[ To say that anyone outside of the House GOP caucus had a hand in
McCarthy’s downfall requires superhuman amounts of ignorance. It
assumes Democrats exists to bail out the GOP from their mistakes and
provide a xxxxxx against their own worst instincts]
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THE REPUBLICANS BOOTED THEIR LEADER, SO OF COURSE IT’S DEMOCRATS’
FAULT  
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Alex Shephard
October 5, 2023
The New Republic
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_ To say that anyone outside of the House GOP caucus had a hand in
McCarthy’s downfall requires superhuman amounts of ignorance. It
assumes Democrats exists to bail out the GOP from their mistakes and
provide a xxxxxx against their own worst instincts _

Nick Anderson, Substack,

 

To hear Republicans tell it, Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as speaker of
the House on Tuesday was all the fault of their Democratic colleagues.
“I think today was a political decision by the Democrats,”
McCarthy himself said, arguing that the party had hurt “the
institution” in a number of ways in recent years. Mike Pence,
working hard to move above four percentage points in the ongoing
Republican presidential primary, gamely attempted to chime in.
“Chaos is never America’s friend,” he said at Georgetown
University. “I’m deeply disappointed that a handful of Republicans
would partner with all the Democrats in the House to oust the
speaker.” Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer
concurred, tweeting, “Unbelievable. The Democrats, with the help of
Matt Gaetz and a handful of GOP Members, just ousted the Republican
Speaker of the House. What a mess.”

This is, I suppose, correct in a mathematical sense. Eight Republicans
voted to oust McCarthy. An additional 208 Democrats, for what they
would argue were pretty good reasons, similarly withheld their support
for the beleaguered speaker. All told, that adds up to a margin of
200, if

To hear Republicans tell it, Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as speaker of
the House on Tuesday was all the fault
[[link removed]] of
their Democratic colleagues. “I think today was a political decision
by the Democrats,” McCarthy himself said
[[link removed]],
arguing that the party had hurt “the institution” in a number of
ways in recent years. Mike Pence, working hard to move above four
percentage points in the ongoing Republican presidential primary,
gamely attempted to chime in. “Chaos is never America’s friend,”
he said [[link removed]] at Georgetown
University. “I’m deeply disappointed that a handful of Republicans
would partner with all the Democrats in the House to oust the
speaker.” Former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer
concurred, tweeting
[[link removed]],
“Unbelievable. The Democrats, with the help of Matt Gaetz and a
handful of GOP Members, just ousted the Republican Speaker of the
House. What a mess.”

This is, I suppose, correct in a mathematical sense. Eight Republicans
voted to oust McCarthy. An additional 208 Democrats, for what they
would argue were pretty good reasons
[[link removed]], similarly
withheld their support for the beleaguered speaker. All told, that
adds up to a margin of 200, if you are not good at math, or 25 times
as many Democratic votes as Republican ones. Sure, that’s a lot! But
it’s the eight Republican votes that actually matter here—without
them (specifically, without five of them), McCarthy would still be
speaker of the House. He didn’t get those votes; he isn’t speaker
anymore.

Still, the outpouring of scorn for the Democrats is illuminating. It
reveals both a political class and a commentariat that believes that
governance is the sole responsibility of the Democrats. It also
reveals a near-total ignorance of the politics that led to
McCarthy’s ouster.

The biggest problem with the argument that McCarthy’s ouster was the
fault of Democrats was that McCarthy never actually tried to get them
to save him—in fact, he made a number of eleventh-hour gestures
that seemed intended to antagonize
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would-be saviors. Dealmaking is a central responsibility of being
speaker of the House. It is arguably _the_ central responsibility.
But McCarthy never tried to bargain
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Democrats. Instead, he treated the opposition party the same way he
treated the renegades in his own, by essentially daring them to remove
him. It’s possible that McCarthy thought this would work—and it
had at various points in the past—allowing him to simply Leroy
Jenkins [[link removed]] his way into
another couple of months with the gavel. It was a preposterous
miscalculation.

McCarthy may be more of an institutionalist than whoever replaces
him—that may be marginally true if Steve Scalise replaces him and
wholly the case if Jim Jordan does. But the institution that McCarthy
was presiding over was hardly worth preserving, and there were zero
indications that, should he have prevailed, he would have done
anything
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help strengthen it. Democrats providing the votes necessary to protect
him would have essentially been endorsing a ridiculous impeachment
inquiry, the stonewalling of the January 6 investigation, the use of
the House of Representatives to politically protect Donald Trump, the
continued existence of the debt ceiling, and a host of other ills.

Some of the arguments that McCarthy’s downfall was the fault of
Democrats seem to have been lodged from Cloudcuckooland. “Instead of
siding with sanity, Democrats have decided to side with Gaetz. It’s
not a good look,” wrote The Daily Beast’s Matt Lewis. His piece
concludes:

There was a “W” waiting for the Dems—a “hanging curveball,”
as they say. Had they done the right thing on Tuesday, then going
forward, they would have been positioned to basically say, “We’re
above culture war bullshit, and would not abide a coup by Matt Gaetz.
Nobody asked us to rescue McCarthy, but we did. That’s what
responsible leadership does. Remember that the next time the GOP says
we’re the problem.” Now they can’t.

The idea that this was an obvious decision to make is absurd, whether
you view it from the perspective of raw political wrangling or
responsible governance. The notion that this was a looming win for
Democrats is pure fantasy. It’s hard to follow the logic here:
Voters would reward Democrats for rescuing McCarthy? That is a dubious
proposal, one more likely to backfire on Democrats and McCarthy, whose
status as a dead man walking wouldn’t have been resolved. Perhaps
Lewis missed the part where the proximate cause of the Republican
hardliners’ complaint was that McCarthy reached a deal with
Democrats on the stopgap funding bill.

But if Democrats were to bail out McCarthy a second time without
receiving any concessions in return, that would simply be political
malpractice—especially so given that Democrats would have every
reason to believe that he would continue to set the House on the same
path it has been on since he took over: toward extremism and
obstruction. Yes, McCarthy has kept the government open twice. But
that is the responsibility of the leader of the majority party.
Whoever takes McCarthy’s place will have to clear that bar,
regardless of whether they ride into power with the blessing of the
Freedom Caucus. At any rate, McCarthy—who voted against certifying
the 2020 election and who has done everything in his power to protect
Donald Trump—was hardly a defender of “the institution.” Quite
the contrary.

What these arguments assume is that the Democratic Party only exists
to bail out Republicans from their mistakes and provide a xxxxxx
against their own worst instincts; never to ask for conditions or make
demands or participate meaningfully in the policymaking process. They
also suggest, absurdly, that Democrats should provide the votes to
seat a speaker of a Republican Party that has shown itself to be
incapable of governance. This is not how politics works, nor should it
be. The House of Representatives is a mess, and two parties have to
live there. But it’s a mess of one party’s making. If five
institution-minded Republicans want to seat Democratic leader Hakeem
Jeffries as speaker, let them come forward and claim what I’m sure
will be a big political win for themselves.

_[ALEX SHEPHARD is a staff writer at The New Republic. @alex_shephard
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* Congress
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