace him. I think you might have an argument if there was a clear choice between two options, but there isn't. The choice was McCarthy or no McCarthy and it's perfectly reasonable for Democrats to expect something in return for helping McCarthy.
Additionally, partisans want to see their political enemies suffer, and Republicans being in disarray and dysfunctional nominally helps Democrats. Because the goal isn't to win a couple of policy concessions from a very weak GoP Speaker, the goal is to win the majority so Democrats don't have to compromise with the GoP at all.
"Additionally, partisans want to see their political enemies suffer, and Republicans being in disarray and dysfunctional nominally helps Democrats."
This is one where I feel more like there's a "right and wrong". Putting government in deliberate disarray so that your side can hopefully win more in the future is "wrong" to me - that's one of the things Republicans have done with the debt ceiling fight that strikes me as flat out wrong.
I think there are plenty of other legitimate reasons not to do support him here, but "dysfunctional government" isn't one of them.
Reminder that parliamentary countries with a history of past instability (like Germany) require a 'constructive vote of no confidence' for this exact reason. You can't remove the existing Prime Minister without either having a replacement in mind, or early elections. In the Weimar era it was easy for parties to agree to dump the current PM, but hard or impossible to get them to coordinate on an alternative..... They too had a chaos caucus that just wanted to watch the world burn (and eventually, succeeded!) Would be a helpful rule to have here in the US
The US normally doesn't have a rule that literally one dumbass in the House can file a motion to vacate and force an up or down vote on the Speaker, but McCarthy agreed to that rule so that he could (temporarily) be Speaker. I would expect that the next time Democrats take the house, it will be scrapped.
If I may ask, why was it ridiculous? It's the kind of power that can be abused, certainly but only if you want to piss off your entire colleagues and caucus. Parliamentary systems seem to get along fine with no-confidence votes (albeit sometimes with timing limitations on the frequency of their introduction).
I'm going to guess from the context in which this question is presented that the answer is, "Very few, if any," but I don't think that's obvious. I'd personally have presumed that, mechanically speaking, the majority practice was to allow it to be raised by a single legislator, with the check on that being that you've destroyed your political career if there isn't at least a respectable number of other people willing to also vote for it. To put it another way, the vote itself is the check on the abuse of the power to raise the question -- if the vote of no confidence passes, then that legitimates a single person having raised the question in the first place.
Wikipedia suggests this (although I’m not sure with the majoritarian restriction, but that’s kind of implicitly redundant in any event.) I’m not sure what it would even mean for it to be otherwise tbh - someone has to introduce the motion, after all (and it ain’t gonna be the PM). I guess they could be obliged to certify that they have the suppprt of X members for the motion?
Like the California recall process, where a bare majority can recall the Governor, but a tiny plurality on the bottom of the ballot can possibly select a replacement with much less support.
See also all the presidential emergency powers and discretionary authority that Democrats spent four years hyperventilating about during the Trump administration -- to the best of my knowledge no bills were introduced in 2021-22 to limit or abolish those (and if any such bills were introduced, none were passed).
A recent Behind The Bastards episode noted that Weimar also didn't have robust coalition-formation mechanisms that would allow alternative parties to try their hand at forming a government.
I think this substantially characterizes our entire polity, not simply that one legislative chamber. We lack the (parliamentary) constitutional machinery to accommodate our increasingly parliamentary politics.
RE #3, I think the Gaetz thing only starts to make sense under the Bulwarkian "Triangle Of Doom" frame of analysis.
Gaetz is building a right-wing-media career, not a career as a Congressman, because that's where the real power center is in the party now. OTOH, it's a mistake to call this a "politics of nihilism" as many here do, because although he indeed isn't demanding anything coherent, he IS pushing for a real end: power in itself.
However, contra John Crespi below, this has nothing to do with an immediate path to the WH. Gaetz is operating in a Trumpian Lizard Brain mode: "follow the media incentives towards power". We shouldn't EVER make the mistake of ascribing some sort of 15D-chess to Gaetz' pursuit of power; he's not that fucking smart, guys.
I get what you're saying but people do somewhat blindly chase power. I'm thinking of (typical guy, I know) the Roman Empire during periods of instability where the reward for seeking to become Emperor was at best usually a brief paranoid reign fighting off claimants with your entire family murdered off once a rival eventually succeeds you. Why on Earth would you want that job as opposed to just being a rich Senator or a commander in a quiet fort along the Danube?
Gibbon writes that some were chosen by their legions, and could as much refuse it as stop the tide with their hands. In chapter ten he writes on the Emperor Decius, who was sent by the Emperor Philip to Mæsia, to calm a revolt led by the subaltern officer Marinus. “The legion of Mæsia forced their judge to become (A.D. 249) their accomplice. They left him only the alternative of death or the purple. His subsequent conduct, after that decisive measure, was unavoidable. … It is reported that, immediately after his reluctant acceptance of the title of Augustus, he had assured Philip, by a private message, of his innocence and loyalty, solemnly protesting that, on his arrival in Italy, he would resign the imperial ornaments and return to the condition of an obedient subject. His professions might be sincere. But in the situation where fortune had placed him it was scarcely possible that he could either forgive or be forgiven”. His interpretation may be wrong — but any step toward imperial power means you must see it through.
Disagree. A lot of people love power in and of itself. I’d say that’s true for 99% of lawmakers. And that’s why you’ll see them abase themselves to keep it. An underrated dynamic with Trump, IMO. All these Republicans could get jobs at think tanks and as lobbyists. But they want that. They want to be powerful.
Also explains the whole, "Remain in office until you literally drop dead" thing that's so popular these days despite any national politician having no financial need to do so.
In Trump, Gaetz, and a lot of these rightwing noisemakers, I'm pretty sure the end is just gratification of their own ego. They feel good when they successfully get everyone riled up. They're already rich, so there isn't much else to work towards.
It’s interesting because in a way similar to China, the levels of government are all kinda lined up nicely for continuous advancement over time. The only difference is that the American system doesn’t focus on technocratic governance and political repression.
The very intense political media and think tank system also opens up even more venues post-tenure for a Gaetz.
Ironically, a stronger revolving door between industry and congress would reduce this incentive!
Humans are adaptation-executors, not fitness-maximizers. Our ancestors who sought prestige and dominance often got reproductive and survival benefits, so evolution selected for a will to power in humans.
(I definitely agree that following that drive uncritically tends not to make people particularly happy; chasing our drives often doesn’t.)
It could be simpler than that, a right-wing-media career is very, very lucrative. He could just be in it to raise his profile so he can get a gig on Fox etc
Yeah, if you see Gaetz trying to leverage this media attention into being a candidate for Governor, which makes him a future power player running for President, or at least VP, this all makes sense.
Meh, I think it only makes sense to take him as a dumb guy who takes things one day at a time. He has *ambitions*, but no concrete plan to satisfy a set of concrete objectives.
For now, that may well be "use a RW media platform to challenge RDS for governor from the right". But if another opportunity presents itself, he'll jump at it.
Which leads to another thought... it's kind of a lost-opportunity here that Dem strategists haven't figured out how to derail these power-mad idiots by distracting them with attractive-seeming opportunities that are secretly wastes of time. Of course, that's easily explained by the facts that (A) Dem strategists don't have a clear and unbiased enough frame of analysis for what's really going on with the Gaetz types, and (B) Dem strategists aren't devious enough to pull it off... but it's nevertheless disappointing.
Does nihilism mean pure arbitrariness, or does it mean a lack of a commitment to an ideology outside oneself? If the former Gaetz is not nihilistic, but if the latter he could be.
Why not both? My main point was that we shouldn’t get stuck thinking that the latter is the only valid definition for using nihilism to describe the current GOP.
IOW, nihilism can easily become a misleading misnomer - people ascribe the latter definition as a descriptor, and assume that’s the end of the story, so they base their entire analysis on it. Except it ISN’T the end of the story; the former definition also informs us about him even if it doesn’t apply to him.
It depends on what Gaetz's end-game is. I'm not sure about that, but if one wanted to gain control of the GoP label from the establishment and moderate factions, then his actions make some sense.
I wasn't implying that he was weak, rather that he's stupid.
I think you're also making a category error. Sure, in war, it's really bad to underestimate one's opponents - it can be downright catastrophic.
In politics, however, *over*estimating one's opponents can be just as dangerous. In 2016, sure, Hillary underestimated Trump in a set of key states that lost her the election. But in 2019 and 2020, the entire Dem primary field was overestimating Trump and freaking out about it. As a result, they were ready to endorse a whole plethora of really poorly-considered, badly left-reactionary approaches to dealing with Trump.
I feel like you're on the verge of making the same mistake about Gaetz. COULD he be a secret mastermind? Sure!!! There's no accounting for just getting straight-up played by your opponent. But most of the evidence and the most solid frame of analysis (the Triangle Of Doom) points towards him being a mental lightweight who's just doing this out of a combination of spite and RWM clout-chasing.
If we underestimate him, MAYBE he plays us; but it's still not likely. If we overestimate him, we WILL end up jumping at shadows. And we'll look ridiculous to the voters for fighting a threat that isn't actually there, all while wasting our opportunity to tell them what the REAL threats are.
> I’m inclined to call it a sociopathic lust for power, but I don’t actually understand how this course of action leads to him amassing power.
