The world seemed stunned by the ousting of Kevin McCarthy as the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. They should not be. The opposition to McCarthy was brewing long before the vote on October 3rd. His attempt to be the top dog in the Republican-led House was doomed from the beginning.
Let us not get buried in the more or less fanciful speculations in the European press as to what is really behind the fall of McCarthcy’s speakership. We can do with just one example—and a good one it is.
Or should I say cringe-worthy. It comes from Wolfgang Hansson, a ‘columnist’ in the Swedish Aftonbladet, whose regular speculations on a variety of subjects have one thing in common: they are blissfully void of facts and substance. But his attempt at ‘explaining’ the vote against Speaker McCarthy took the cake:
The word banana republic and USA become more and more synonymous. When a single member of Congress brings the entire political system to a halt based on a personal vendetta, the democratic rot has reached very deep. But there is one winner from the political chaos in the U.S.: Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
Every sentence in this paragraph is false, but there is no point in getting distracted by the opening ‘banana republic’ comment (except that Mr. Hansson has no idea what that is). More noteworthy is his apparent belief that one member of Congress, in this case Republican Matt Gaetz from Florida, got Kevin McCarthy fired from the speakership.
Not only does Mr. Hansson confuse “Congress” with the House of Representatives, but he also exhibits a charming lack of insight into how the Speaker of the House is elected. One person cannot elect the speaker, and therefore one person cannot vote the speaker out of office. To be successful, either vote requires a majority of the House members who are present at the time of the vote. As a case in point, on October 3rd a total of 426 members were present to cast their votes, with 216 voting in favor of vacating the speaker’s office and 210 in favor of keeping McCarthy in there.
In other words, “a single member of Congress” did not end Kevin McCarthy’s speakership, but more importantly: “a single member of Congress” did not bring “the entire political system to a halt.” The vote against McCarthy was initiated by Representative Gaetz, but that was all he did. Just as the prevailing rules in the House allowed him to do, the Congressman from Florida took his dissatisfaction with the incumbent speaker as far as he was allowed to.
It is also worth noting that the rules that allowed him to challenge the speaker were adopted according to due process.
One more point on this: the vote of no confidence did not bring “the entire political system to a halt” in any way. Apparently, Mr. Hansson has not studied up on how the U.S. House of Representatives works: when a speaker is fired from his job, it is not the case that the seat remains vacant and the House ceases to function. A Speaker Pro Tempore steps in and holds the office until a new speaker is elected. This temporary holder of the office is there precisely to make sure the proceedings of the House continue uninterrupted. The only substantive difference between the temporary speaker and a regular one is that the regular speaker is the third in line of succession for U.S. President, after the Vice President and the Secretary of State. The Speaker Pro Tempore is not part of that line of succession.
The only part of Mr. Hansson’s rant that has any real substance is his “vendetta” remark. This is where the speakership vote actually gets interesting, though of course not in the way this Swedish pundit thinks.
Representative Gaetz had well-founded reasons to initiate a vote against Speaker McCarthy, but it has been difficult to hear this through the white noise of media reporting in recent days. Specifically, there have been allegations that the vote on October 3rd was somehow a stunt initiated by Representative Gaetz to distract the House from an ongoing ethics inquiry into himself.
While that investigation exists, it has nothing to do with the animosity between Gaetz and McCarthy. The investigation was started by the Democratic majority long before the 2022 election shifted the House back to the Republicans. There was also a two-year investigation under the Department of Justice, which concluded back in February without any charges being filed against Mr. Gaetz.
That does not mean that Representative Gaetz is some kind of squeaky-clean politician; he is often described as intelligent but immoral. I do not know him and therefore cannot speak to his character, but based on my decades of experience in politics in both Europe and America, I could easily use those same words—”intelligent but immoral”—about countless other elected officials, both past and present, and of all political flavors.
In short, any reference to the ethics allegations against Matt Gaetz is a distraction from the real, substantive reason why Kevin McCarthy lost the speakership. That reason is purely ideological and part of an ongoing battle within the Republican party. At the forefront of that ideological battle is something as mundane as government spending—which, as it happens, was the catalyst for the October 3rd vote.
The members of the conservative wing of the Republican House majority are deeply dissatisfied with how the House passes budgets. Explains CBS:
In theory, executive branch departments … are funded through a dozen individual appropriations bills that set spending levels for the year ahead. These bills typically must be passed by Congress and signed by the president by the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1 to avoid a government shutdown.
Except for the use of the word “typically,” this is a correct explanation of the broad strokes of the appropriations process; we can leave the committees and the House-Senate negotiations out of this. The big problem, namely, is that since the Obama administration, Congress has fallen into a habit of not passing a budget on time. Starting with the TEA Party (Taxed Enough Already) movement in 2010, the conservative political movement in America has gradually become more vocal in their opposition to constantly growing government spending.
With Obama in the White House and the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the conservatives that were ushered into politics by the TEA Party wave gained enough momentum to disrupt the Republican establishment in Congress. The GOP, which under Obama held the House of Representatives from 2010 and the Senate from 2012, could not just reach a spending-as-usual deal with Obama.
