Kevin McCarthy’s big mistake was trying to govern.
The now ex-speaker’s historic ouster came only three days after he was forced to use Democratic votes to head off a damaging government shutdown that his own party’s absolutism was about to trigger. This compounded his original sin, earlier this year, of blinking when House GOP hardliners threatened to cause a disastrous default on America’s debts that could have thrown the economy into chaos and caused global panic.
McCarthy’s short speakership underscored how the Republican Party in the age of Donald Trump has turned into one of the great forces of instability in American life, and potentially the world, with the ex-president dominating the 2024 GOP primary as he takes aim at a wrecking ball second term. A party that once defined conservatism as preserving a traditional sense of steadiness and strength has evolved over the last three decades into a haven for chaos agents, stunt politics and a perpetual ideological revolution that keeps driving it to new extremes. The party’s willingness to accept the outrageous was also on display Tuesday in New York, where Trump ranted in a corridor outside a courtroom hearing his fraud trial and was slapped with a gag order for attacking a judge’s clerk on social media.
McCarthy was no moderate and did little to check the GOP’s turn away from democracy. But his defeat, at the hands of far-right rebels he complained last week want to “burn the whole place down,” is an eloquent commentary on his party. His political assassins, led by Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, toppled their leader with no plan for what comes next – leaving a hugely important wing of the US government paralyzed for at least a week. The self-inflicted chaos will hamper the party’s effort to capitalize on President Joe Biden’s vulnerability, and the fresh show of incompetence and extremism could hamper the GOP’s bid to retain swing seats it needs to keep its majority next year. More importantly Tuesday’s political regicide showed that the majority in the House is inoperable and that the Republican Party is unmanageable. Until that changes, America itself will be ungovernable.
McCarthy’s fall is not without irony. It came about when he diverted from the path of extremism by seeking an accommodation with Biden to save the country from harm. In a party in which trying to break the cherished chain of peaceful transfers of presidential power, being criminally indicted four times and cozying up to some of the world’s most bloodthirsty dictators is not a disqualification (see Trump), McCarthy’s reluctant search for compromise was unpardonable.
McCarthy stoked the extremism that felled him
For a while, McCarthy seemed to do everything right in appeasing the radicalism that perpetually drives the GOP to the right.
In rising to power in a job he had long craved, the Californian paid the requisite homage to Trump, reviving the disgraced ex-president’s reputation with a post-Capitol insurrection pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago and working to thwart accountability for an uprising he briefly condemned. More recently, McCarthy ordered an impeachment inquiry into Biden, despite a dearth of evidence of the high crimes and misdemeanors that are the standard for considering the Constitution’s gravest sanction.
But far from ejecting Biden from office, McCarthy himself was gone in less than a month of launching that inquiry. McCarthy probably hoped to placate the fury of the right with the impeachment move, but there’s no limit to the demands of an anti-government GOP faction for which chaos is an end in itself. Before interim Republican leaders said they’d recess until next week to try to come up with a new speaker, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Rep. Tim Burchett, one of eight Republicans who sealed McCarthy’s fate on Tuesday, whether his party would have a new figurehead by nightfall. Encapsulating the GOP’s embrace of anarchy, the Tennessean replied: “I have no earthly idea, brother.”
