McCarthy Sells His Soul for Nothing

Welcome to Bags to differ. The Bulwark weekly round table discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to center right. I’m Mona Charron, dedicated columnist and policy editor at The Bulwark, and I am joined by our regulars, Bill Galston of The Bookings Institute in The Wall Street Journal, Linda job as of the Nishkanen Center and Damon Linker who writes the Substack newsletter eyes on the right. Our special guest This week is the Bulwark’s own Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast and commonly seen in many places as a respected commentator, including a one place that you might want to catch both of us which is if you become a Bulwark plus member, you get a weekly secret podcast that Charlie and I do on Tuesdays.

So Welcome one and all. Happy New Year, one and all. Happy New Year. Well, it has been quite a week on Capitol Hill with multiple votes for speaker. We are heading close to double digits as we record a recalcitrant minority of the House GOP continues to vote against Kevin McCarthy for speaker.

The vote has not moved despite the incredible spectacle overnight of Kevin McCarthy basically giving up everything in order to secure this job. And so I’m gonna begin with you, Charlie, and ask who in the world would want a job like this? That is the speaker’s job. When you’ve agreed to basically have no power?

Well,

first

of all, thanks for inviting me. And, you know, at the risk of repetition, amazing that they’re going through this again. And that the day after Donald Trump weighs in and tells people to knock it off, the day that Elon Musk endorses McCarthy. Not only does McCarthy lose, but he doesn’t gain a single vote, not one vote has moved despite apparently spending the entire night engaging what I described in my newsletter as self glding. And you’re asking exactly the right question.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board asked it. Who is crazy enough to want this job? This is the I think objectively speaking, the worst political job in America right now. Whoever takes this job is pretty much guaranteed to, you know, be at the center of chaos of backbiting for the next two years or the next two weeks or however long they last. The dynamic in the caucus right now is that you have more than a dozen Republican congressmen who frankly don’t care about the institution, who do not care about governance, who do not care about whether or not they are damaging the political party, they are loving the theater.

And right now, you can just sense the frustration on the part of other Republicans, including Kevin McCarthy himself, who, by the way, I’d give no sympathy to. But it’s saying, you know, what more can I give you? And the answer is Nothing except your head on a platter. I mean, there’s nothing more that he can give up to them. He has groveled.

He has caved. He has surrendered. He has self humiliated. And amazingly, Kevin McCarthy’s finding that you cannot shrink yourself into a position of power like this.

Linda, Charlie, mentions the dynamic within the caucus. And this is actually a story that predates Donald Trump. Many of the problems in the Republican Party are traceable to Donald Trump, but not all of them. And this is one that you remember well we saw this kind of performative ass hollary excuse my language. And it’s that’s a line I think I stole from Charlie.

But we saw this, for example, with Ted Cruz, and his absurd, no plan b, you know, holding up the work of Congress to say that we were going to defund Obamacare when they didn’t have the votes. And it was absolutely impossible, but it played well with conservative media. And aren’t we seeing another version of that? That these nineteen or however many, you know, it is, this resistance caucus. They don’t care about governing.

They don’t care about whether there’s an end game here, about getting anything substantive. They just want to be seen as disruptors. That’s right, by their particular audience. Although there is

a very big difference, and that is that conservative media has turned on these guys as well. I don’t know if you saw the clips that were playing of Sean Hannity with Lauren Bogart he was really hard on good old Lauren. How many votes did she win by don’t remember, but it was very, very close. I mean, generally, barely one. A very conservative district, I happen to have lived in that district at one point.

In Colorado. So, no, they have nothing whatsoever to gain. Well, you mean nothing to gain, like, substantive

Nothing seems to say why. No worries.

They’re not gonna they have ten percent of the vote, but they’re never gonna get to two hundred and eighteen. That’s not gonna happen. So what is their goal? And they have absolutely humiliated, Kevin McCarthy. And I mean, this guy and I have unfortunately sat way too long in front of the television watching this spectacle go on.

Sort of engaging in shot in Freud all the while because, you know, Kevin McCarthy used to be a sort of reasonable guy, not particularly ideological, not all that principled. And then, of course, he sold his soul to the devil in order to get back in Donald Trump’s favor after January sixth. And he has nothing to show for it.

He sold his soul at a discount and still didn’t get And still didn’t get And

still didn’t get anything. Right. Right.

So

I don’t know what the end game is. I mean, there are all sorts of scenarios which I suppose we will talk about in a minute, you know, of — Yeah. — different things that could happen. But I’m not sure. Any of them will work with this group of twenty neanderthals.

You know, I don’t know how to describe these people. I mean, you know, a couple of them Chipotle made some I thought legitimate points when he was up giving his nomination speech. I don’t even remember who he was nominating now because they’ve gone through a series of people they’ve put up against the party. But he made some points about the way in which the House used to operate regular order. You know, we passed an almost two trillion dollar bill last time around never went through the committee, never had sub committee hearings, most of the members were not able to even read the bill and they didn’t have it long enough to be able to know what was in it and digest it.