He *did* amass power, did he not? He just lit the Speaker of the House on fire, just to show that he can. What is that if not power? What Gaetz does not obviously seek, in my eyes, is *rank*.
High school girls also think it's hot when you defy court orders and install a Ten Commandments monument in a public space! But maybe I've said too much . . . .
"An underrated asymmetry in American politics is that “extreme” Democrats are pretty normal people whose ideal policy outcomes just happen to be further away from the status quo than the moderate Democrats"
The real asymmetry is that the sorts of people who want to break shit on the left by and large aren't Democrats and aren't involved in Democratic Party politics. The Green Party makes it more difficult for Democrats to win elections, but an actual useful thing that it does do is siphon off the sorts of people who cause problems on the Republican side of the aisle.
The Freedom Caucus and other burn-it-all-down Republicans aren't libertarians, so the Libertarian Party doesn't have the same effect for Republicans as the Green Party and DSA do for Democrats.
Twitter isn't real life, etc., but the Chapo/Briahna Joy Gray types don't run for office and often don't consider themselves Democrats or vote for the party's candidates.
Some truth here, but I think a bigger factor is that the left flank of the Democratic Party, including officeholders, want the government to do more and do it well. So they just don't have any real burn-it-down incentives.
Can anyone comment about how McCarthy's logic re: the Democrats was disturbingly like a serial domestic abuser who blames his partner for not cleaning up the glass after he got drunk and shattered all the windows?
"Moderate" Republicans take for granted that Democrats are the adults in the room who will just suffer anything that they sling at them (including in McCarthy's case reversing his word and bringing a totally spurious impeachment charge against the President) and then they're just kind of flabbergasted that their victims won't step up and enable their total recklessness?
Isn't this not only galling, but just also a stupid game for Dems to play along with?
McCarthy is just playing CYA as best he can in a set of circumstances that are terrible for him. Blaming the other party is always the go-to response in that situation.
Matt didn't mention this directly, but I assume everyone would rate the possibility of a government shutdown in November higher than they did yesterday, right?
Definitely higher than it seemed yesterday. But getting to November without a new speaker might persuade some republicans to actually offer democrats a placeholder who will hold the needed votes, even though Matt Gaetz won’t like it. (Presumably it would also be with new rules that Matt Gaetz wouldn’t like either.)
I think the idea of some Republicans offering Democrats a placeholder who will hold the needed votes would require the type of Republicans who would have tried to engage more with Democrats in pushing some sort of concession to protect McCarthy. That is, the sort of actor who would behave in the way you outline would already have revealed their preferences by now.
Sure, but at a certain point you keep missing exit ramps and you have to start considering that the driver doesn't want to get off the highway.
No efforts to work with Democrats during the speaker vote at the start of the year, no effort to stop the HFC from getting McCarthy to walk away from the fiscal deal, no effort to forge a bipartisan deal to avoid a shutdown, no effort to protect McCarthy when facing this MTV. Etc. etc.
Maybe, but I also think that they can’t negotiate on behalf of McCarthy - they would have to actually take the leadership themself to be able to make the offer.
It would have to be either a moderate Republican who has decided that they are retiring after this session anyway, or a moderate Democrat who gets the seat by promising moderate Republicans that they will do something like bring up all and only the bills that have majority support in the House, rather than doing anything partisanly Democratic.
Or a moderate Republican who is legitimately more worried about losing the general than their primary. Not sure if anyone like that exists (it *could* include the likes of Brian Fitzpatrick, but tbh I'm not as up on Bucks County politics as I should be) but if they do exist, they'd fit the profile.
I remember the “West Wing fantasy” idea back in January was to get a retired moderate Republican like Fred Upton to be speaker with a bipartisan coalition.
At least the defenestration of McCarthy breaks the deadlock on power held by one sinister, conniving racial type.
McCarthy? McConnell? Biden? Kavanaugh? Do I have to spell it out for you?
They had the leadership of the WH, Senate, and House, as well as seats on the SCOTUS. The Black Shamrock League, bent on world domination, had the commanding heights of the government.
Let's hope this current set-back checks their master plan for turning us all into the slaves of the Hibernian conspiracy.
Popery is only one aspect of the wickedness of the potato-eaters. I'm less worried about world domination by Rome than world domination by Dublin, and its tentacles in Boston, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere.
They've already taken over South Bend, for gods sake -- do you want to see that sickly green wave spreading inexorably across our whole nation, like the Chicago River on St. Paddy's day?
I've thought for years (like back to when Boehner was being harassed) that Republicans should make one of the crazy Freedom Caucus members Speaker, so they find out how first-hand difficult it is to weild actual power and to wrangle the entire caucus. My guess is said Freedom Caucus member would quit very soon or there is a Robespierre-turning-on-Danton moment where another FC member takes down the FC Speaker. All this to say: make Matt Gaetz Speaker of the House.
Part of me somehow empathizes with Robespierre in some ways, in that he saw where the road was leading, and was flailing around for an off-ramp, but couldn't find one.
But that doesn't keep me from revealing in karmic justice being meted out.
If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend “The Fall of Robespierre” by Colin Jones. It covers the Frenchman’s last day, shedding a brilliant light on the episode and its aftermath.
This is basically the "How to deal with Islamists" approach. (There's a bunch of political science research on how Islamist political parties moderate when they actually become part of a national government because it turns out that a fundamentalist reading of the Quran doesn't give any guidance on how you fund local sewer districts, pave roads, etc.)
Seems true of European far right parties too (as long as they don’t actually get enough power to be in charge of things without more moderate coalition-mates). Italy’s three big populist parties all moderated pretty fast when they actually entered government and realized that their country would be totally fucked if it Italexited the EU.
It's hard being Speaker when you don't want to seriously govern, lol -- much easier obstructing people trying to get things done than actually lead (& I don't think Freedom Caucus reps want to actually try)
MTG and Boebert have been fighting for a year or two. Everyone thinks they are allied when then are not. Boebert is part of the Gaetz burn-it-all-down group and MTG is allied with McCarthy and Republican leadership.
I'm not sure we are better off with or without McCarthy. It was a gamble for Democrats and I get why they did it, but the replacement might be worse. I hope the gamble works for the good of the country.
That being said, I have ZERO sympathy for McCarthy. He sold his soul to an utterly morally bankrupt person in Gaetz, so all of this was completely predictable. At some point, Gaetz will get what he deserves, just like some of the others who are also morally bankrupt.
If I were Hakeem Jeffries, I would have doled out a few “present” votes as you went down the list of Democrats and let McCarthy hang on with a bare tie (or majority of 1). Then when Gaetz calls for his second vote, start making demands.
I think that by starting the impeachment inquiry, then attacking democrats over the weekend, he basically made the argument to democrats that he wasn't any better or more "moderate" than whoever the next guy will be, so it didn't make sense for Democrats to save him. Especially since he wasn't giving them any concessions.
This ends one of two ways: either Republicans elect a new Speaker with unanimous Republican support, which they always could have done, or a compromise Speaker is elected with Democratic votes, but in the latter case Jeffries was correct not to bail McCarthy out without explicit concessions (and, realistically, one of the concessions is probably somebody other than McCarthy being Speaker.)
Send Boyle, Dean, and Gottheimer to go offer the crown to Fitzpatrick if he can bring 10 moderate Republicans for a grand reform bill for NEPA, along with permitting/streamlining measures for power transmission, pipelines, geothermal and oil/gas wells, wind and solar farms, and major transportation corridors.
I would have definitely thought about it. Keep your job with like a massive Ukraine aid package would have been appealing. But again McCarthy deserves this, he made a deal with I think the worst person in the house.
And if the rumor is true that Liz Cheney helped sink this for his behavior towards her that’s a Shakespearean twist of fate right there!
On point 13, Europe is already preemptively bitching that none of them can spare the material and they don’t have the money to build industrial chains to make it fast enough.
FFS. Every single time I think they’ve plumbed the depths of fecklessness and hit bottom they manage to disabuse me of the notion.
The logical extrapolation of the Western European policy position on most issues is that they don’t have the right to exist.
Isn't the reason Europe doesn't have an expansive defense base because American policy has been to take over defense concerns from them since the creation of NATO? We want them to spend a *little* more, but not a *lot* more, because we still want to be able to call the shots in Europe. I'm not sure the Europeans are being more feckless than usual.
On the domestic side, the big selling point of NATO to Republicans is that it will cost the American taxpayer less than another major war in Europe. If that's not true, then it's kind of hard to see why Republicans would like it. If you want Republicans (and in the longer haul, American voters) to support emergency spending, you need to demonstrate it's a one-off emergency. But the best way to stand up to Russia is to hold your cards close and bluff you can spend forever.
You are talking about ‘the European’s’ as though they are one big unified thing. In terms of defence, every country is independent. Independent supply chains, independent contracting, independent industry. It’s inherently less efficient than in the US, which can contract from coast to coast and make its substantial defence budget to further.
Yes, and in a perverse way, it is in the American interest that they remain a loose federation with little in the way of an independent unified security goal to rival ours. But then we get unhappy with the results of that loose federation, while ignoring the realistic alternatives.
Except the reality is that we're not talking about huge amounts of money here from either us or the Europeans. The EU has a GDP of almost 18 trillion dollars. They are supposed to spend about 2% on military spending, but are currently around 1.5% If they simply raised their military spending to the amount they are supposed to and sent that to Ukraine, that would be enough to keep Ukraine supplied (~90 billion a year).
