Oct 13, 2023 By Richard Robbins 4 min read

The House of Representatives was on the verge of a governing majority last week. And then it wasn’t. The gulf between the two parties was too great and antagonisms between lawmakers too severe to admit to real cooperation.

Thus, Kevin McCarthy was ousted from the speakership by eight renegade Republicans, and the House – and the federal government – faces days, if not weeks, of protracted battles that complicates two already complicated and vexing questions: Can America be governed, and is this one more sign of the impending end of U.S. democracy?

The vote to boot the Californian was 218-210. Perhaps if McCarthy had been steadier and slightly less partisan, he might have picked up some support from the other side of the aisle. As it was, Democrats cast all of their 210 votes against McCarthy, whose nine months as House leader was the shortest on record.

It was also the first to unravel at the hands of a speaker’s own party.

A mere handful of House Republicans forced the issue. Lead by Matt Gaetz of Florida, the eight represent deep red congressional districts. Empowered by a Republican base fueled by resentment of bugaboo elites – even their own elites – the eight plowed ahead, heedless of the wishes of the vast majority of Republicans in the House.

The eight claimed they were acting in the country’s best interest. That hardly seems credible, given the multiplicity of problems the country faces, the most immediate of which is another pending government shutdown in mid-November.

Give the eight their due. In addition to “the crisis at the border,” they wailed on things fiscal and budgetary: the debt ceiling agreement which McCarthy negotiated with President Biden, the size of the national debt, federal spending levels, inflation.

McCarthy, in his post-ouster press conference, claimed that references to fiscal restraint and responsibility were beside the point. “You all know Matt Gaetz,” he told Capitol Hill reporters. “You know it was personal… It was all about getting attention from you” in the media.

“I want to be a Republican that governs,” the ex-speaker added, inferring that Gaetz and friends are a wrecking crew out to damage or even to destroy government.

It is significant that bright and early the next day Gaetz snuggled up close to a microphone with Steve Bannon, podcaster and chaos agent who advises that government spending is “cootie-infested,” and who has told Republican lawmakers, “Get an amendment. Make it as outrageous as possible.”

The truth is that a large portion of the GOP has turned outrage into governing credo. Maybe this isn’t surprising. A party that no longer believes in elections – or believes in selective elections only – can hardly be expected to believe in democratic governance.

Should Democrats have come to McCarthy’s rescue? The long-term answer is yes, but most politicians operate in the short-term, and the short-term supposition was that saving McCarthy would have amounted to political malpractice, absent an unprecedented (and politically implausible) power-sharing arrangement.

Besides, McCarthy so angered the opposition party over recent years that trusting him to keep his word on pledges he might have otherwise proffered was a bridge too far for House Democrats to cross.

So is this the beginning of the end?

Most likely, we’ll muddle through to a tolerable resolution; still, the omens are, well, ominous.

“You’ve got a real institutional problem,” McCarthy said at his farewell press conference.

According to Brian Riedl of the conservative Manhattan Institute, the no-compromise fringe of House Republicans now has a lock on House policy, which, he pointed out, “doesn’t square” with the reality of a Democratic Senate and a Democratic White House.

Mark Medish of the nonprofit Keep Our Republic said, “We can and should have vigorous debate about spending priorities and the national debt. But if we are inclined to repeatedly call into question the functioning of the state, we are on road to unraveling….”

In the wake of McCarthy’s ouster, Harvard’s Daniel Ziblatt, the author of “Tyranny of the Minority,” argued that “what precedes a government breakdown is political stalemate and extreme dysfunction where there’s a sense that nothing can get done. When governments can’t respond to genuine crises, it has a delegitimizing effect, and it reinforces the sense among citizens that we have to resort to other means.”

Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.