The House is a mess. I worked in the House in my early career. I worked for House Judiciary Committee. It used to be up place of rules. I mean, the rulebook was something that if you were a young staffer and wanted to make yourself useful, you read that book, cover to cover, you learned the rules because the rules were important and the way Bills work their way, not just through the committee structure, but the negotiations that would take place, the reconciliation, and everything that would take place when the Senate passed a different version, all of that produced good policy.

And we’ve abandoned that Well, not me. It didn’t always but it produced better policy. I think than what we have today. I mean, today, you know, who knows? Yeah.

You know, so it’s a mess and there does need to be reform. But this is not the way to do it. Yep.

Bill Galston, at one point, I also worked on Capitol Hill, worked for congressman Jack Kemp at the time. And then two, the rules were very important. I mean, it was known that there were certain members who had mastered the rules to such a degree that they could get what they wanted more effectively than others who didn’t know the rules as well. And that just seems like another century. Doesn’t well, it was another century.

But, I mean, it’s used another world. So respond to that. But before you do, let me just tell you how things have gotten. I mean, people are getting a little punchy after six, seven votes where it’s the same same thing. So this is from political.

Congressman Ken Buck was recommending that members should have a meeting with booze that that might help move the talks along. And Justin Amash was hanging out and offering himself. He’s a former member. Offering himself a speaker and saying he wished that this kind of thing went on when he was there. But this is the best one.

Representative Jeff Van Drew A petite former dentist from New Jersey often seen in pin striped suits argued that absent any agreement, the party’s leaders should get everybody back in the caucus room and start beating the daylights out of each other until we get something. There you go.

That’s not the worst suggestion

ever. So respond to any of that. I’m teeing it up for you to comment on whatever you want. I mean, about the rules, about the about this crazy process that we’re watching, about the the the humiliation of of Kevin McCarthy about why anybody would want this job? Any

of that?

I’ve struggled for decades to understand my own party. And it it would be falling in medium to pretend that I I understand the other one, but It’s clear to me that in the absence of reason, some very strong passions are bubbling up. And some of this has a long history. Newt Gingrich, I think, was a pivotal figure in centralizing power in the house, in the office of the speaker. And that works well when there’s a strong bond.

Between the speaker and the caucus. And when that bond yields tangible results, that make most people happy.

That

hasn’t been the case for a while, and I know for a fact, having been hanging around the hill in various capacities, none formal over the past decade, that a lot of members on both sides of the aisle are intensely thrust rated. With the consequences of this process of centralization,

they

feel completely shut out of actual policy determination. They complain whether Democrats or Republicans that bills are written in the speaker’s office and dead of night and then presented to them as taken and leave at propositions. And with speakers in such complete control of the rules committee, If the speaker doesn’t want any amendments at all, well then there’s gonna be a completely closed rule and then you either have to break with your

party

or go along with legislation that you really believe is fundamentally flawed. And some of what’s going on is, I think, reflective of that. And then there are people, as you and Charlie and others have said, who are in it for the performance, not the policy, because their idea of a promotion is to move from Congress to their own show on fox or some place, although they may be going too far to be eligible for that anymore. And part of it I think is that the concessions that McCarthy

makes

just fortifies the belief that many of the dissidents have, that he’s a man completely without either principal or spine. Mhmm. So he is not helping himself, I think, by

exceeding

to their demands in the way that he’s doing it. Because I think what they really want is someone who deeply agrees with their take on the world and whom they believe they can trust, not to go back on his word, not to compromise, not to do any of the things, that real politicians have to do in order to keep things moving. So, you know, I can’t understand the Republican party and don’t tend to, but some of what’s going on, I think, can be explained.

Damon, Bill makes a good point. I mean, some of the critique here, certainly, yeah, Chip Roy has raised this and others who are not, you know, nut cases. There is an issue about the way legislation is now crafted that it’s done the last minute in the speaker’s office behind closed doors and then they get presented with these omnibus bills and you take it or leave it and you vote up or down rather than having the committee process. And so things have broken down. I mean, it has been I don’t know how many years since the Congress has actually done its job of appropriating they’re supposed to have twelve appropriation bills a year or something like that.

And the committees are supposed to consider the pros and cons, and that’s gone by the boards, now they have continuing resolutions. But my question to you is, is anything that this Rump group of Republicans is anything they’re doing making a more reasonable house procedure more likely or less likely?

Oh,

you you were setting it up first. Right? Yes, or no. No.

Sorry about that. And I

was already it was gonna be a great moment of tension and then and then humor where I just said No. Sorry. So it didn’t quite work there at the end. I’m sorry. No.

Absolutely nothing there, dude. I mean, those sure. Those are legitimate criticisms, Congress has become increasingly dysfunctional. It’s both dysfunctional in the sense that it less gets done than ought to get done and that when it gets done. It doesn’t get done that well.