Yes, we want them to spend a "little" more, and they won't even do that. This is a constant and very public complaint the US has had with NATO countries for at least two decades and most NATO countries are perfectly happy to ignore those complaints and continue free riding.
The tax savings point for Republicans would be a be new one when it comes to foreign policy. The more traditional sell to Republicans would be about American strength and status.
I'm not saying that the new sell does not have a market among Republicans, but I don't think it's clear that the market is bigger than the one for the old sell.
Sure, but aside from you, no one's point of reference is Robert Taft.
The GOP, despite your desire to pretend otherwise, is not what it was in 1940. Or 1929. Or even 1975. There is very, very little ideological continuity there by now.
They are more obsessed with government spending today than they were two decades ago. More skeptical of government spending in Europe like they were in the 1940s and 50s. You can see this in %GDP charts, but also in their DW-NOMINATE scores trending rightward while Democrats hold steady. The more things change...
Ahh, so your working theory is that they genuinely care but are terminally incompetent, given the gap between rhetoric and results!
I know, I know, you have your chart on tax take as a percent of GDP. Spending tells a very different story, as do deficits.
The problem is that at the Federal level there are very, very few of you, and a lot of what I'll be an asshole and call "downscale voters."
They don't have a voting base who care, or are sophisticated enough to hold them to account. The college-educated and professional class votes which historically drove GOP "clean government" focuses circa 1920-1985 are fading fast. They therefore go through the motions of being "pro-market" and "anti-big government" because it produces the soundbites that the base likes while not actually crafting policy to that effect. They hold the tax take down, briefly, but never curtail spending, and never do they exercise power to "make the market," by changing or curtailing regulatory bloat and the growth of bureaucracy.
Why do they not want the Democrats to help them dismantle NEPA? Why do they not want to streamline permitting for geothermal drilling? Why is OSHA still impossible to follow in full after Trump promised to simplify it? Why is occupational licensing still a shitshow? Why, in short, can they never exercise an effective deregulatory impulse?
The key thing which divorces them from the Republican Party as it was from 1895 until 1975 is that they lack any understanding of how the government can make (or break) a market economy through regulation and red tape. They no longer understand the concept of regulatory capture, nor rent-seeking, nor anti-trust policy, nor pricing transparency. And because of that, they can't even enact *deregulatory* policies to fix problems that the regulatory state has created, let alone propose good light-touch regulation in lieu of what exists today.
Why would the fall of the USSR change their calculus? Or America's calculus? Russia is always going to want buffer room on its long land border and Europe is always going to want security from Russia's soft and hard power threats to try and extend that buffer room.
Why is the wish of the "buffer" countries irrelevant here? The specific problem at the moment is that basically all of the countries between Western Europe and Russia want to be aligned with the former and Russia is big mad about it.
Europe always complains about costs in a way we don’t.
I think it reflects their much lower fiscal flexibility more than anything. Europe is dramatically poorer than the U.S. and much more of the services in their economies are explicitly on the government’s books.
The fact that you can only name two exceptions with a combined 3% of the EU's population suggests there's some validity there.
In the main, Europe's nations start at "poorer than the US" (Germany, Netherlands, Nordics, Belgium), go through "a lot poorer than the US" (UK, France), "hugely poorer than the US (Spain, Italy, Czechia), and end up at "barely or just not developed nations" (Greece, Portugal, Poland, Romania, etc.)
As I said elsewhere the other day, perhaps a third of the gap between the US and the Netherlands, Nordics, or Germany can be explained as a function of GDP as an accounting measure, namely that our healthcare expenditures are more directly accounted for in GDP and also bloated by rent-seeking. But the remaining two-thirds represent genuine differences in standard of living.
Also, what a profoundly *silly* thing to be disdainful of. We Americans can actually afford to travel outside the continent often enough that we use the expression "back in the States" commonly among the middle and upper classes!
Americans travel abroad WAY WAY less often than Europeans, and the class divide there is much smaller. This is in part a function of basic geography. To travel from one European country to the next is often cheaper than us domestic flights. To travel from Europe to Middle East or North Africa is also much closer and cheaper than for Americans to do so. The result however is that Americans are far less familiar with the outside. world.
Oh, and on a week where the devastating life expectancy data comes out is probably not the best time to go all rah rah America...
Abroad, sure. Just like Americans often travel three states over at a similar expenditure of time and money. The vast majority of European travelers stay within Europe or, at most, venture to Turkey. There's obviously more diversity within that area than within the United States, but I don't see how that's relevant. It's pretty clear from the data that more Americans leave the continent entirely to travel. Hell, something like 40% of Americans have been to Europe at least once.
As has been beaten unto death, the class divide in Europe is smaller mainly because its middle and professional class are vastly poorer than their American counterparts.
Pointing out that the American healthcare system is a clusterfuck, our zoning and infrastructure construction are a shambles, and our higher education is shot through with rent-seeking, but we're still getting enough right for almost all of us to be richer than Western Europeans of similar relative status... isn't exactly "America, fuck yea."
It's "let's learn from what the Europeans do well and please not emulate the things they don't as if it's a package deal."
Mechanistically, if the *entire* differential in healthcare spending between the United States and Germany is due to rent-seeking, without any advantages in performance at all, then adjusted American GDP per capita is 45% higher than German.
And, after taxes, transfers, and healthcare expenses, the residual disposable income an American household has surpasses its German counterpart at around the 25th to 30th percentile.
There are only handful of countries in Europe which do better in that regard.
Could the US improve the performance of its healthcare system and make that number even more lopsided? Absolutely.
And likewise, one of the few sectors Europe doesn't overregulate to near-death is construction; the US has quite a bit to learn from France, Spain, or Germany on permitting reasonable amounts of private housing development *and* more quickly and cheaply building public infrastructure.
But for the rest of the "Western European package"... no, thank you.
Even "help" is debatable. They give us more purchasing power, but also disadvantage our primary and secondary sectors, push over-financialization of the economy, and distort the hell out of the income distribution.
US public debt is not abnormally high by rich country standards. Nor, as far as I know, has the country ever failed to pay back a penny’s worth of interest or principal.
Re: 10 -- given that (1) compromise government is a theoretical aspiration of Congressional law-passing and (2) As you note, McCarthy could and should have totally struck a deal with the Dems, is the system necessarily as stupid as it appears?
Arguably the good version of this kerfluffle would be the one that ends up with McCarthy being answerable to the House at large and has to make some concessions to the Democrats as a condition of his speakership, and then the roughly *half of the country* represented by the Democratic caucus gets some degree of say in governance affairs rather than 0% as they do by default.
The fact that McCarthy wasn't tactically competent enough to pull this off doesn't seem like it's necessarily a strike against the "mischiefs of faction" view.
If the system requires people to behave in ways that are unnatural or irrational for their other policy goals, the system is pretty stupid.
McCarthy cannot make concessions to the Democratic caucus if that goes against the interest of not just the far-right Freedom Caucus member but also the interest of his median caucus member.
While that’s a fine heuristic, it doesn’t work when talking about the GOP. The party prioritizes fighting with Democrats, so there is no system which would have them behaving in a natural way.
Way back when McConnell was talking about fighting Obamacare so people would know there’s a “great debate” going on, people should have taken him seriously. His party needs big fights with Democrats or its voters believe they’re not standing up for them. That’s the main fulcrum of American politics and no systemic change will change that.
So what you're saying is that the main fulcrum of American politics requires fighting between the parties ... hence why it's stupid to have an institutional system that requires compromise.
If the system doesn’t want compromise, then there won’t be a fight.
The GOP needs a fight. You could run the kind of virtual single-party state like Britain with the pre-Gingrich GOP but the current iteration would wreck that, too, in search of a fight so their voters know they’re fighters.
The Republicans are constrained form passing their policy goals in numerous ways by political reality -- this is why they aren't constantly proposing ending Social Security and passing federal abortion bans.
If the Democrats can delivery McCarthy a speakership that his median caucus members can't because there aren't enough of them (and, clearly, there aren't), then the Democrats get to pull some of the strings.
1. Mostly this is just really funny. McCarthy could not possibly deserve it more.
2. I've been having an unfortunate amount of "The worst person you know has a point" feelings about Matt Gaetz this week, not that I actually think he's serious or making any of these points out of noble motivation, but he's mostly right about how the process should work.
3. It's in fact good to fight to force budgets through normal order and demand people simply accept the outcomes of the process of voting and amendments rather than the way we've been doing it where party leadership negotiates entirely within their coalition in secret then forces it through on party lines, or even worse runs the government through CRs.
- Gaetz is 100% right that McCarthy was a spineless lying liar who was going to keep lying and making promises he couldn't keep to everyone
- Gaetz is 100% right that McCarthy is just somewhat bad at politics and doing his job
- Gaetz is 100% right that individual spending bills and debate would be a better system for the country.
If you take the man at his word, and keep in mind that screwing over mccarthy is also a pretty good end in itself for him, his actions make complete sense
Yes he's obviously not a good faith actor. But maybe he's like 50% good faith here? Even if not, what he's saying makes some sense regardless if he believes it at all
Point #2 and 3 are excellent. Gaetz and the Joker Caucus want a more open process, less centralization in the Speakership and a return to normal order. Those are all good things IMO.
