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View of the US Capitol on October 23, 2023, in Washington, DC.
CNN
—
Winning the majority party nomination for president of the House of Representatives usually elevates a lawmaker into the pantheon of American political leaders.
But that’s how it is toxicity of GOP Three weeks after President Kevin McCarthy was ousted, the nominee expected to be named Tuesday may never get the top job.
The nomination is an assignment to a perhaps impossible political mission to unite a conference that could never compromise. And even if the candidate wins the gavel, the next speaker has a reasonable chance of an even shorter term than McCarthy, who lasted nine months.
But this is more than just the woes of a Republican Party that often looks like it’s falling apart. If the dysfunctional House GOP majority can’t come to an agreement, the US government could run out of funding before Thanksgiving week – and millions of Americans could pay the price.
As lawmakers returned to Washington on Monday, there was a growing sense of growing public frustration with a House that has been paralyzed for three weeks as global crises simmer and a shutdown deadline looms.
Florida Rep. Vern Buchanan said his constituents “think we’re all incompetent.” Buchanan, who is supporting fellow Sunshine State MP Byron Donalds for speaker, added: “People are very angry and upset.”
The hopefuls lined up Tuesday at the start of the secret ballot that will produce a party nominee for speaker following the failures of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan to replace McCarthy. But there is no guarantee that the nominee emerging from the secret ballot will be able to muster the required majority in the House — given the stark divisions in the GOP between some far-right hardliners who helped oust McCarthy and more moderate lawmakers in battleground districts. .
Because of their slim majority, almost every Republican must support the nominee to become speaker — a big opportunity in a conference that is deeply divided. Former President Donald Trump is fielding calls from leading candidates seeking his support, but joked Monday that only divine intervention could end the crisis.
“I said there’s only one person who can take it all the way,” Trump said in New Hampshire. “Do you know who this is? Jesus Christ. If Jesus came down and said, ‘I want to be a speaker,’ he would.”
The fact that there were so many candidates on Tuesday tells its own story – namely that no one is strong enough to clear the field, and whoever emerges may not have a strong base of support.
There are signs that House Majority Whip Tom Emmer has made progress, but as a member of a House leadership group distrusted by the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, his candidacy may suffer the same liabilities as those of Scalise and McCarthy. Another possible candidate is Donald of Florida, a member of the House Freedom Caucus and one of the few black Republicans in Congress. But Donald may be too radical for moderate Republicans in districts that voted for President Joe Biden. There was palpable anger among such members — on whom the majority is based — that lawmakers who voted for McCarthy escaped punishment. A speaker from the far right may be too much for them to accept.
But the identity of the new Republican speaker — when he does emerge (there is not a single woman among the current candidates) — may be less important than the predicament he will face. The House GOP has now spent three weeks failing to pick a new leader — time that would have been better spent hammering out a position on a new government funding deal needed to avert a government shutdown in mid-November. Even if a new speaker is chosen by the end of this week, there are just three weeks left before the Thanksgiving break to reach an agreement with the Senate and the Democratic-run White House to avoid another majority government collapse of the GOP.
The funding showdown will represent one of the toughest tests ever for a new speaker. The possibility that this leader will be a compromised figure in danger of losing his job at any moment at the head of a revolutionary conference makes the position even more vulnerable.
As former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, himself a notoriously polarizing figure, told Fox News this weekend: “They made big decisions down the road. There’s a very real danger that they’ll elect someone and three out of four or five weeks from now, you’re going to blow up a group of people and decide to go back to the same mess.”
The danger of such a scenario is heightened by the fact that any new speaker will face the same kind of impossible choices that McCarthy faced when he narrowly averted a government shutdown last month. Knowing that he could not meet extreme demands for spending cuts from hardliners with a Democratic Senate and White House, McCarthy was forced to use some Democratic votes to pass a funding bill. And it cost him his job.
The growing pressure to fill the speaker’s chair may be an incentive for the GOP to finally end the impasse. But the danger is that a compromise candidate won’t have spent the years building a power base — inside Capitol Hill and in the critical fundraising circuit — and thus may not be an effective leader of a fractious conference.
The fact that party leaders can miss just four votes and pass a bill on party lines has highlighted the huge divisions within the conference and underscored that there is no reliable Republican majority for any legislation in the House right now.
Rep. Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, for example, said the leadership crisis “shows that we’re not functioning as a majority. And when you lose that, you lose the ability to govern.”
The 2024 election is still more than a year away, but the sight of a House being brought down by its own divisions bodes ill for the Republican Party. The party can’t enact its agenda, has no chance of showing voters it can be an effective majority, and can’t even use its power to prevent Democrats from taking tough policy votes that could come back to haunt them — like could generally make a majority party at this point in the political cycle.
But House Republicans aren’t just hurting themselves. If the leadership vacuum lasts much longer, the damage could spread across the country and become global.
A government shutdown could hurt countless Americans — including members of the armed services who could be left without pay. And the paralysis in the House means lawmakers cannot vote on sending emergency aid to Israel amid its war with Hamas. Biden’s request for a new $60 billion aid package for Ukraine is also going nowhere. At home, vital appropriations bills for everything from agriculture to energy and overseas activities have stalled.
“I think House Republicans know this is very damaging to the country. Look at what’s happening … in Israel, what’s happening in Ukraine and all the other things that we know are happening in the world, including our own country,” Rep. Larry Bucshon told CNN’s Brianna Keilar on Monday. The Indiana Republican also warned that the party is hurting itself ahead of the crucial funding showdown.
“I think it puts us at a disadvantage. We don’t have someone who is the speaker of the House to negotiate with the White House, with the Senate Democrats who are the majority. … It puts us at a political disadvantage.”
“Also practically for the country, it’s not good.”