House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is a smart guy and astute politician. Threatening to shut down the government, he put together a spending bill that cut spending dramatically (by DC standards, anyway). He was prepared to pass it in his House, and send it to the Dem-controlled Senate. There, everyone knew it would die, but it would be a starting point for negotiations between the Senate and the House.
But McCarthy never got the chance. Predictably, the House Dems opposed it on the grounds it cut spending too much. Less predictably, half a dozen GOP hard-liners also opposed it – for not cutting spending enough.
To avoid a shutdown, McCarthy watered down the bill. The watered-down bill didn’t cut spending as much, but did garner the votes of most of the Dems and most of the GOP too. The Senate Dems and Joe Biden were delighted with the bill, and promptly passed it and signed it.
Which infuriated the GOP hard-liners. They moved to remove McCarthy from the speakership.
The Dems thought it was Christmas. They unanimously voted in favor of the move. Their 200-some votes together with 8 of the hard-liner GOP votes, succeeded in ousting McCarthy. The result was that 8 GOP hard-liners brought about a result favored by all 200-some Dems and disfavored by 210 of their fellow Republicans.
So now, the House is without a speaker and the GOP representatives are without a leader.
Here’s what will happen next. A new speaker must be elected. That requires a majority of the House. The GOP hardliners have shown that they will not vote for someone who is not a hard-liner. This will produce one of two outcomes.
The first is this. The hard-liners get their hard-liner speaker. Expect him to do what the hard-liners demand. That’s to pass spending bills that have zero chance of passing the Senate. The stalemate will produce a government shutdown – an outcome that, rightly or wrongly, gets blamed on the GOP. The people guided by the mainstream media will turn against the GOP even more, and the GOP will lose the House in next year’s elections.
The second is this: The GOP will tell the GOP hard-liners to bug off, and will instead negotiate with the Dems to get a few Dem votes. The Dems, in turn, will hold out for a very squishy speaker – maybe even a fellow Dem. The new squishy speaker will get elected with no GOP hard-liner votes but with a substantial number of Dem votes. In effect, the GOP will have turned over the House to the Dems without the Dems even winning the 2024 election.
Either way, the GOP hard-liners have shot themselves – or at least their party – in the foot if not the heart. I hope it feels good to them.
But it doesn’t feel good to me. I’m as angry as anyone else about DC, but this looks like a selfish, childish, counter-productive, drama queen moment for a few ideologues with a grudge who are willing to sacrifice the cause of conservatism for their own needy egos.
the Aspen beat 
Once again, the Republican party has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Another reason why the Republicans are also known as the STUPID party.
Glenn, your two scenarios are plausible, and although neither is better than whatever compromise McCarthy might have wrangled, I think you misunderstand what the hardliners are trying to accomplish. The House keeps spending money we don’t have, and our debt has reached $49 Trillion: Our GDP is only $23 Trillion. No matter how you parse the options. the inevitable outcome looks like default. Nobody born in this country truly understands what the consequences of defaulting on the debt is, except that almost any pain we suffer in the short term to avert that is minor in comparison. We desparately need to confront that problem, not keep kicking the can down the road.
I agree with that. But I’m not optimistic that the Dems to whom Gaetz has turned the House over to, will do better than McCarthy in addressing the debt.