>But what do Gaetz and his fellow rebels actually want?<
1) A sharp downturn in the economy leading to a MAGA wave election* and an end to US democratic norms, followed probably very rapidly by a substantial dismantling of the Great Society, as well as Social Security privatization. (Doesn't matter if it's unpopular if we no longer have competitive elections).
2) Tax cuts for the affluent.
3) A virtual end to immigration. Withdrawal from NATO. Withdrawal from the UN. Withdrawal from the WTO. Withdrawal of our embassy in Beijing. Air strikes against Mexico.
4) Victory for Russia.
You asked.
*Anyone who thinks the US electorate is likely to correctly apportion blame for a recession precipitated by a fiscal crisis really ought to look revisit the elections of 2010 and 2014 (and also 2016).
This is as good an answer as I've seen. It seems basic that the House GOP would love a recession and I've no doubt that some of them think either a government shutdown or a debt default might be a fine way to cause one (we know that plenty of them don't know the difference between the two).
I’d love to hear more details about why a group of GOP Reps won’t make concessions let alone form a unity leadership under someone with real power sharing. It happened in New York’s state legislature for years, for instance. The moderates who defected from parties did face primary challenges, but they lasted quite a while. Of course NY Republicans are not like national ones. Also the NY governor is MUCH more powerful.
Because the party, from the voters to the politicians, heavily prioritizes fighting with Democrats. Working with Democrats can result in a dicey primary challenge. Both dicey in that the individual politician has a good chance of losing and in that the primary often produces someone unelectable.
The short answer is because what that relatively small group of GoP reps want is not what the majority of GoP reps want. And because the GoP majority is the slimmest majority in almost a century, that small group of GoP reps wields veto power. If the GoP majority was bigger, then they could be ignored.
On point 13 (Ukraine) from a European perspective, Politico.eu recently noted that Europeans were sleepwalking. Few of them realise a choice may now have to be made between allowing Russia to win (maybe also swallowing up Moldova) or funding Ukraine to get a better outcome in some form. Their leaders know but are silent on this rather urgent matter. Taking the second course will constitute a heavy immediate cost for European taxpayers but the alternative, a Russian victory, might also ultimately mean costly defense budgets to deter Russia, not to speak of Ukrainian migrants heading west. Europe may even have to turn to China for help.
I think it’s pretty wild that McCarthy could give a farewell speech to his caucus where he explicitly admitted the Democrats tried to intervene on his behalf but he refused and said he would rather get ousted than “sell his soul” and work with the other party, and then could walk out from that speech directly to a press conference where he proceeded to blame Democrats for not saving him, and the reporters who knew what he had said to his caucus didn’t say a word to call him on it.
Goes to show how dishonest he is, and how deficient a lot of Hill reporting is.
It's also wild that the media just assumes that Democrats have a greater interest in Kevin McCarthy being Speaker than Nancy Mace does.
Stenographers gonna stenograph.
Do you have a link to this? That's some serious chutzpah (and negligence by the press corps).
That’s normal operating procedure for the press, honestly. It wants a juicy story about clashing personalities, not serious responsibility for keeping government in check.
I actually think that the even bigger issue here is that the Congressional press corps prizes access above all else and have strong incentives not to call members liars to their faces. Anyone who called McCarthy out on this publicly at a press conference wouldn’t be able to get info from him in the future.
I kinda feel like gossipy bits are the main reason access is prized, honestly.
See how Peter Baker has become the pre-eminent New York Times political reporter.
Agree. Such an important piece of our current troubles.
I wish I knew ways to help fix this. But I got nothin
https://x.com/JakeSherman/status/1709341271595094177?s=20
“...And i did it for the good of the conference. The Dems came to me to make a deal. I wasnt goign to make a deal.”
https://x.com/JakeSherman/status/1709341670221775347?s=20
“Im not going to sell my soul to Democrats.”
McCarthy is definitely dishonest, but the systemic incentives very strongly work against the idea of a Speaker relying on votes from the other party to maintain that Speakership. McCarthy was in a lose-lose situation. A Speaker that needs to court votes from the minority to maintain the position is - by definition - a weak Speaker.
Although such a Speaker is also, by definition, a stronger Speaker than Kevin McCarthy as of this writing.
<rimshot>
This but unironically, though.
An imagined, fantasy speaker is going to appear stronger that McCarthy in theory the same way that an imagined girlfriend is always going to appear better than the one you just dumped. But it's all academic until someone actually gets the job and we see what they can actually accomplish.
I think the joke is that McCarthy is no longer speaker and thus is at the absolute nadir of strength as a speaker -- any speaker, no matter how weak, would be stronger than a non-speaker.
Good point!
You're making the same odd argument that MY makes in his post. The fact is that the Democrats didn't save McCarthy--as he claims Pelosi had promised she would should a motion to vacate be made. Either the Democrats made the correct decision, in which case they shouldn't have changed their mind just because McCarthy offered some sort of bribe. Or they made the wrong decision, which can't be justified on the grounds that McCarthy didn't offer a bribe. The Democrats decision was either right or wrong, irrespective of what McCarthy did or didn't offer them.
It’s not asking for a “bribe”, it’s seeking procedural and policy concessions that would allow Democratic lawmakers to introduce and pass more legislation to further what they see as either the national or their constituents’ interests, and from their perspective, that matters a lot more than which particular Republican sits in the Speaker’s chair.
Establishing that Republican leaders won’t get their support for free is a means toward achieving that goal— you can’t get anything in negotiations if the other party knows that you’ll just fold.
The world must seem very easy when you can collapse things this convoluted down to "right" and "wrong" without actual reference to the specifics of the bargaining position.
I increasingly think that most people who dislike consequentialist ethics really just dislike the fact that it requires them to do (at least estimate-level) math before they can feel self-righteous.
Well call it whatever you like, but either preserving McCarthy in office is a good thing or it isn't. If it's good thing the Democrats should have supported it--as McCarthy claims they told him they would (but who knows if that's true?). If it's a bad thing, they should have opposed it. It's a pretty momentus step to kick out a speaker for the first time in U.S. history. Particularly when his successor is likely to be someone less inclined to work with the Democrats. Doing it shouldn't depend on being paid off with further aid to Ukraine (a great idea, imo) or whatever else it is that the Democrats were looking for.
I feel like this is an illogical claim.
If I want you to do something, whether or not you do it would vary considerably based on the circumstances, and one of those circumstances is whether I offered you something in exchange for the service I wanted you to perform. Other circumstances are things like "how I feel about you" or "what I predict will be the long-term result of this action."
Democrats' action in the vote, like pretty much all human behavior, was the product of a multi-variable equation. McCarthy had a lot of opportunities to influence that equation, and he did so in ways that produced a particular outcome: House Democrats concluded that they should not vote to support his speakership. He could have made different choices. It is on him that he didn't.
And one of the circumstances is whether it's the right thing to do or not. This wasn't about negotiating which particular projects get included in an infrastructure bill. It's a very weighty matter to kick out a speaker. MY's framing of the Democrats' position as "We would have voted for McCarthy but he didn't offer us enough" may be accurate, but if so it doesn't seem to me to be a very creditable position. I guess I'm just surprised that he doesn't even feel obliged to address the issue of whether this was a situation in which the Democrats were right to withhold their support in the absence of a quid pro quo.
I think the disconnect here is that you seem to believe that the vote to vacate the chair falls under a more absolute ethical standard, like a thing that is intrinsically bad to do, whereas I (and, I think, MY) is evaluating the ethics / wisdom of the decision under an expected-future-outcomes (consequentialist, if you prefer that framing) approach.
If you care about this vote in terms of what it means going forward, as I do, then it seems pretty clear that promising stuff to Dems necessarily alters that equation. It also means that McCarthy's reputation for keeping or breaking such promises bears heavily on the evaluation of probable future outcomes, as does his past behavior, since it has predictive value for his future performance.
But I can see where if you thought this was a Ten-Commandments-style absolutist issue (thou shalt or shalt not), that compensation shouldn't matter. I endorse that approach in some circumstances, but I have trouble seeing how this is one of them.
Can you make that argument? What makes this, in your words, a "weighty matter"? Also, I guess, what does "weighty matter" mean?
it seems like you are arguing that the act of affirmatively voting to "vacate the chair" mid term and without a resignation is of itself an inportant act that degrades democracy in addition to any consequentialist policy outcomes.
if i have correctly summarized your argument, i disagree. in fact getting our congress to behave a bit more like a parliament may not be a bad thing. unsure.
We don’t really know what the democrats asked for and what, if anything, McCarthy offered. So it’s hard to judge the decision.
"If it's a bad thing, they should have opposed it."
Not if they can make a deal that gets them more than McCarthy's position is worth. That's what politics is: agreeing to bad things as long as you get more-important good things too.
Anybody who believes that politicians should never do small bad things in order to achieve big good things should be forced to read “The Prince” five times.
Surely it's good or bad based on what he's prepared to empower Democrats to achieve in Congress? If the answer is "something", then the right move was to vote for him. If the answer was "nothing" (which it seems to be) then the right move was not to vote for him.
This probably goes without saying for almost everyone, but a “bribe” isn’t just a pejorative word for a negotiation you don’t like. A bribe is when someone gives an official a personal benefit - like cash (or gold bars) for taking an action using their official power. Like paying a clerk $100 to approve your permit faster or overlooking violations. The Democrats weren’t asking McCarthy to enrich them personally, they were asking for him to agree to things they legitimately are pursuing as legislators.