And I understand the legitimacy of a lot of those criticisms of the process now as you summarized it very nicely. But absolutely nothing that these kamikazee twenty are trying to do or gonna fix any of that. They’re drawing on those legitimate grievances to try to put a kind of fig leaf on their acting out in my view. What I see this as as a combination of what Yuval Levin has described as the tendency of politicians in our day to use institutions as a kind of platform for their own personal advantage and aggregation of attention So you don’t use the institutions of government in which you serve as a means to attain certain public goods. Granted, of course, that we, as a society, disagree about what those goods are, and so we’re gonna fight about it, but that’s normal.

Instead, you use the institution in order to, as you said, get yourself on television. And so that’s a big part of it. And, you know, Trumpism is an expression of that as well. But then there’s also this ideological remnant from within the old Republican Party, and here I suspect some of the people on this podcast who have ties to the old Republican Party, which I had admired in lots of ways. But if you simply edit one famous line from Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address, you end up where we are.

That line which I’m paraphrasing not quoting verbatim went like this. In our current circumstances, government isn’t the solution to our problems. It is our problem. Ronald Reagan said that on inauguration day nineteen eighty one. If you eliminate in our current circumstances and simply say, government isn’t the solution to our problems.

It is the problem. And you turn that into the thing you care about most in politics, you get these twenty, you are refusing to approve a speaker of the house

and

leaving our, you know, the main popular legislative of the country paralyzed. And I think some of them would consider it a good day’s work to do this every day going forward so that government could do nothing. You know the line about how the point is to starve the beast. They are starving the beast. And it isn’t just the act in the present moment, all of the concessions that McCarthy has made to try to mollify these people, none of which have moved even a single vote are all designed to give them even more power to throw wrenches in the works.

The funniest

one that he conceded over Wednesday night had to do with allowing a single member of the House to call an objection to the current speaker In other words, it would be the equivalent of saying that any single person in the majority could call for a essentially a vote of no comp for that — Yeah. — the speaker. And talk about why would McCarthy want this job? I mean, these people, I get the feeling that even if he could win the vote, You know, a day later, someone could object — Yep. — and say, actually, no.

Let’s have another vote to get rid of him. I mean, talk about neutering his own power. It’s just astonishing. Yeah. So, I mean, I do think that we’re dealing with largely a dynamic error.

The legitimate problems of Congress that do need to be addressed, we need reform in all kinds of ways. That is being used as just verification for something that is much more nihilistic, which is just a simple attempt by a kind of small faction in the Republican caucus to just gum up the works as much as they possibly can. We’re

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So, Charlie, let’s talk a little bit about some of the other things that McCarthy has agreed to. So, he had said that he would never agree to having just five votes to vacate the chair. He’d said, no. No. No.

That can’t be done. Then he not only agreed to five votes he has now dropped it, as Damon said, she dropped it down to just one vote. One person can call a vote to vacate the chair. He has agreed to have this committee that will be investigating the weaponization of the Department of Justice and the FBI he has agreed that his super PAC will no longer participate in primaries in red states where it’s a safe red seat. God only knows what that means because who defines what a safe red seat is.

But in any event, this is an effort to have more Andy Biggs’s and and and Matt Gates’s elected. And he’s agreed to that. And here’s one where he could run into trouble with the people who’ve been with him all along. So the vast majority of the Republican caucus is with

him. But

now in his sort of PALMEL, you know, surrender mode to these holdouts, He’s even talking about giving committee chairmanship to some of the Freedom caucus guys which means he would be denying them to the people who’ve been supporting him all along. That could blow the whole thing out of the water. Right? Well,

I think it’s a real good chance that it’s gonna blow the whole thing out of the water. You know, I don’t know how many of you are Game of Thrones fans. But I I just had this moment in the middle of the night where I thought, okay, what will the next demand be? Well, maybe it will be to force him to walk naked through the streets while Matt Gates goes in front of him with a bell, you know, yelling, shame, shame, shame, and then they would still vote against him. Yeah.

Basically, this is you we’ve used the word nihilism before. I think what you saw over the last twelve hours was that there’s no concession that he can make. They just do not want him. They do not want Kevin McCarthy. And so it doesn’t matter what he says at this point.

You know, we can talk about the legitimate concerns of the caucus. But really, it comes down to that. That’s what this is really all about. But also, Mona, I do wanna go back to your fantastic piece in the bulwark where you pointed something out. We’re talking about this minority of the caucus making these unreasonable demands.

I think it’s a huge mistake to think of this as a fight between the far right wing and the moderates or the extremist and the establishment because as you wrote, this is extremist versus extremist. There is no establishment anymore. This is margery Taylor Green versus is Lauren Boehlberg. Whatever the outcome of this is, you’re going to have people like Marjorie Taylor Green and Scott Perry and Matt Gates who are going to be empowered one way or another because this is not just a small faction in the caucus. Remember the vast majority of members of this conference voted again certifying the twenty twenty election.

Right. And so Kevin McCarthy has enabled, has nurtured the magnification, the amplification of his own caucus, and he’s living with the consequences of it. But people shouldn’t be under any illusion that somehow this problem is solved if we crush those twenty. If we just get those twenty to shut up because those twenty actually are pretty much indistinguishable from a majority of the rest of the caucus. Since I I would like you to talk a little bit more about that because I keep hearing people talk about this somehow as a fight between the insurgents and the establishment.

