Years of broken promises, political reversals and obeisance to the GOP’s Trumpian elements finally caught up this week with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. By reneging on last May’s budget deal with President Joe Biden and on procedural promises to fellow Republicans, he angered both the Democrats and a crucial cadre of GOP right-wing members. The result: Tuesday’s unprecedented vote abruptly ending his nine-month speakership.
In a larger sense, however, McCarthy fell victim to a decade-long Republican revolution that turned the GOP from a moderate conservative party that worked for smaller government and stronger defense to a divided party whose most extreme right-wing elements often hold sway. That revolution hamstrung the last two Republican speakers before ousting this one and made it very difficult for House Republicans to govern, even when they had more than their current five-seat majority.
This revolution started with the Tea Party movement more than a decade ago, spread with Donald Trump’s election to the presidency and has been on full display since Republicans recaptured the House last November.
It transformed the GOP from a party pushing conservative alternatives to the Democrats’ liberal policies to one with many members seeking to dismantle parts of the government and rejecting a firm stance abroad. An underlying impetus is the fact that many Republican voters want their representatives to stick to their principles, rather than follow the traditional practice of seeking compromises.
Multiple polls over the past decade have shown the sharp contrast between the attitudes of Democrat voters, most of whom favor compromise, and Republicans who prefer their officeholders to resist it.
The Tea Party movement arose as a reaction not only to President Barack Obama’s landmark Affordable Care Act but to deficit spending by the prior George W. Bush Republican administration on the Iraq War and domestic programs like the Medicare prescription drug benefit and the 2008 bank bailout.
Its energy helped the GOP regain the House in 2010 but victory brought a number of anti-government radicals who formed the House Freedom Caucus and hamstrung John Boehner on issues such as immigration.
Trump’s takeover of the GOP provided executive branch sanction of their tactics and his threats drove out of Congress such independent-minded Republicans as Sens. Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, who epitomized the traditional political give-and-take that made government work.
Last Saturday, facing a government shutdown for which he feared Republicans would be blamed, the speaker proposed a simple extension of government spending authority for 45 days that attracted all Democrats and a majority of Republicans.
However, 90 GOP lawmakers voted against it, and the speaker’s reversal ensured his right-wing critics would seek to pursue their threats to force a vote on removing him.
McCarthy was really the victim of larger forces with which the next Republican speaker will have to deal. Whoever it is won’t have much time to reconcile the competing GOP factions, since government spending authority will run out again on Nov. 17, right before Thanksgiving.
Morning Briefing Newsletter
Get a rundown of the latest local and regional news every Mon-Fri morning.