I don't get it. It's like saying "selling your car is either right or wrong regardless of the price you're offered for it."
To the extent that McCarthy is an above-replacement speaker, it's because he's willing to moderate on some things and not have stupid shutdowns/debt ceiling fights. If he can't offer credible concessions to moderate with Dems he's not above-replacement level.
(If you think that there was a moral case to support McCarthy regardless, then I might agree with you, but I haven't seen that case)
Have you ever negotiated for something? If you didn’t get everything you wanted, does that mean you bribed the other party?
Well, that just how polarize partisanship works, and in Congress, TANSTAAFL applies.
It's not clear - even now - whether or not it would be good for Democrats to save McCarthy without a quid pro quo given that no one has any idea what will happen next or who will replace him. I think you might have an argument if there was a clear choice between two options, but there isn't. The choice was McCarthy or no McCarthy and it's perfectly reasonable for Democrats to expect something in return for helping McCarthy.
Additionally, partisans want to see their political enemies suffer, and Republicans being in disarray and dysfunctional nominally helps Democrats. Because the goal isn't to win a couple of policy concessions from a very weak GoP Speaker, the goal is to win the majority so Democrats don't have to compromise with the GoP at all.
"Additionally, partisans want to see their political enemies suffer, and Republicans being in disarray and dysfunctional nominally helps Democrats."
This is one where I feel more like there's a "right and wrong". Putting government in deliberate disarray so that your side can hopefully win more in the future is "wrong" to me - that's one of the things Republicans have done with the debt ceiling fight that strikes me as flat out wrong.
I think there are plenty of other legitimate reasons not to do support him here, but "dysfunctional government" isn't one of them.
I agree. Unfortunately, that's where the incentives are with our current system.
Reminder that parliamentary countries with a history of past instability (like Germany) require a 'constructive vote of no confidence' for this exact reason. You can't remove the existing Prime Minister without either having a replacement in mind, or early elections. In the Weimar era it was easy for parties to agree to dump the current PM, but hard or impossible to get them to coordinate on an alternative..... They too had a chaos caucus that just wanted to watch the world burn (and eventually, succeeded!) Would be a helpful rule to have here in the US
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_vote_of_no_confidence
The US normally doesn't have a rule that literally one dumbass in the House can file a motion to vacate and force an up or down vote on the Speaker, but McCarthy agreed to that rule so that he could (temporarily) be Speaker. I would expect that the next time Democrats take the house, it will be scrapped.
It’s probably going to be scrapped for the next Republican Speaker. It was ridiculous on its face.
If I may ask, why was it ridiculous? It's the kind of power that can be abused, certainly but only if you want to piss off your entire colleagues and caucus. Parliamentary systems seem to get along fine with no-confidence votes (albeit sometimes with timing limitations on the frequency of their introduction).
Do many parliamentary systems allow a no-confidence vote on the basis of a single legislator raising the question?
I'm going to guess from the context in which this question is presented that the answer is, "Very few, if any," but I don't think that's obvious. I'd personally have presumed that, mechanically speaking, the majority practice was to allow it to be raised by a single legislator, with the check on that being that you've destroyed your political career if there isn't at least a respectable number of other people willing to also vote for it. To put it another way, the vote itself is the check on the abuse of the power to raise the question -- if the vote of no confidence passes, then that legitimates a single person having raised the question in the first place.
Wikipedia suggests this (although I’m not sure with the majoritarian restriction, but that’s kind of implicitly redundant in any event.) I’m not sure what it would even mean for it to be otherwise tbh - someone has to introduce the motion, after all (and it ain’t gonna be the PM). I guess they could be obliged to certify that they have the suppprt of X members for the motion?
Like the California recall process, where a bare majority can recall the Governor, but a tiny plurality on the bottom of the ballot can possibly select a replacement with much less support.
Did we ever change that? That was a shitshow.
we did not
See also all the presidential emergency powers and discretionary authority that Democrats spent four years hyperventilating about during the Trump administration -- to the best of my knowledge no bills were introduced in 2021-22 to limit or abolish those (and if any such bills were introduced, none were passed).
A recent Behind The Bastards episode noted that Weimar also didn't have robust coalition-formation mechanisms that would allow alternative parties to try their hand at forming a government.
This is a great point that needs more attention.
Our House currently operates like a quasi-parliamentary body but with none of the other features and guardrails that make parliamentary bodies work.
I think this substantially characterizes our entire polity, not simply that one legislative chamber. We lack the (parliamentary) constitutional machinery to accommodate our increasingly parliamentary politics.
RE #3, I think the Gaetz thing only starts to make sense under the Bulwarkian "Triangle Of Doom" frame of analysis.
Gaetz is building a right-wing-media career, not a career as a Congressman, because that's where the real power center is in the party now. OTOH, it's a mistake to call this a "politics of nihilism" as many here do, because although he indeed isn't demanding anything coherent, he IS pushing for a real end: power in itself.
However, contra John Crespi below, this has nothing to do with an immediate path to the WH. Gaetz is operating in a Trumpian Lizard Brain mode: "follow the media incentives towards power". We shouldn't EVER make the mistake of ascribing some sort of 15D-chess to Gaetz' pursuit of power; he's not that fucking smart, guys.
Power in itself is a weird end. Usually power is a means *to* an end.
Power in itself is a weird end, for the reason you mention.
And yet money, like power, is also usually a means to an end, and the world is full of misers.
People set weird ends.
I get what you're saying but people do somewhat blindly chase power. I'm thinking of (typical guy, I know) the Roman Empire during periods of instability where the reward for seeking to become Emperor was at best usually a brief paranoid reign fighting off claimants with your entire family murdered off once a rival eventually succeeds you. Why on Earth would you want that job as opposed to just being a rich Senator or a commander in a quiet fort along the Danube?
Gibbon writes that some were chosen by their legions, and could as much refuse it as stop the tide with their hands. In chapter ten he writes on the Emperor Decius, who was sent by the Emperor Philip to Mæsia, to calm a revolt led by the subaltern officer Marinus. “The legion of Mæsia forced their judge to become (A.D. 249) their accomplice. They left him only the alternative of death or the purple. His subsequent conduct, after that decisive measure, was unavoidable. … It is reported that, immediately after his reluctant acceptance of the title of Augustus, he had assured Philip, by a private message, of his innocence and loyalty, solemnly protesting that, on his arrival in Italy, he would resign the imperial ornaments and return to the condition of an obedient subject. His professions might be sincere. But in the situation where fortune had placed him it was scarcely possible that he could either forgive or be forgiven”. His interpretation may be wrong — but any step toward imperial power means you must see it through.
People who blindly chase power usually end up out of power pretty quickly after acquiring it, though.
See McCarthy, Kevin.
Disagree. A lot of people love power in and of itself. I’d say that’s true for 99% of lawmakers. And that’s why you’ll see them abase themselves to keep it. An underrated dynamic with Trump, IMO. All these Republicans could get jobs at think tanks and as lobbyists. But they want that. They want to be powerful.
Also explains the whole, "Remain in office until you literally drop dead" thing that's so popular these days despite any national politician having no financial need to do so.
In Trump, Gaetz, and a lot of these rightwing noisemakers, I'm pretty sure the end is just gratification of their own ego. They feel good when they successfully get everyone riled up. They're already rich, so there isn't much else to work towards.
It’s interesting because in a way similar to China, the levels of government are all kinda lined up nicely for continuous advancement over time. The only difference is that the American system doesn’t focus on technocratic governance and political repression.
The very intense political media and think tank system also opens up even more venues post-tenure for a Gaetz.
Ironically, a stronger revolving door between industry and congress would reduce this incentive!
Humans are adaptation-executors, not fitness-maximizers. Our ancestors who sought prestige and dominance often got reproductive and survival benefits, so evolution selected for a will to power in humans.
(I definitely agree that following that drive uncritically tends not to make people particularly happy; chasing our drives often doesn’t.)
I think people are underestimating the personal element of this as well. Screwing over McCarthy really was an end in itself to Gaetz
It could be simpler than that, a right-wing-media career is very, very lucrative. He could just be in it to raise his profile so he can get a gig on Fox etc
Yeah, if you see Gaetz trying to leverage this media attention into being a candidate for Governor, which makes him a future power player running for President, or at least VP, this all makes sense.
Meh, I think it only makes sense to take him as a dumb guy who takes things one day at a time. He has *ambitions*, but no concrete plan to satisfy a set of concrete objectives.
For now, that may well be "use a RW media platform to challenge RDS for governor from the right". But if another opportunity presents itself, he'll jump at it.
Which leads to another thought... it's kind of a lost-opportunity here that Dem strategists haven't figured out how to derail these power-mad idiots by distracting them with attractive-seeming opportunities that are secretly wastes of time. Of course, that's easily explained by the facts that (A) Dem strategists don't have a clear and unbiased enough frame of analysis for what's really going on with the Gaetz types, and (B) Dem strategists aren't devious enough to pull it off... but it's nevertheless disappointing.
Does nihilism mean pure arbitrariness, or does it mean a lack of a commitment to an ideology outside oneself? If the former Gaetz is not nihilistic, but if the latter he could be.
Why not both? My main point was that we shouldn’t get stuck thinking that the latter is the only valid definition for using nihilism to describe the current GOP.