And as you point out, there’s no establishment anymore. And that’s kind of the dirty secret here. The whole thing has been hollowed out. Yeah. It

is notable that a lot of the press reporting does frame this as it’s McCarthy — Right. — the moderate against the conservatives in the in the Freedom caucus. And let’s remember who Kevin McCarthy has allowed himself to become. He is the one who chased Liz Cheney out of the Caucus and supported Harry and Hagemann against her in the primary. Did you notice as the votes were ticking down?

There’s Kevin McCarthy standing next to Margery Taylor Green the entire time. She’s become his great pal. And he was never for holding her accountable for her lunatic views. From the very beginning, he wants June Peach, I’ll handle my orcas. He wants to investigate Hunter Biden’s laptop.

He wants to remove the metal detectors on the entrance to the house floor. He was against investigating the January sixth insurrection. He was against a commission, and he tried to sabotage the eventual committee. Right down the list, he has been aligning himself with the nut cases And so it’s just wrong to think of him as the reasonable establishment. I mean, that’s not to say there aren’t some people in the GOP who are reasonable establishment types.

I think you could make a case, and Linda, I’ll go to you on this. I mean, what we saw this week in sort of on the split screen was the House Republicans in fleet chaos, whereas there’s Mitch McConnell — Mhmm. — with Joe Biden, you know, dedicating

a a new bridge Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. No. With Andy Bashir, my favorite Democrat governor.

Okay. Yeah. No. That’s absolutely true. But I do want to quibble a little bit with Charlie’s use of the term necklace to describe these people.

They aren’t smart enough to be necklace. I do think they are anarchist. Okay. Fair enough. They’re, you know, they’re anacres, they’re bomb throwers, you know.

If Kevin McCarthy ends up being speaker and they take out the magnometers outside of the House of Representatives. He better watch his back because, you know, Lauren Beaubert might come in with her little Ladiesmith and Wesson, and you know who knows what could happen? I mean, it’s just such an awful spectacle. And it is true that there’s just the absence of order and decorum, which used to be the Republicans daily witch. I mean, we used to be the party of Sephora.

Right? I mean, Ronald Reagan never took off his suit jacket in the Oval Office. And people would always make fun of how sloppy the democrats were. Although new Cambridge

was not particularly no

No. I was gonna say, this a lot of this goes back to Newton Kingridge. I have to say, I think Newton Kingridge began the kind of turmoil that has come to fruition. It’s taken it to its logical conclusion. And I think there’s a lot to blame there.

But the democrats, what do they have to gain from coming up with some way to bail out the Republicans? Because there are discussions. Well, maybe if you could get, you know, an outside, former respected, moderate, republican, like a red upped and that name has been floated a lot. And maybe you could get a handful of Democrats to join with a majority of Republicans. And come up.

Well, that’s not in anybody’s interest. It’s certainly not in the interest of hardline Republicans, but it’s also not in the interest of the democrats. They could sit back and watch this thing play out for day after day after day and come the next election you could just run some of these pictures on the air. Now, it’s true that usually people don’t care very much what goes on is sort of an inside baseball thing. But the fact that you have this paralysis, that you have a group of people who seem unable to govern.

And they can’t even agree among themselves and yet they want to be the majority party in the country. I think that’s a very powerful story, the Democrat. Will have to tell.

Bill, what’s your sense of that? I mean, Linda’s right. Most of the time, Republicans have not paid a price for gumming up the works in Washington. They’ve been able to go back home and say, see, you know, we threw a wrench into the works and Washington is broken. I can’t count how many times During these speeches, even in the last three days, they keep saying Washington is broken even as they’re breaking it beyond repair themselves.

But so far, it hasn’t hurt them with voters. But this is a step further. This is true paralysis I guess it would be the equivalent of not being able to form a government in a parliamentary system. Do you think that might penetrate it’s possible.

I have

to say I’m skeptical because this is the sort of thing that tends to fade if it’s resolved, say, in a few days or a week, and people will go back to worrying about what really works. So I’m not sure that is quite the right way to go at it.

You know,

there’s

a problem when people substantively stand for things that substantial chunks of the electorate simply don’t like. And I think Republicans learned a little bit of that in the recent midterms.

But I don’t think

it was disorder or rocket readiness or the presence of largely tailored green that produced the results that they’re now lamenting back in November. I think it was some pretty hard to defend stances. On things like January sixth and abortion that weakened what otherwise would have been a pretty strong hand that we’re holding. So here’s a scenario for you. It’s early next week, and Kevin McCarthy’s supporters take in the side and say, Kevin, you’re absolutely right.

You deserve this job. But unfortunately, you’re not gonna get it. And we can’t force you to do this, but we want you to start thinking about standing down in favor of someone we trust who could get to two hundred and eighteen. Someone like maybe Steve Skolese. Not being a Republican, not traveling in the gossip of Carter’s.

