Legal and political experts weigh in on how it got to this point and what it means for the future.
 | By Allison Benedikt Editorial director, Opinion |
When Republicans eked out a House majority in an unexpectedly close nail-biter of a midterm election, I knew things were going to be tough for Representative Kevin McCarthy. But I'm not sure anyone thought it would be this tough. |
"For the first time in nearly a century," the legal scholar Richard H. Pildes wrote on Thursday in a guest essay, "we have witnessed the stunning spectacle of a Republican Party so fractured it has struggled in multiple rounds of balloting to choose a speaker of the House." |
Pildes looks beyond former President Donald Trump to explain the train wreck, smartly pinpointing the other forces that have made the usual business of electing a speaker so toxic. "That the simple first act of a new House — the majority party choosing a speaker — is so fraught," he writes, "exemplifies the difficulties that political parties" — and he means both parties — "now face in being able to manage themselves, let alone govern." |
Pildes points to the tremendous power of social media and small donor fund-raising as two factors that have increased any single politician's ability to get vast amounts of attention and money — an incentive structure that has "enabled individual members of Congress to function, even thrive, as free agents." |
Or, as Michelle Goldberg put it in her scorcher of a column this week, the people gumming up the works for McCarthy are "crafting brands as much as political careers, meaning they benefit from high drama and have little need to work their way through Republican institutions." These are people who care more about airtime than policy, Michelle says, and if you've watched any cable news this week, it's easy to see that they're winning. It's also reasonable to assume that this is not a one-off event, but rather the beginning of the next stage of institutional breakdown. These incentives are not going away. |
So where does this leave McCarthy? |
In April 2021, Mark Leibovich wrote a long piece in The Times about McCarthy. It had been nearly four months since the Jan. 6 riot, and McCarthy was sticking with Trump because, as Leibovich put it, "he has made the calculation that the former president's support is essential for his ambitions to become speaker after the 2022 elections." Whoops! |
As of this writing, McCarthy's chances look bleak. If he eventually gets to 218 votes, the best-case scenario, as Michelle puts it, is that he'd be "a hostage to the hard right and constantly in danger of defenestration." So whether he pulls this off or is forced into the recesses of Congress, it's hard to imagine him having much power. |
As for where this leaves the country — well, it's hard to say. In a piece published today, Katherine Miller, a writer and editor for Opinion, puts the messy speaker fights of 1923 and 1856 in context and asks whether the meaning of this current moment will reveal itself to us in time. Ultimately, it's impossible to know what we're living through as we're living it. "Maybe," Katherine writes, "the ultimate context is just that — for some period of time, not concluded yet — we've entered into a realm where the unbelievable happens." |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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