In the end, he couldn’t even get 218 votes, a simple majority. The GOP’s Kevin McCarthy gained the House speakership in the dead of night early Saturday, but the last winner of a 15-rounder who emerged this battered and bloody was Muhammad Ali, who told reporters after 1975′s “Thrilla in Manila” that “it was like death.”
Pundits were quick to portray McCarthy’s grueling and at times comically pathetic 3 1/2-day slog to victory as a symbol of weakness and dysfunction within the not-quite-post-Donald Trump Republican Party, but the reality of what just happened on Capitol Hill is far worse than that, and I’m not sure if it’s fully set in.
The ambitious but low-wattage Californian was finally elected speaker on that 15th ballot — in the kind of gridlock that America hasn’t seen since the run-up to a Civil War that killed 600,000 people.
The ability of a McCarthy-led House to stymie progress for two years against the run of play in American politics would be bad enough, but it’s a lot worse than that. To win that diminished and tarnished speaker’s plaque over his new office door, McCarthy ceded much of his power to the radical bloc of the House’s 20 or so most extreme right-wing members. He gave them not just increased visibility but power to investigate their enemies and block basic governance — and to replace the speaker on a whim. These grifters and C-list stars of their own reality shows — elected from the most extreme pro-Trump, uncompetitive districts in the United States — now wield veto power over the will of the American people.
McCarthy’s exhausting election was the launch of a crisis in which the American Experiment will be held hostage for the next two years by the ever-changing moods of the most extreme whack jobs in American politics. The real fun is likely to start — according to Wall Street analysts — around August, when the government’s deficit spending is projected to bump up against the current debt ceiling of more than $31 trillion.
Without legislation this summer, the United States faces the very real prospect of a damaging default on its debt obligations, as well as scenarios in which things like Social Security or military salaries aren’t paid.
The “Damn Yankees”-like deal of damnation that McCarthy made with congressional bomb throwers like Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert seems to ensure such a disastrous outcome, or at least a near-death experience. McCarthy reportedly promised the renegades that any debt ceiling increase would be attached to a 10-year plan to balance the budget.
That would mean an estimated $11 trillion in long-term spending cuts. Although one of two good things — mainly, massive reductions to the Pentagon’s obscenely bloated budget — might come from that, the bulk would be the decimation of government programs that are for the most part wildly popular, like Social Security and Medicare. President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats will never sign off on this legislative blackmail. More importantly, virtually none of the millions of Americans who went to the polls in November voted for this nonsense.
It is minority rule when the newly minted Speaker Kevin McCarthy promised in the Saturday morning darkness that he would fix “woke indoctrination in our schools” — even though a majority of Americans (53%) think it’s appropriate to teach high school students that “systemic racism is embedded in American institutions.”
It is minority rule when McCarthy says his House will pursue fossil fuel-intensive “America First” energy policies — even though surveys consistently find that two-thirds of Americans believe the exact opposite.
In her popular newsletter, the historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote Saturday that “the party is planning either to convince more Americans to like the extremism of the MAGA Republicans — which is unlikely — or to restrict the vote so that opposition to that extremism doesn’t matter.”
One of these days, the dam is going to break. I believe there will come a time when Americans wake up to the reality of minority rule and say that enough is enough. That time may come in August, but as a nation do we have the gumption to make those kind of radical changes — ditching the Electoral College, ending the filibuster, and a second, bulletproof kind of Voting Rights Act, and that’s a bare minimum — to finally govern by the people’s will? It would require — building on historian Eric Foner’s brilliant notion that America launched a Second Founding after the Civil War — a Third Founding. And maybe this time we can do it without 600,000 corpses littering the countryside.
Will Bunch is national columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. ©2023 The Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
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