IOW, nihilism can easily become a misleading misnomer - people ascribe the latter definition as a descriptor, and assume that’s the end of the story, so they base their entire analysis on it. Except it ISN’T the end of the story; the former definition also informs us about him even if it doesn’t apply to him.
It depends on what Gaetz's end-game is. I'm not sure about that, but if one wanted to gain control of the GoP label from the establishment and moderate factions, then his actions make some sense.
You’re making the mistake of assuming there IS an endgame.
Gaetz is playing A game. But he’s playing to play, not to win some prize.
Maybe? I don't think any of us know what's in his mind. My point is the evidence fits a lot of different options, including the one I mentioned.
In the absence of determinative evidence, the safest explanation to work with is the simplest, which is that he's a cockroach.
I try not to underestimate opponents. I think it's better to operate on the assumption that he is something much stronger than a cockroach.
I wasn't implying that he was weak, rather that he's stupid.
I think you're also making a category error. Sure, in war, it's really bad to underestimate one's opponents - it can be downright catastrophic.
In politics, however, *over*estimating one's opponents can be just as dangerous. In 2016, sure, Hillary underestimated Trump in a set of key states that lost her the election. But in 2019 and 2020, the entire Dem primary field was overestimating Trump and freaking out about it. As a result, they were ready to endorse a whole plethora of really poorly-considered, badly left-reactionary approaches to dealing with Trump.
I feel like you're on the verge of making the same mistake about Gaetz. COULD he be a secret mastermind? Sure!!! There's no accounting for just getting straight-up played by your opponent. But most of the evidence and the most solid frame of analysis (the Triangle Of Doom) points towards him being a mental lightweight who's just doing this out of a combination of spite and RWM clout-chasing.
If we underestimate him, MAYBE he plays us; but it's still not likely. If we overestimate him, we WILL end up jumping at shadows. And we'll look ridiculous to the voters for fighting a threat that isn't actually there, all while wasting our opportunity to tell them what the REAL threats are.
May not be 15D, but, it's n>2D and whichever spot he lands, WH or a Fox program, he will say, "See, that was smart" so it amounts to the same thing.
I think you’re mistaking a “2d at best” image for a 2d projection of an Nd object.
I was told there would be no topology?
> I’m inclined to call it a sociopathic lust for power, but I don’t actually understand how this course of action leads to him amassing power.
He *did* amass power, did he not? He just lit the Speaker of the House on fire, just to show that he can. What is that if not power? What Gaetz does not obviously seek, in my eyes, is *rank*.
It seems to me that he wants fame, presumably on the expectation that famous guys get laid.
He’s only interested in teenagers tho
High school girls find power moves like defenestrating the Speaker of the House totally hot! *Ahem* Or so I've heard . . . .
Roy Moore, is that you?
High school girls also think it's hot when you defy court orders and install a Ten Commandments monument in a public space! But maybe I've said too much . . . .
He has power the same way the Joker has power, the power to blow things up, but not much else.
"An underrated asymmetry in American politics is that “extreme” Democrats are pretty normal people whose ideal policy outcomes just happen to be further away from the status quo than the moderate Democrats"
The real asymmetry is that the sorts of people who want to break shit on the left by and large aren't Democrats and aren't involved in Democratic Party politics. The Green Party makes it more difficult for Democrats to win elections, but an actual useful thing that it does do is siphon off the sorts of people who cause problems on the Republican side of the aisle.
The Freedom Caucus and other burn-it-all-down Republicans aren't libertarians, so the Libertarian Party doesn't have the same effect for Republicans as the Green Party and DSA do for Democrats.
Twitter isn't real life, etc., but the Chapo/Briahna Joy Gray types don't run for office and often don't consider themselves Democrats or vote for the party's candidates.
Some truth here, but I think a bigger factor is that the left flank of the Democratic Party, including officeholders, want the government to do more and do it well. So they just don't have any real burn-it-down incentives.
Can anyone comment about how McCarthy's logic re: the Democrats was disturbingly like a serial domestic abuser who blames his partner for not cleaning up the glass after he got drunk and shattered all the windows?
"Moderate" Republicans take for granted that Democrats are the adults in the room who will just suffer anything that they sling at them (including in McCarthy's case reversing his word and bringing a totally spurious impeachment charge against the President) and then they're just kind of flabbergasted that their victims won't step up and enable their total recklessness?
Isn't this not only galling, but just also a stupid game for Dems to play along with?
It is, and I'm glad they didn't fall for it
McCarthy is just playing CYA as best he can in a set of circumstances that are terrible for him. Blaming the other party is always the go-to response in that situation.
Matt didn't mention this directly, but I assume everyone would rate the possibility of a government shutdown in November higher than they did yesterday, right?
Definitely higher than it seemed yesterday. But getting to November without a new speaker might persuade some republicans to actually offer democrats a placeholder who will hold the needed votes, even though Matt Gaetz won’t like it. (Presumably it would also be with new rules that Matt Gaetz wouldn’t like either.)
I think the idea of some Republicans offering Democrats a placeholder who will hold the needed votes would require the type of Republicans who would have tried to engage more with Democrats in pushing some sort of concession to protect McCarthy. That is, the sort of actor who would behave in the way you outline would already have revealed their preferences by now.
Maybe but inertia and "I just don’t believe it could happen" are powerful tendencies. It’s possible that now it has happened they might reconsider.
Sure, but at a certain point you keep missing exit ramps and you have to start considering that the driver doesn't want to get off the highway.
No efforts to work with Democrats during the speaker vote at the start of the year, no effort to stop the HFC from getting McCarthy to walk away from the fiscal deal, no effort to forge a bipartisan deal to avoid a shutdown, no effort to protect McCarthy when facing this MTV. Etc. etc.
Maybe, but I also think that they can’t negotiate on behalf of McCarthy - they would have to actually take the leadership themself to be able to make the offer.
The problem with that is whoever takes on this role would probably be committing political seppuku. They'd be primaried for sure.
It would have to be either a moderate Republican who has decided that they are retiring after this session anyway, or a moderate Democrat who gets the seat by promising moderate Republicans that they will do something like bring up all and only the bills that have majority support in the House, rather than doing anything partisanly Democratic.
Or a moderate Republican who is legitimately more worried about losing the general than their primary. Not sure if anyone like that exists (it *could* include the likes of Brian Fitzpatrick, but tbh I'm not as up on Bucks County politics as I should be) but if they do exist, they'd fit the profile.
I remember the “West Wing fantasy” idea back in January was to get a retired moderate Republican like Fred Upton to be speaker with a bipartisan coalition.
If the clock is ticking on a shutdown, there’s at least some chance of that.
I wonder how many fit that description and have the chops for leadership.
Exactly! And the corollary also applies: had the Dems helped McCarthy yesterday, the likelihood of a future shutdown was much lower.
"had the Dems helped McCarthy yesterday, the likelihood of a future shutdown was much lower."
Really?
Because giving in to the demands of terrorists makes them demand less in the future??
No, because doormats are never an obstacle.
At least the defenestration of McCarthy breaks the deadlock on power held by one sinister, conniving racial type.
McCarthy? McConnell? Biden? Kavanaugh? Do I have to spell it out for you?
They had the leadership of the WH, Senate, and House, as well as seats on the SCOTUS. The Black Shamrock League, bent on world domination, had the commanding heights of the government.
Let's hope this current set-back checks their master plan for turning us all into the slaves of the Hibernian conspiracy.
And the puppet master behind the scenes controlling everything, as Republicans continually remind us, is O'Bama.
Tiocfaidh ár lá!
"Tiocfaidh ár lá!"
That's easy for you to say!
It turns out that the Nativists from 100-150 years ago were right!
...just with a significant time delay.
Oh, they Knew Something, alright.
You say Hibernian, I say Popish.
Popery is only one aspect of the wickedness of the potato-eaters. I'm less worried about world domination by Rome than world domination by Dublin, and its tentacles in Boston, Chicago, New York, and elsewhere.
They've already taken over South Bend, for gods sake -- do you want to see that sickly green wave spreading inexorably across our whole nation, like the Chicago River on St. Paddy's day?
Buddy, I live within vomiting-green-beer distance of Boston, you don't need to explain the Emerald Menace to me.
The Irish are also the master-minds behind the Great Replacement.
They want to replace "Great!" with "Brilliant!"
"This tea is brilliant! That goal was brilliant!"
If we let them have their way, they will try to Make America Brilliant Again. No wonder Biden opposes the MAGAs.
I've thought for years (like back to when Boehner was being harassed) that Republicans should make one of the crazy Freedom Caucus members Speaker, so they find out how first-hand difficult it is to weild actual power and to wrangle the entire caucus. My guess is said Freedom Caucus member would quit very soon or there is a Robespierre-turning-on-Danton moment where another FC member takes down the FC Speaker. All this to say: make Matt Gaetz Speaker of the House.
Reading the Wikipedia pages about Robespierre's downfall is a secret guilty pleasure of mine. I revisit them on maybe a monthly basis.
Part of me somehow empathizes with Robespierre in some ways, in that he saw where the road was leading, and was flailing around for an off-ramp, but couldn't find one.
But that doesn't keep me from revealing in karmic justice being meted out.
If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend “The Fall of Robespierre” by Colin Jones. It covers the Frenchman’s last day, shedding a brilliant light on the episode and its aftermath.
