Teenager in the Room

Image via CityWatchLA.

Pushing the snooze button solves nothing, because these same losers will try to pull the same shit in 45 days. I voted yes tonight to keep the government open, but I’m done normalizing this dysfunction. This is not entertainment, it’s governance. 

—Senator John Fetterman

“There has to be an adult in the room,” the speaker said. He suggested that the group of 15 to 20 GOP holdouts who regularly sabotaged Republican-backed votes act like political children.

Actually, apparently unknown to McCarthy, there were dozens and dozens of adults in the room. Whether he actually decided to join them and be an adult himself is up for debate, but I'm not buying it. I think Fetterman's analogy fits better. McCarthy is the teenager in the room, grousing: "Mom, it's not even healthy to get up this early. You're stunting my growth! I had to do a whole impeachment thingy already this week!"

Now the babies in the room have fired him, and there's no Speaker in the House at all. I'm finding that hilarious, as apparently is John Boehner, who made it out of  a similar pickle with a good deal more dignity, though dignity was never his own strong suit:

The simple pleasures of not being Kevin. https://t.co/7AXBcfyJGR

— Yas We Can @yastreblyansky.bsky.social (@Yastreblyansky) October 3, 2023

McCarthy was certainly the weakest and most ineffective Speaker in memory, and his fate was largely sealed right at the start of the speakership last January with the agonizing 15-ballot election and the partly secret deal he made with the Trumpiest members that gave any one of them the power to do what Rep. Gaetz did today, submit the motion to vacate, forcing a vote, a little like the traditional vote of confidence in a parliamentary system, on whether or not the current Speaker should "vacate" the office; which (all 213 Democrats would vote yes, on partisan principle, so just 5 of the 222 Republicans voting yes as well could remove him), he was always going to lose—I said in a "matter of months".

It seems (per CBS News) that that one-member rule for calling a vote to oust the Speaker always existed, going back to 1910, until it was changed at the outset of the second Pelosi speakership in 2019 to require a majority of one of the party caucuses; Gaetz's demand for giving the power to any single member at the beginning of the term just restored a longstanding norm. I don't know how likely it is that House members will try to rewrite the rule now in the middle of the term—Gaetz himself has declared they won't, but the person with the biggest role in making a change, House Rules Committee chairman Tom Cole, seems extremely irritated by the whole thing:

Nobody knows what’s going [to] happen next, including all the people that voted to vacate (they) have no earthly idea what, they have no plan. They have no alternative at this point. So it’s just simply a vote for chaos.

Though he still wants to assign primary blame to Democrats:

And he's not the only one. The whole Republican caucus is furious, with Gaetz, McCarthy, or both. Gaetz is just altogether a boil on the butt of humanity, an awful person from start to finish, as well as a subject of a House Ethics Committee investigation

Since the spring of 2021, Mr. Gaetz has been under investigation over allegations he engaged in sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use and accepted impermissible gifts under House rules, among other allegations.

that was on pause while he was being investigated on the sex allegations by the Justice Department (which apparently decided the witnesses in the sex trafficking charges were too scummy for a jury), but is now said to have started up again, possibly one of the reasons he's been in such a bad mood (normally, the Ethics Committee, evenly divided between the parties, isn't expected to do anything about anything, so this unwonted activity on their part really is pretty interesting).

Meanwhile, McCarthy really has gone back on his word with everybody he's ever negotiated with, from Gaetz's faction when they allowed him to be elected Speaker through the Democrats with whom he came to a formal agreement on raising the debt ceiling in June only to renege on it two months later, endorsing the Gaetz group's demands for painful further spending cuts, and in a last blow making this 45-day extension of the previous deal contingent on a refusal to increase aid to Ukraine (which is endorsed by large majorities of Republicans and Democrats in the House but rejected by the Gaetzists, who are clearly Putinists). Then he went on Sunday morning TV to blame the possible shutdown on Democrats:

While speaking with CBS News host Margaret Brennan on "Face the Nation," the California Republican said he had doubts about whether the bill, which passed with mostly Democratic votes, would actually get through the House.

"I wasn't sure it was going to pass," he said. "You want to know why? Because the Democrats tried to do everything they can not to let it pass."

Brennan laughed, noting that it was Democrats who kept the bill afloat, as 90 Republicans voted against it.

On Monday, discussing whether or not they might support McCarthy in the motion to vacate, that video was one of the the things the Democrats looked at. They clearly made the right decision; Kevin couldn't be trusted.

In the end, it's really the party, as David Kurtz says for TPM:

But this is not really about Kevin McCarthy. He’s a stand-in. Before him were the chronically debased Paul Ryan and John Boehner. The House GOP has been on this merry-go-round for more than a decade.

McCarthy’s downfall is another symptom of the same underlying pathologies: a cultish GOP in thrall to a would-be autocrat, anti-majoritarian structural impediments, a surge in right-wing extremism, white resentments and grievances channeled into a burn-it-all-down fever.

I'd like to think they can't survive this way—their anti-majoritarianism reflects the understanding that they don't represent a majority, and can't win elections without the aid of anti-democratic features in the electoral system and the red-state districting maps, and they really shouldn't be able to win at all, if our country had a functioning democracy at the national level. And I think there's really hope (after the debacles of abortion referenda and Democratic gainst in special elections all over the country this year). that their inability to govern could really be punished in 2024.