The House GOP Is a Failed State

Kevin McCarthy’s ouster is dramatic evidence, if redundant, about the state of the modern GOP. 

 

[McCarthy] wasn’t associated with any particular governing idea.

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...For a quarter-century, every Republican to ascend to the speakership has descended from it with his standing diminished. It’s a line that travels from Newt Gingrich to Dennis Hastert to John Boehner to Paul Ryan to McCarthy.

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... A party that used to have an instinctual orientation toward authority and order — Democrats fall in love, went the old chestnut, while Republicans fall in line — is now animated by something akin to nihilism. The politics of contempt so skillfully exploited by Donald Trump is turned inward on hapless would-be leaders like McCarthy with no less ferocity than it is turned outward on liberals and the media.

 ...In the case of Gaetz...the dispute is primarily about personal animus, not ideology. He wanted McCarthy’s antlers on the wall of his rec room, and he got them. Needless to say, there are many Republicans who are now hunting for him.

And, yet, in the nihilistic spirit of the age, it is worth asking of these intraparty feuds: Who cares?

 

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McCarthy showed his malleable core on the paramount question of Republican politics, or for that matter all American politics: Where do you stand on Trump?

“I’ve had it with this guy,” McCarthy sputtered to colleagues after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, saying he would push Trump to resign immediately. McCarthy denied news reports that he had ever said this, until my colleagues Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin revealed in their book, This Will Not Pass, that they had the moment unambiguously on tape.

No matter, McCarthy soon enough was reliably back in the Trump fold, and Trump was unreliably and indifferently in the McCarthy fold.

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The House GOP now resembles a failed state. The party elects leaders with no capacity to lead members who have no interest in being led....

 What was that guy’s name again? No need to commit it to memory. That’s what Google is for.