I have no idea of whether he would fill that bill, but I’m sure there’s someone who would, someone other than Kevin McCarthy. Suppose that happens in a few days or a

week, How much

of this is going to have legs with the electorate? I have to say I’m a little

bit skeptical.

Right. Mhmm. Damon, assuming that Steve Skalise is the likeliest alternative to McCarthy. And that’s what I’ve heard scuttlebutt from, like, former members that I’ve spoken to. They say nobody hates Steve Skalise, especially after he was shot quite honestly.

I mean, there was a lot of sympathy for him, a lot of admiration for how he handled it and so forth. But if he’s the guy, he inherits all of the compromises that Mcarthy made. Right? Nobody’s gonna vote for him if he says, oh, okay. Forget about this vacate, the chair thing, and we’re not gonna have a two thirds

vote for

every spending increase, and we’re not going to have a term limits mode, etcetera, etcetera. I mean, all the things that McCarthy has already agreed to. He would sort of have to agree to, and he’d be gelled to use Charlie’s wonderful phrase right from the beginning, Woodney. I

don’t know because none of it makes any sense. I mean, because I mean, frankly, if you put Kevin McCarthy and Steve’s colleagues’ record neck to each other, there’s absolutely no reason why he would go. I’ll never vote for McCarthy, but Skolese, yes, he is the one. I mean, they’re interchangeable when it comes voting records and ideological positioning and plus police has no interest in the job. He claims now by no politician and say that all the time when actually they just want to be begged.

But given the current circumstance, we’ve already noted on here. Well, why would he want it? Why would anyone want it? This looks like a thoroughly thankless humiliating job. So Maybe in the end he can be persuaded to do it.

I just don’t get why they would want him versus Mcarthy, but, okay, let’s assume they do, they’re willing, at least he’s not McCarthy. So they vote for him and he gets in. Will all those concessions have to carry over? I really don’t know. I mean, I don’t think there’s a rule that they would have to.

It would have to be a matter of what police thinks he can get away with, I guess. But it’s a mystery to me. I mean, one thing that I find a little kind of eyebrow raising and that I’m amazed nobody has mentioned on this podcast yet. Part

of it is

because some of it has happened since we’ve been corday, but there’s been an eighth vote and it’s gone exactly the same way again and including that on both the seventh and the eighth vote, Matt Gates, has nominated Donald j Trump. To be speaker of the house. And Steve Bannon is pushing that on his war room podcast or broadcast, whatever it is. In real time, all these votes take place. Now so far, there doesn’t appear to be any momentum in favor of that.

That is a comical suggestion, but I don’t see why Gates isn’t doing a better job of, you know, how can you vote against Trump, but the irony of the situation is, of course, that Matt Gates is nominating Trump, and Trump is supporting McCarthy. So, like, it’s a total circular firing squad at this point. I won’t say

it

now because I’ve been going on for a bit, but I hope if we come around again, I do want to talk a little bit more seriously about this being a real problem. That this is not just funny even though it is funny. And it isn’t just a kind of indictment of the Republican Party that there is something more worrisome about this whole drama that we’re seeing here. And, again, I could go into it now, but we could also go around one more time if if you’d rather defer it.

Right. Right. Right. No. I was coming to that.

But first, I want Charlie to comment on the whole role of Trump in all this because it is kind of interesting, not just the Gates nominated him, you know, that was a placeholder or whatever, a little signal. But his waning influence, he did make phone calls on McCarthy’s behalf, he did a little truth social. Now you can say maybe he didn’t do it as energetically as he might have, but he did come down four square for McCarthy and People like Lauren Barber said on the House floor even having my favorite president call us and tell us we need to knock this off. She said the president needs to tell Kevin McCarthy that. And Matt Gates mocked Trump at one point saying it was sad.

And ban and, you know, also. So his spirit hovers over the chaos and yet as an actual influencer, he does seem to be waning.

Right? Well, there’s no way around that. I mean, that’s what’s extraordinary about it. You know, this morning, I got up, you know, to write a piece that Trump was extending his losing streak because wasn’t able to move a single vote. But in the back of my mind, I’m thinking before he changed the dynamic because now, of course, you could have Republicans go to the floor and say, look, we look like losers.

Kevin McCarthy looks like losers. And if you keep doing this, you’re gonna make Donald Trump look like a loser. You’re you’re not gonna do that. Are you? But that apparently is completely unpersuasive.

Now, he’s not irrelevant. He could. Destroy Kevin McCarthy with a single truth social. I mean, he could make Steve Skolese or Elise Stefanik, the speaker designate. I don’t know that he could do it for Elise Stefanik.

Think she’s unelectable. But clearly, Lauren Beaufort and Matt Gates are not afraid of ignoring him. Here. Now, there’s a couple of explanations for that. Number one is that he is a diminished figure.

Number two is that they know that he has red lines and this is not one of his real red lines that he may put out a statement. Mhmm. But there’s kind of a, okay, I gotta do this for Mike Kevin. But, you know, my heart’s really not in it. There was no hesitancy on the part of these folks who are Trump loyalists and from Trump.

