The battle earlier this month over who would be speaker of the House was the longest and messiest the country has seen in generations. House Republicans took 15 ballots to elect Kevin McCarthy, a longtime GOP leader who had been eyeing the position for a decade. The public airing of party grievances raises the question of whether the old Will Rogers quotation — “I’m not a member of any organized political party, I am a Democrat” — should be reversed. Democrats appear united and Republicans divided.
While the unprecedented nature of McCarthy’s election caused the hyper-engaged, terminally online commentariat to buzz with excitement, it is important not to overstate the drama. Bargaining is essential in politics, and in many instances, those bargains do not come together until the last minute, when both sides are obliged to show their full hands. This is one reason why the government has shut down several times over the last several decades as the two parties posture as long as they possibly can. Likewise, the bulk of the anti-McCarthy vote in the House moved over to his side after last-minute negotiations over matters of substantive issues. That these fractious negotiations were caught by the C-SPAN cameras does not necessarily mean they are unique.
It is important to remember this was not all about posture. McCarthy’s right flank wanted the rules changed to decentralize the power structure of the House, especially when it comes to the appropriations process. They won many victories from the speaker-elect that conservatives should cheer: a return to the old appropriations process, where spending bills are individually debated on the floor under an open rule and amendments can be made; a minimum of 72 hours to read any bill; and more diversity among Republicans on key committees, especially the Rules Committee, which historically has been controlled by the speaker. These are all good things in that they take power from leadership and reduce the chances of omnibus bills, totaling thousands of pages and costing trillions of dollars, being passed in the middle of the night without anybody having read them.
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Nevertheless, the intraparty squabble we witnessed earlier this month points to two long-standing problems inherent in the Republican Party. First, there is a pervasive disconnect between party leadership and the party base, one that does not look to be solved anytime soon. Second, some party members like to exploit this disconnect for their own personal notoriety.
First, the Republican base has been at odds, on some level or another, with the party leadership since at least 2006, when George W. Bush’s job approval rating fell below 40%, a signal that he was losing support among his own partisans. We saw it again in 2008, when many conservatives felt that nominating John McCain was a betrayal of party values, and again in 2012, when Mitt Romney won the nomination. We saw it with the effort among House Republicans to boot John Boehner from the speakership in 2015. We see it even today in Sen. Mitch McConnell’s job approval ratings. According to RealClearPolitics, the Kentucky Republican has a net disapproval rating of 34%, the largest among major American political figures. A gap that wide is possible only because a portion of his own party dislikes him. And yet he was easily named the leader of Senate Republicans, perhaps a perfect distillation of this tension between the top and bottom of the party.
There are a lot of reasons for this lack of trust. Much of it has to do with the persistency of Republican leaders overpromising and underdelivering on sweeping reforms. Ronald Reagan made bold promises and delivered on many of them. But since then, the party base has felt let down again and again. While the base’s expectations are too high, considering how narrowly the two parties have been divided since the mid-90s, party leaders never seem to urge caution during the campaign season. Instead, they promise their voters the sun, the moon, and the stars.
The fight in the House seems to have boiled down to the same basic problem. Members who represent some of the most conservative districts in the country simply did not trust McCarthy to reform the way the House does business and demanded that he write a guarantee into the rules themselves. McCarthy, once one of the “young guns” of the House during the George W. Bush administration and an ambitious reformer seeking to upend the old ways of doing things, now comes across to many in the party as the old guard, looking to defend lobbying interests and the Beltway “uniparty.” That is largely unfair to McCarthy, who has a conservative voting record, but not entirely. After all, he has long been part of a leadership team whose boasts have been greater than its accomplishments.
Second, while most of the anti-McCarthy stalwarts gave way after he agreed to changes in the rules, a few of them held out — most notably Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL). In fact, their refusal to agree on the 14th ballot, when most of the anti-McCarthy vote yielded, was a massive embarrassment to the party leadership and seemed to prompt Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) to lunge at Gaetz in frustration. This opposition was not substantive — it was performative. McCarthy had yielded on key issues. There was no alternative speaker to be chosen. It was time to come together as a party. Yet Boebert, Gaetz, and a few others had to get that last, final, public dig in at their nemesis.
Without impugning any person’s motives, it is worth noting that there is publicity to be gained in certain quarters as an “uncompromising” conservative. It is a path to notoriety around and outside the traditional ways by which one accumulates power and esteem in the House — diligent work on committees or on behalf of the party. With so much of the GOP electorate frustrated by the leadership, this is an appealing avenue for self-promotion. It is an easy trick: pin all the blame for the country’s dysfunction on the “swamp,” identify McCarthy as the head of this cabal, denounce him in strident terms, and blast out some fundraising emails to supporters pledging to man the breastworks, come what may.
Over the years of these GOP disputes, there have been more than a few enterprising politicians who have trod this road. Gaetz and Boebert are hardly the first, nor the most notorious. That honor probably goes to Donald Trump, who breezily blamed the “swamp” in 2016 for every ailment the country was suffering from without ever really detailing how he would fix it. That Gaetz and Boebert could sing the same old tune as Trump did seven years ago just goes to show how successful the former president was in reforming Washington’s ways.
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And ultimately, this is one reason that the speakership battle might matter. Just how big is this performative caucus in the House of Representatives? How many members will categorically refuse to compromise with Democrats? If it is greater than four, the minimum number of defectors the party can suffer in its slender majority, then the Republican majority will effectively be a nullity when it comes to must-pass legislation, such as defense appropriations. In that case, Republican leaders will either have to suffer a massive public relations problem for failing to do their most basic duties or give Democrats a better deal to win them over.
The issue today gets down to a simple question: What do the anti-McCarthy voters actually want? Do they want to move the policy needle meaningfully in a conservative direction while recognizing that compromise with Democrats is necessary, given the divided nature of the government? Or do they want to present themselves to their donors and supporters as the true defenders of the faith? We do not yet know the answer, but it will determine how Republicans fare over the next two years.
Jay Cost is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a visiting scholar at Grove City College.