If I may offer a counter-point, please. McCarthy has a history of betraying those of us on the traditional conservative side of the political spectrum, generally speaking in favor of conservative ideas but voting against such things, which resulted in his being the subject of a book, “The Young Lions,” in which he was associated with those other two stalwart “conservatives,” Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor. Both of his fellow “young lions” were eventually outed as shills for the “uniparty” and McCarthy is clearly another one in the same mold. He went to DC as a purported “Reagan conservative,” but his years there, and his rise to leadership evidence his true proclivities, which cause him to seek to accrue power rather than disperse it among the states and the people. He was renowned for his fund-raising activities, which, as everyone knows, requires kow-towing to those with the funds to give. He is, therefore beholden to the monied interests much more than his actual constituents. This caused many conservative Representatives to harbor doubts about his conservative bona fides, as witness the struggle he had in becoming Speaker. He was able to do so only by promising certain reforms to those conservatives, but, as per his usual modus operandi, he reneged on his promises and chose instead to continue to seek consensus with democrats and other similarly inclined soi-dissant “republicans” (a/k/a/ RINOS) who, like him, seek to accrue power and the money that flows from it in the DC swamp. His loyalty to the conservative cause and the conservative constituents who sent him to DC to implement their political desires is non-existent; he has replaced that with a desire to self-aggrandize. All this was what has led to the current state of affairs. It can therefore hardly be maintained that this imbroglio came as a surprise. It could have been avoided had he not betrayed his promises to the conservatives who earlier agreed to vote for his speakership, but he obviously ignored them and the cause of conservatism in his effort to maintain his power and position among the DC elite political cabal. Thus, I can say that his leadership was likely only to lead to continued decline of conservative government and increasing accretion of power in DC, something that I oppose. To conclude, I can not predict the outcome of the current situation, but I do understand how we arrived at this point and my sympathies lie with Gaetz and his stalwarts.
I value your opinion, Steve, but in all due respect it reads more like a verdict than an argument. It’s thin on data.
And, notably, the Republicans in the House apparently disagree with your verdict to the tune of 210 to 8. Maybe those 210 are all RINOs, but, if so, you’ve defined
“real” Republicans as a vanishingly small segment of the party .
As a matter of semantics, perhaps they deserve a different name. Yesterday, the name they deserved was the name of the party that unanimously sided with them, “Democrats”
I get it. But all McCarthy has been doing is enabling the feeble (in more ways than one) Biden policies. Including the insane funding of Ukraine AND the exploding national debt. When are your 210 supposed Repubs going to do anything about it? Certainly The Turtle won’t. How long do we have to wait…?
Most likely, we have to wait till 2024 when the GOP wins the Senate. Until then, whatever happens in the House is thwarted in the Senate.
Unfortunately, however, the Gang of 8 have reduced the GOP’s chances ofwinning back the Senate.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/no-ukraine-funds-mccarthy-throws-11th-hour-hail-mary-avert-shutdown
I enjoy your work Glenn. But do not enjoy leaving out facts just to make your argument.
I enjoy your work, Glenn. But do not enjoy writers who leave out information just to make their own case. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/no-ukraine-funds-mccarthy-throws-11th-hour-hail-mary-avert-shutdown
Please overlook my return to the fray, but this is topic which deserves our attention and astute analysis. I understand how one can disagree with my position, and inasmuch as I have enormous respect for Our Gracious Host, I grant his position has merit. However, I am inclined to agree with another commentator I esteem, Don Surber, who posted a very long and insightful analysis of the situation. I will not go so far as to include a link, but his substack is, I believe accessible even without a subscription. If I am wrong, I apologize. Nonetheless, he gives a thorough run-down of the events leading up to our present embarrassment.
It seems that Gaetz did exactly what he said he’d do months ago… I know, a rarity in politics.
The election is over a year in the future, and after what the country has been subjected to since 2016, most people couldn’t care less about this cat fight.
Robert W Malone, MD
@RWMaloneMD
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46m
In my opinion, Matt Goetz has repeatedly demonstrated exceptional courage under fire.
McCarthy did not act with integrity, and needed to be held accountable. Goetz did what needed doing.
Now the Uniparty Rinos are predictably attacking him. They are revealing themselves.
McCarthy did what politicians do….he made promises to a small group to get their votes, then failed to keep his word to them. it appears he didn’t even try. In a rare show of courage, this group held him accountable for his failure to do what he promised. He, and everyone else, is shocked and dismayed by this.
It’s a start.
As Matt Gaetz said “You know what chaos is, it’s the dollar losing its status as the global reserve currency. Chaos is sitting on a $33 trillion debt. Chaos is accepting Biden budgets that lead to $2.2 trillion annual deficits forever. We’ve got to get the government to act with a sense of urgency.”