This is basically the "How to deal with Islamists" approach. (There's a bunch of political science research on how Islamist political parties moderate when they actually become part of a national government because it turns out that a fundamentalist reading of the Quran doesn't give any guidance on how you fund local sewer districts, pave roads, etc.)
Seems true of European far right parties too (as long as they don’t actually get enough power to be in charge of things without more moderate coalition-mates). Italy’s three big populist parties all moderated pretty fast when they actually entered government and realized that their country would be totally fucked if it Italexited the EU.
The real problem with the Republicans is that they’ve faced minimal electoral consequences for incompetence.
European far-right parties will be out of power quickly if they mess around.
It's hard being Speaker when you don't want to seriously govern, lol -- much easier obstructing people trying to get things done than actually lead (& I don't think Freedom Caucus reps want to actually try)
The thing about the Freedom Caucus crazies is that they don't actually want to wield power.
Correct. They want to entertain their fans on TV, social media, and talk radio. Taking down McCarthy is entertainment.
I hope you’re right.
Nice advice, von Ribbentrop. (OK, cheap shot.)
MTG and Boebert have been fighting for a year or two. Everyone thinks they are allied when then are not. Boebert is part of the Gaetz burn-it-all-down group and MTG is allied with McCarthy and Republican leadership.
I'm not sure we are better off with or without McCarthy. It was a gamble for Democrats and I get why they did it, but the replacement might be worse. I hope the gamble works for the good of the country.
That being said, I have ZERO sympathy for McCarthy. He sold his soul to an utterly morally bankrupt person in Gaetz, so all of this was completely predictable. At some point, Gaetz will get what he deserves, just like some of the others who are also morally bankrupt.
If I were Hakeem Jeffries, I would have doled out a few “present” votes as you went down the list of Democrats and let McCarthy hang on with a bare tie (or majority of 1). Then when Gaetz calls for his second vote, start making demands.
That presumes McCarthy even wamted to bargain. Or that Democrats wanted to trust to him. He already backslid on the debt ceiling cuts.
Yeah -- from best I can tell the Democrats wanted McCarthy gone too, he was a sub-replacement level Republican Speaker from their perspective.
Which might be wrong. But I agree, it was a calculated risk, and Republicans need to know that sometimes, Democrats will not be there to save them.
I think that by starting the impeachment inquiry, then attacking democrats over the weekend, he basically made the argument to democrats that he wasn't any better or more "moderate" than whoever the next guy will be, so it didn't make sense for Democrats to save him. Especially since he wasn't giving them any concessions.
Oh yeah. And impeding the J6 investigation. Is McCarthy actually a worse Speaker than Jim Jordan would be?
This ends one of two ways: either Republicans elect a new Speaker with unanimous Republican support, which they always could have done, or a compromise Speaker is elected with Democratic votes, but in the latter case Jeffries was correct not to bail McCarthy out without explicit concessions (and, realistically, one of the concessions is probably somebody other than McCarthy being Speaker.)
Send Boyle, Dean, and Gottheimer to go offer the crown to Fitzpatrick if he can bring 10 moderate Republicans for a grand reform bill for NEPA, along with permitting/streamlining measures for power transmission, pipelines, geothermal and oil/gas wells, wind and solar farms, and major transportation corridors.
I would have definitely thought about it. Keep your job with like a massive Ukraine aid package would have been appealing. But again McCarthy deserves this, he made a deal with I think the worst person in the house.
And if the rumor is true that Liz Cheney helped sink this for his behavior towards her that’s a Shakespearean twist of fate right there!
On point 13, Europe is already preemptively bitching that none of them can spare the material and they don’t have the money to build industrial chains to make it fast enough.
FFS. Every single time I think they’ve plumbed the depths of fecklessness and hit bottom they manage to disabuse me of the notion.
The logical extrapolation of the Western European policy position on most issues is that they don’t have the right to exist.
Isn't the reason Europe doesn't have an expansive defense base because American policy has been to take over defense concerns from them since the creation of NATO? We want them to spend a *little* more, but not a *lot* more, because we still want to be able to call the shots in Europe. I'm not sure the Europeans are being more feckless than usual.
On the domestic side, the big selling point of NATO to Republicans is that it will cost the American taxpayer less than another major war in Europe. If that's not true, then it's kind of hard to see why Republicans would like it. If you want Republicans (and in the longer haul, American voters) to support emergency spending, you need to demonstrate it's a one-off emergency. But the best way to stand up to Russia is to hold your cards close and bluff you can spend forever.
You are talking about ‘the European’s’ as though they are one big unified thing. In terms of defence, every country is independent. Independent supply chains, independent contracting, independent industry. It’s inherently less efficient than in the US, which can contract from coast to coast and make its substantial defence budget to further.
Yes, and in a perverse way, it is in the American interest that they remain a loose federation with little in the way of an independent unified security goal to rival ours. But then we get unhappy with the results of that loose federation, while ignoring the realistic alternatives.
to be or not to be (the hegemon)...
The purpose of Nato was to "Keep Russia out and Germany down"
Except the reality is that we're not talking about huge amounts of money here from either us or the Europeans. The EU has a GDP of almost 18 trillion dollars. They are supposed to spend about 2% on military spending, but are currently around 1.5% If they simply raised their military spending to the amount they are supposed to and sent that to Ukraine, that would be enough to keep Ukraine supplied (~90 billion a year).
Yes, we want them to spend a "little" more, and they won't even do that. This is a constant and very public complaint the US has had with NATO countries for at least two decades and most NATO countries are perfectly happy to ignore those complaints and continue free riding.
The tax savings point for Republicans would be a be new one when it comes to foreign policy. The more traditional sell to Republicans would be about American strength and status.
I'm not saying that the new sell does not have a market among Republicans, but I don't think it's clear that the market is bigger than the one for the old sell.
It's only new if your point of reference is Ronald Reagan, but not as much if your point of reference is Robert Taft.
Sure, but aside from you, no one's point of reference is Robert Taft.
The GOP, despite your desire to pretend otherwise, is not what it was in 1940. Or 1929. Or even 1975. There is very, very little ideological continuity there by now.
They are more obsessed with government spending today than they were two decades ago. More skeptical of government spending in Europe like they were in the 1940s and 50s. You can see this in %GDP charts, but also in their DW-NOMINATE scores trending rightward while Democrats hold steady. The more things change...
Ahh, so your working theory is that they genuinely care but are terminally incompetent, given the gap between rhetoric and results!
I know, I know, you have your chart on tax take as a percent of GDP. Spending tells a very different story, as do deficits.
The problem is that at the Federal level there are very, very few of you, and a lot of what I'll be an asshole and call "downscale voters."
They don't have a voting base who care, or are sophisticated enough to hold them to account. The college-educated and professional class votes which historically drove GOP "clean government" focuses circa 1920-1985 are fading fast. They therefore go through the motions of being "pro-market" and "anti-big government" because it produces the soundbites that the base likes while not actually crafting policy to that effect. They hold the tax take down, briefly, but never curtail spending, and never do they exercise power to "make the market," by changing or curtailing regulatory bloat and the growth of bureaucracy.
Why do they not want the Democrats to help them dismantle NEPA? Why do they not want to streamline permitting for geothermal drilling? Why is OSHA still impossible to follow in full after Trump promised to simplify it? Why is occupational licensing still a shitshow? Why, in short, can they never exercise an effective deregulatory impulse?
The key thing which divorces them from the Republican Party as it was from 1895 until 1975 is that they lack any understanding of how the government can make (or break) a market economy through regulation and red tape. They no longer understand the concept of regulatory capture, nor rent-seeking, nor anti-trust policy, nor pricing transparency. And because of that, they can't even enact *deregulatory* policies to fix problems that the regulatory state has created, let alone propose good light-touch regulation in lieu of what exists today.
Tax take is not all that matters to conservatism.
Don’t blame Yurp’s free riding on the US’s defense umbrella since the collapse of the USSR on the US.
Why would the fall of the USSR change their calculus? Or America's calculus? Russia is always going to want buffer room on its long land border and Europe is always going to want security from Russia's soft and hard power threats to try and extend that buffer room.
Why is the wish of the "buffer" countries irrelevant here? The specific problem at the moment is that basically all of the countries between Western Europe and Russia want to be aligned with the former and Russia is big mad about it.
Oh they matter, it's just they're small. UK and US are their best allies, Germany and France see the buffer situation a little differently.
"Russia is always going to want buffer room on its long land border"
Why?
This explicitly assumes there must be some otherness between Russia and the western Europe that is completely arbitrary.
Europe always complains about costs in a way we don’t.
I think it reflects their much lower fiscal flexibility more than anything. Europe is dramatically poorer than the U.S. and much more of the services in their economies are explicitly on the government’s books.
The fact that you can only name two exceptions with a combined 3% of the EU's population suggests there's some validity there.
In the main, Europe's nations start at "poorer than the US" (Germany, Netherlands, Nordics, Belgium), go through "a lot poorer than the US" (UK, France), "hugely poorer than the US (Spain, Italy, Czechia), and end up at "barely or just not developed nations" (Greece, Portugal, Poland, Romania, etc.)
As I said elsewhere the other day, perhaps a third of the gap between the US and the Netherlands, Nordics, or Germany can be explained as a function of GDP as an accounting measure, namely that our healthcare expenditures are more directly accounted for in GDP and also bloated by rent-seeking. But the remaining two-thirds represent genuine differences in standard of living.