Calling these guys is the lowest hanging fruit in the megawatt. Right? I mean, to get on the phone and call Lauren Bogart or Matt Gates, these are the loyalist of the loyal. And know the fact that they’re brushing it off, not a good moment, and clearly does make him look like something of a loser, which, of course, is the spin. He’s issuing statements now virtually on the hour saying this is great.

We’re gonna demurge stronger, but you’ll notice that he’s no longer using Kevin McCarthy’s name here. And

just

can I just weigh in on on one thing about what’s gonna happen if Steve’s police become speaker? Number one, I think he has to go along with all of the concessions. I don’t think you can take that back if he wants two eighteen both. And keep in mind, in terms of the question, will this have legs? This particular chaos in itself won’t eventually will become just sort of an interesting story, but this Congress will continue the way

it began. And

if this does not get the public’s attention, if they push a debt default, that certainly might. This is a preview of two years of absolutely shambolic politics. And that will be an issue in twenty twenty four. Although keep in mind, you know, that’s a presidential election year. Everything will be overshadowed by what happens.

But if the Republican party, for example, does nominate Donald Trump. With this Congress, Democrats are gonna have two years of saying, look at these guys. Look who they are. And I think that is just a deadly scenario from their point of

view.

Howard Bauchner: So let’s

turn to how important this is.

Linda,

representative Ralph Norman, who I believe is one of the holdouts, is a Republican in South Carolina, one of his demands is that they shut down the government rather than raise the debt ceiling. So, terrific. Now, they don’t have to make a decision about raising the debt ceiling until till the fall, but that

will be one

of the things that is in the future. They have to pass a budget It is hard to see how that will run smoothly when we see how this all began. But let me phrase this slightly differently because Damon said, you know, we have to discuss the seriousness here, and I wanna frame it this way because read an interesting piece by Josh Barrow this week. Listeners will be familiar with him who’s been on this podcast a few times. He proposes that it’s actually not that important that the house is shut down.

I mean, he left aside the whole security matter. People don’t have security clearances and the intelligence committees can’t act and so forth. But I think he’s assuming eventually there’ll be a speaker. But he says, look, what is a Republican controlled house gonna do anyway? Except performative votes.

Right? They’re not going to be able to pass them through the Senate or get the president to sign them. And so really the only two things they have to do is pass a budget and raise a debt ceiling. And that’s not coming up, he says, for a while. What do you make of that?

The debt ceiling vote, I think, will come up a

little before the fall. I think it’s gonna happen in in the — Right. — summer of twenty twenty three. But I think that’s precisely the point. And of course, if you really are anti government and you really think that the most effective thing you could do is throw a monkey wrench in the works and stall everything.

You know, maybe they’ll be effective, appeasing their folks. And I do think that they’re whole emphasis on what it is they want to accomplish. I mean, they’ve talked a little bit in some of these speeches about trying to

get better

handle on the terrible opioid epidemic we have with over one hundred thousand people dying each of the last several years. From opioids. But of course, they always phrase that in terms of the border. And they always conflate the movement of drugs into the United States with the movement of people who are trying to come here to work, which is their game book. And

those are obviously very

Yeah. They’re very separate things.

Although

one could argue that when you have, you know, as many people trying to come in who don’t come in the normal way or don’t come in the legal way, it strains resources to be able to focus on — Yes. — on drugs. And I think that’s one of the ways in which the Republicans have actually made the flow of drugs more difficult because they haven’t dealt with the flow of people. In a reasonable way. But all of that being said, what they really want to do is have investigations.

They want to get into that laptop of Hunter Biden. They want to try to implicate Joe Biden in some of the nefarious doings of his very troubled and former drug addict’s son. They want to investigate the January sixth committee. I don’t know what it is. They think they’re going to find by investigating.

I think they’d like to throw attention toward so called security failures when in fact there were lots of security failures, but those security failures were more

a

problem of security agencies not letting Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and everybody else on the hill know. What was about to happen with the flood of people who were armed in dangers coming in for the January sixth rally. But it is all about spectacle. They don’t want to pass bills, you know, even on the question of the border. They don’t want to pass.

Immigration legislation, they don’t

have any

kind of positive program that they have to offer to the American people or even to their base. And so it’s really all about the circus. It’s all about entertaining the masses with a spectacle after spectacle on Capitol Hill. And, you know, I suppose they can do that without much effort, and it doesn’t take much to throw that kind of spectacle. It certainly doesn’t take the kind of willingness to legislate the willingness to compromise the willingness to make hard choices that actual legislation

requires. Bill Galston, what do

you think? Is this playing with fire in any way? Is this dangerous for the United States to have this kind of gridlock and no elected speaker? I’m

with Charlie. I think the real danger of these events is their role as a leading indicator of chaos over the next two years.

There are

very serious things that could happen if this House of Representatives simply refuses to do its job even minimally, a government shutdown is Syria’s business, especially if it lasts for more than a few days. A deck default is even more serious. I don’t need to remind anybody

on

this panel or probably in the audience that the US dollar is the backbone of the world financial system. And US treasury bills are the fundamental baseline against which the entire credit market of the world is measured. And I’m not sure whether anarchist or nihilist or, you know, performance artist. I’m not sure what the right description is. But if

this

group of whatever they

are, create

chaos in the international financial system, it could have devastating long term concert nuances from the international standing at the United States. So yeah, you

know, to quote

the poet Mary Anne Moore, this may be an imaginary garden, but it has real toads in. It. And someone who are poisonous. And that’s why I think that we should take our focus away from the ins and outs of the speaker race, although they are fascinating, I’ll confess. And focus on the bigger picture because that is really truly, worry so in my opinion.

Damon, is that

the sort of thing

you were thinking about when you recommended we address the serious side of this?

Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. But allow me to build on it. Yes, please.

What Bill

said is exactly right. Linda is well and Charlie. I mean, in my view, this is an expression of something that’s been going on and building for many years now, and it can be summarized in a few ways. This is how I’ll do it Now, on the one hand, the American population is very deeply divided, but also very narrowly divided. And the reflection of that narrowness is the fact that it just takes these twenty people and actually it can be even fewer than twenty.

To lead to this kind of a deadlock, to even get off the starting block for this Congress. And it’s because the division between the Republicans and the Democrats is so narrow that almost the entirety of the Republican caucus needs to be on board with who the speaker will be, and it only takes a handful to throw a wrench into the works. And that is something we’ve seen for a really long time, roughly half of the country wants each party. Now, I think the rest of the world looks at our politics and probably looks at the performance of Biden. Both domestically, but then also in his leadership in the Ukraine and Russia war and says, oh, look, America’s kind of back.

But they also have the experience of the Trump administration and now this to remind them, like, Oh, there are only two parties in that country and regularly the government swings between one or the other having power and the Republicans are still completely amiss, then half the country is voting for a party that has twenty people in it who are willing to be again who knows or who cares really what the word is, anarchist, nihilist, the spectral coal mongers. These are people who are not really interested in governing. They want to get on television. They’re happy to lead the government to I do a halt for the sake of the spectacle. And then there are substantive issues as well.

The fact that I think most of these twenty, but then as others have pointed out, many of those on McCarthy’s side would for instance very happily vote against continuing to fund our support for Ukraine. Mhmm. That I think probably a lot of the rest of the world, especially the part of the world that is on our side in this kind of proxy conflict with Russia is looking at this and thinking, like, are we sure that America will be there in this leadership role if the Republicans managed to win in two years because if not, it’s gonna be those people who are running the show and they would take a one eighty degree turn in the opposite direction and just cut that funding down to zero. Same with other forms of foreign aid, other foreign policy commitments, the fact that Biden is doing a lot of things, that are tough about China, you know, that sounds like, oh, look, like actually Trump got that one right and Biden’s following his lead. But I don’t think there’s any guarantee that the Republicans are gonna be consistent on any of that either.

There is a very strong current on the right now that simply wants to be to quote the old line from Pat Buchanan, a republic, not an empire, and they find that as coming home, getting out of the business of trying to lead the globe. And I’ll stop now. But I mean, then we get back to Bill’s point about the possibility of debt default and the fact that our currency underlies the credit markets of the entire planet. And instead of husbanding that incredible influence and power, you have a faction of this other party that controls half the country, half the country loves it. Of significant faction of that party just doesn’t care that if it could be the biggest spectacle and stunt you’ve ever seen, defaulting on the debt just to prove we can do it.

I think there are a significant numbers of people in that group who would do that, and that is insane. And extremely reckless and I really worry that the world is repeatedly learning a lesson about America in this period. That in the longer term is going to redown very much against our benefit.

Alright. Well, we’ll close out this discussion with one final ironic observation and that is that if Kevin McCarthy had not helped to chase out of congress, nine out of the ten members who voted to impeach Donald Trump, he might have had the votes to become speaker.

With that, let’s

turn to our highlights and lowlights of the week Linda Chavez. Well,

I am going

to do a real about phase here and pick a topic totally unrelated to politics. And point to two articles that appeared that at least captured by interest. And certainly regular listeners of the show know that I love culture and in literature and there was a piece last week that made me very depressed in The New York Times. It was a piece by Matthew Walter, and he wrote a piece entitled poetry died one hundred years ago this month. And he was referring to the one hundred year anniversary of the poem The Wasteland and TS Elliott, one of my favorite poets who wrote that.

And according to mister Walter, T. S. Elliott, almost single handedly destroyed poetry for all time. So that depressed me. And then soon after reading that, I got in my inbox an article by Noah Milman that is in substack and that article was entitled Is The Land Waste and Did TSL yet kill poetry, really?

And he makes a very good case on behalf of TSLY, but also on behalf of art. And in times when we have the spectacle going on on Capitol Hill and so much of our politics being debates, being able to think of something like art and poetry that elevates us is, I think, my gift to our listeners this week.