Also, what a profoundly *silly* thing to be disdainful of. We Americans can actually afford to travel outside the continent often enough that we use the expression "back in the States" commonly among the middle and upper classes!
Americans travel abroad WAY WAY less often than Europeans, and the class divide there is much smaller. This is in part a function of basic geography. To travel from one European country to the next is often cheaper than us domestic flights. To travel from Europe to Middle East or North Africa is also much closer and cheaper than for Americans to do so. The result however is that Americans are far less familiar with the outside. world.
Oh, and on a week where the devastating life expectancy data comes out is probably not the best time to go all rah rah America...
Abroad, sure. Just like Americans often travel three states over at a similar expenditure of time and money. The vast majority of European travelers stay within Europe or, at most, venture to Turkey. There's obviously more diversity within that area than within the United States, but I don't see how that's relevant. It's pretty clear from the data that more Americans leave the continent entirely to travel. Hell, something like 40% of Americans have been to Europe at least once.
As has been beaten unto death, the class divide in Europe is smaller mainly because its middle and professional class are vastly poorer than their American counterparts.
Pointing out that the American healthcare system is a clusterfuck, our zoning and infrastructure construction are a shambles, and our higher education is shot through with rent-seeking, but we're still getting enough right for almost all of us to be richer than Western Europeans of similar relative status... isn't exactly "America, fuck yea."
It's "let's learn from what the Europeans do well and please not emulate the things they don't as if it's a package deal."
Jesus, you've been petulant lately.
Lol.
Mechanistically, if the *entire* differential in healthcare spending between the United States and Germany is due to rent-seeking, without any advantages in performance at all, then adjusted American GDP per capita is 45% higher than German.
And, after taxes, transfers, and healthcare expenses, the residual disposable income an American household has surpasses its German counterpart at around the 25th to 30th percentile.
There are only handful of countries in Europe which do better in that regard.
Could the US improve the performance of its healthcare system and make that number even more lopsided? Absolutely.
And likewise, one of the few sectors Europe doesn't overregulate to near-death is construction; the US has quite a bit to learn from France, Spain, or Germany on permitting reasonable amounts of private housing development *and* more quickly and cheaply building public infrastructure.
But for the rest of the "Western European package"... no, thank you.
We get much larger houses and way more/larger/more powerful cars out of the deal?
We generally have better healthcare.
We have worse health outcomes.
Because the public won't tolerate the kind of paternalism that could actually improve our underlying health metrics (like, say, obesity).
If they are on the phone, they are probably just alerting the person they are speaking to that they are in a much different time zone.
Norway is a petrostate and Switzerland gets a bunch of foreign investment because of their weird banking laws. They aren't comparable to America.
While those things definely help America, they do not create our incredibly high GDP per capita.
Even "help" is debatable. They give us more purchasing power, but also disadvantage our primary and secondary sectors, push over-financialization of the economy, and distort the hell out of the income distribution.
US public debt is not abnormally high by rich country standards. Nor, as far as I know, has the country ever failed to pay back a penny’s worth of interest or principal.
I'm not sure saying "I'm in the USA" is any different from saying "I'm in Europe"
Re: 10 -- given that (1) compromise government is a theoretical aspiration of Congressional law-passing and (2) As you note, McCarthy could and should have totally struck a deal with the Dems, is the system necessarily as stupid as it appears?
Arguably the good version of this kerfluffle would be the one that ends up with McCarthy being answerable to the House at large and has to make some concessions to the Democrats as a condition of his speakership, and then the roughly *half of the country* represented by the Democratic caucus gets some degree of say in governance affairs rather than 0% as they do by default.
The fact that McCarthy wasn't tactically competent enough to pull this off doesn't seem like it's necessarily a strike against the "mischiefs of faction" view.
If the system requires people to behave in ways that are unnatural or irrational for their other policy goals, the system is pretty stupid.
McCarthy cannot make concessions to the Democratic caucus if that goes against the interest of not just the far-right Freedom Caucus member but also the interest of his median caucus member.
While that’s a fine heuristic, it doesn’t work when talking about the GOP. The party prioritizes fighting with Democrats, so there is no system which would have them behaving in a natural way.
Way back when McConnell was talking about fighting Obamacare so people would know there’s a “great debate” going on, people should have taken him seriously. His party needs big fights with Democrats or its voters believe they’re not standing up for them. That’s the main fulcrum of American politics and no systemic change will change that.
So what you're saying is that the main fulcrum of American politics requires fighting between the parties ... hence why it's stupid to have an institutional system that requires compromise.
If the system doesn’t want compromise, then there won’t be a fight.
The GOP needs a fight. You could run the kind of virtual single-party state like Britain with the pre-Gingrich GOP but the current iteration would wreck that, too, in search of a fight so their voters know they’re fighters.
The Republicans are constrained form passing their policy goals in numerous ways by political reality -- this is why they aren't constantly proposing ending Social Security and passing federal abortion bans.
If the Democrats can delivery McCarthy a speakership that his median caucus members can't because there aren't enough of them (and, clearly, there aren't), then the Democrats get to pull some of the strings.
My thoughts:
1. Mostly this is just really funny. McCarthy could not possibly deserve it more.
2. I've been having an unfortunate amount of "The worst person you know has a point" feelings about Matt Gaetz this week, not that I actually think he's serious or making any of these points out of noble motivation, but he's mostly right about how the process should work.
3. It's in fact good to fight to force budgets through normal order and demand people simply accept the outcomes of the process of voting and amendments rather than the way we've been doing it where party leadership negotiates entirely within their coalition in secret then forces it through on party lines, or even worse runs the government through CRs.
4. Justin Amash for Speaker!
RE #2 I've been having the same thought!
- Gaetz is 100% right that McCarthy was a spineless lying liar who was going to keep lying and making promises he couldn't keep to everyone
- Gaetz is 100% right that McCarthy is just somewhat bad at politics and doing his job
- Gaetz is 100% right that individual spending bills and debate would be a better system for the country.
If you take the man at his word, and keep in mind that screwing over mccarthy is also a pretty good end in itself for him, his actions make complete sense
Yes he's obviously not a good faith actor. But maybe he's like 50% good faith here? Even if not, what he's saying makes some sense regardless if he believes it at all
Relatedly, this is hilarious: https://x.com/Kevin__McMahon/status/1707037964017000741?s=20
Point #2 and 3 are excellent. Gaetz and the Joker Caucus want a more open process, less centralization in the Speakership and a return to normal order. Those are all good things IMO.
>But what do Gaetz and his fellow rebels actually want?<
1) A sharp downturn in the economy leading to a MAGA wave election* and an end to US democratic norms, followed probably very rapidly by a substantial dismantling of the Great Society, as well as Social Security privatization. (Doesn't matter if it's unpopular if we no longer have competitive elections).
2) Tax cuts for the affluent.
3) A virtual end to immigration. Withdrawal from NATO. Withdrawal from the UN. Withdrawal from the WTO. Withdrawal of our embassy in Beijing. Air strikes against Mexico.
4) Victory for Russia.
You asked.
*Anyone who thinks the US electorate is likely to correctly apportion blame for a recession precipitated by a fiscal crisis really ought to look revisit the elections of 2010 and 2014 (and also 2016).
This is as good an answer as I've seen. It seems basic that the House GOP would love a recession and I've no doubt that some of them think either a government shutdown or a debt default might be a fine way to cause one (we know that plenty of them don't know the difference between the two).
I’d love to hear more details about why a group of GOP Reps won’t make concessions let alone form a unity leadership under someone with real power sharing. It happened in New York’s state legislature for years, for instance. The moderates who defected from parties did face primary challenges, but they lasted quite a while. Of course NY Republicans are not like national ones. Also the NY governor is MUCH more powerful.
Because the party, from the voters to the politicians, heavily prioritizes fighting with Democrats. Working with Democrats can result in a dicey primary challenge. Both dicey in that the individual politician has a good chance of losing and in that the primary often produces someone unelectable.
You assume that they want to govern more than they hate democrats. The party is much more about hating democrats than about having any actual goals.
What would the upside be from a Republican perspective? Non-embarrassing government? It's obvious how much they value that.
The upside would be functioning government and yes you are correct, it's not something they care about
They haven’t made concessions yet, but there are 45 days or so in which they could.
From the perspective of Republican voters, they did make concessions. They caved on funding for 45 days.
Which Republican voters though? Remember the Republicans who would make the concessions have voters more like Brian Fitzpatrick's than Matt Gaetz's.
Pretty much all of them.
The only difference is whether they think it’s incompetence or high treason.
NY is a Blue State and the US isn't a Blue Country (at least not with the anti-majoritarian Constitutional design we have).
The short answer is because what that relatively small group of GoP reps want is not what the majority of GoP reps want. And because the GoP majority is the slimmest majority in almost a century, that small group of GoP reps wields veto power. If the GoP majority was bigger, then they could be ignored.
On point 13 (Ukraine) from a European perspective, Politico.eu recently noted that Europeans were sleepwalking. Few of them realise a choice may now have to be made between allowing Russia to win (maybe also swallowing up Moldova) or funding Ukraine to get a better outcome in some form. Their leaders know but are silent on this rather urgent matter. Taking the second course will constitute a heavy immediate cost for European taxpayers but the alternative, a Russian victory, might also ultimately mean costly defense budgets to deter Russia, not to speak of Ukrainian migrants heading west. Europe may even have to turn to China for help.