Well,

thank you for that. Charlie sucks. Well, this

feels like it’s

almost too easy, but I’m gonna go with it anyway. The low light, of course, is the chaos you’re seeing in the house for all the reasons that Damon just articulated. I agree with him that this is a preview of a willingness to tear it all down. The highlight and you know that unlike some of my colleagues, I try not to be a fan boy of the guy in the White House, But I thought the split screen this week of the bipartisan shutdown in Kentucky was truly remarkable you really got a different version of what politics could be where you had Republicans and Democrats standing together shaking hands and talking about getting things done. And the contrast between that scene down in Kentucky and what we have been seeing in Washington DC was perhaps the well, let’s just say that it would define the imagination of screenwriters to come up

with a greater illustration of the gap in our politics today. Yes, thank you. Let me just add really quick since it did not come up in our earlier discussion, but since you mentioned it, it is relevant to note that also this week at the state level. There were a couple of really fascinating developments where in Ohio, yeah, a moderate republican got the speaker scandal by joining with Democrats, and they denied it to a more extreme Republican, so that’s pretty interesting. And in Pennsylvania, a moderate Democrat was chosen and changed his party to independents.

So there are things bubbling up from the state level that are kind of hopeful and interesting along those same

lines. Okay,

Damon Linker. Well, I don’t

wanna sound too crabby after being a sort of negative in my last intervention on here, but there was an article this week that really sort of irritated me. This was in Vanity Fair. Titled a comprehensive guide to why Iran DeSantis presidency would be just as terrifying as a Trump one. By someone named Beth Levin. Now, I will not vote for Rhonda Santos.

I’m telling you right now, I think he would be awful. I think it’s very clear that he’s trying to play to the Trump base of the party. I hear the democrats were repeatedly making the claim that a competent Trump is worse than a bumbling Trump and so forth. That’s the tenor of a lot of these arguments. And I’m happy to read through a piece like this and all these reasons why DeSantis would be bad.

It’s very useful to do that. But this idea of always having to kind of one up everything and say, oh, you thought Trump was bad. This would be even worse. This is hyperbole. It’s worse.

And I think it distorts our understanding of the situation these past few years. Yes, the ideology that Trump brought in was very bad. But the thing that made Trump distinctively, uniquely worrying and dangerous, toxic even for our liberal democratic system were personal qualities of the man himself that I am pretty confident that desantis and most other active public figures in America do not possess. And we could have had a kind of intellectual debate about that issue for quite a while through the Trump presidency. But after January sixth, I think it is affinitive.

No other politician in America would have done what Donald Trump did. It was a function of his self delusion his narcissism, his lack of concern for anything beyond his own very, very sensitive ego. That led us to this really catastrophic event of an attempted self coup in the United States of America. So I would urge my Democratic friends To yes, if DeSantis looks like he’s gonna be the nominee fight to the deaths to make him lose, do politics as it’s meant to be and make him lose, but keep your heads and don’t start minimizing the unique off list that was Donald j Trump. Me

too. Totally agree. Totally agree. One hundred percent. Bill Galston, it was hard to pick out the

low point. In the House of Representatives this week. But I

have a nominee and

that is Matt Gates trying to use these negotiations in order to get a subcommittee chairmanship for himself. That may sound like business as usual, but it isn’t. And a group of Republicans who were not crazy gave a press conference in which they called out Gates by name

you know, for

trying to use this very serious vote in order to promote his own very narrow personal interests. They took the position. A fight over policy is fine. A fight over the rules is fine. A fight over the character and qualifications of different people is fine.

But using this chaotic situation, in order to achieve something for yourself that you could not get through regular order within the Republican caucus is really disgraceful. That’s what they said. And I really agree with him.

Okay. Thank you. I have an encouraging story to highlight and disappeared in the New York Times, and it is about the phonics movement. Now, I’ve followed this matter for many, many years. It’s been a controversy in education, policy, In this country, we have had a weakness for educational fads.

Many of them unfortunately promoted by Teacher’s College, part of Columbia University where I did attend. But teachers College has been the source of a tremendous amount of nonsense when it comes to education that has a last had tremendous influence around the country. And one of those paths was the so called whole language thing. So that you should teach children to read by getting them to guess at the meaning of words based on context. But look at the pick cures and consider the other words around it and so on and so forth rather than the phonics method, which is sound it out.

Break down the word into smaller chunks and sound it out and learn what those smaller chunks mean, Neo means new, etcetera, etcetera. And it has been known for decades decades that phonics is the way to go. Phonics is far more successful at teaching kids to read and become competent students in every realm, and yet our schools have been lagging. Well, that is beginning finally to change. And the New York Times story that highlighted this.

They’ve had a number of stories actually over the last several months. This one in particular is called a Memphis the phonics movement comes to high school, literacy lessons are embedded in every academic class, even in biology, And this story links then to other stories about how the phonics curriculum is being adopted by more and more states who are finally finally getting the message that one of the reasons that we lag behind other advanced industrial countries on reading comprehension is that we’re teaching it wrong.

So —

Yes. — that’s progress, and I’m thrilled to highlight that. With that, I want to thank our guests, Charlie Sykes, and our panel. Joe Armstrong is our sound engineer. Katie Cooper, as always, is our producer.

Wanna thank all of you for listening, and we will return next week as

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