The Democrat president, on the other hand, refused to negotiate with Republicans. Where his predecessor Bill Clinton commendably worked with a Republican-led House back in the 1990s to curb spending and balance the federal budget, Obama basically abandoned any budget talks where he would have to give anything of substance to the Republicans. As a result, Congress kept the funding of the federal government going by passing an almost unending series of so-called continuing resolutions, CRs.
Since Obama, the use of CRs to keep spending money has become a convenient way for Congress to abridge party divisions over spending. The result has been exceptional bloating of the federal budget: in the first six months of this year, the federal government spent $3,234 billion. If this keeps up, total spending for 2023 will almost reach $6.5 trillion.
That is a 36% increase over 2019, the last year before Congress lost all sense of fiscal sanity as a result of the pandemic.
This number is enough to understand why fiscal conservatives in Congress are deeply unhappy with an appropriations process that locks them out from any influence over the federal budget. The reliance on CRs to fund government by default means that current spending levels simply continue for as long as the CR is in effect.
Back to the CBS article:
Gaetz and his fellow GOP holdouts wanted to put an end to that practice, and return to “regular order—the consideration and passage of the individual, annual spending bills. This, the argument went, would allow them to extract deeper spending cuts … As that Oct. 1 deadline approached this year, McCarthy brought up and the House passed four individual spending bills but said a continuing resolution would be needed to avoid a shutdown.
According to Representative Gaetz and other fiscal conservatives, this meant that McCarthy walked away from promises he had made when he sought their support for his speakership.
It is worth noting that while the CR just passed by the House does not contain any funding for Ukraine, that particular spending item has not been a driving force for Gaetz and other fiscal conservatives in their opposition to McCarthy. The U.S. government has already supported Ukraine with significant amounts of money—anywhere from $75 billion to $119 billion, depending on how the funds are classified. However, these are minor amounts in a federal budget that in its totality exceeds $6 trillion.
In other words, the battle for the speakership is not nearly as politically spicy as it has been made out to be. However, that does not mean it will be easy for the House majority to unite around a successor to McCarthy. The two main candidates are Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan. These are two strong candidates, both of whom have earned a reputation for being strong conservatives.
Scalise currently has the position of Majority Leader for the Republicans, which means that he is the second-ranking Republican after the Speaker. He was almost killed in an assault in 2017. A Democrat-supporting activist, inspired by the left’s raging anti-conservative hatred online, opened fire on a group of Republican members of Congress while they were practicing for the annual Congressional baseball game. After shooting 50 rounds, the Democrat-supporting activist was gunned down by Capitol Hill police officers. Steve Scalise was one of the wounded and nearly succumbed to his injuries.
Over the years, Congressman Scalise has earned the respect of Republican Congressmen from both the moderate and the conservative sides. After the 2022 election, he was apparently elected majority leader with a simple voice vote of unanimity. This was a sign of strength at a time when it took Kevin McCarthy 15 votes to secure the speakership.
Jim Jordan chairs the important House Judiciary Committee, which has significant investigative powers. Jordan is also one of the founding members of the Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative members of the House with a record of vocally opposing the sprawling powers of the federal government. He is the key figure in the House impeachment inquiry focused on President Biden’s alleged penchant for taking bribes.
Again, both Scalise and Jordan are strong candidates. That does not mean either of them will have an easy job maneuvering legislation through the House. Whatever comes out of the House will have to have some chance of passing an almost evenly divided Senate, and then get President Biden’s signature.
Biden himself is scared of agreeing to anything that has even the pretense of being conservative in nature. He fears making any deals that offend the radical left wing of his own party. One of his many problems is that he is trapped between, on the one hand, the environmental agenda of that very radical wing, which includes a transition from regular cars to electric vehicles, and on the other hand the de facto demands from the auto workers that the federal government stop subsidizing their jobs out of existence.
With all that in mind, the Republicans are going to come out of this stronger and more united. It will reinvigorate them as they go into the hugely important 2024 election year.
The Real Reason for Firing Speaker McCarthy
Photo: 3D Animation Production Company / Pixabay
The world seemed stunned by the ousting of Kevin McCarthy as the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. They should not be. The opposition to McCarthy was brewing long before the vote on October 3rd. His attempt to be the top dog in the Republican-led House was doomed from the beginning.
Let us not get buried in the more or less fanciful speculations in the European press as to what is really behind the fall of McCarthcy’s speakership. We can do with just one example—and a good one it is.
Or should I say cringe-worthy. It comes from Wolfgang Hansson, a ‘columnist’ in the Swedish Aftonbladet, whose regular speculations on a variety of subjects have one thing in common: they are blissfully void of facts and substance. But his attempt at ‘explaining’ the vote against Speaker McCarthy took the cake:
Every sentence in this paragraph is false, but there is no point in getting distracted by the opening ‘banana republic’ comment (except that Mr. Hansson has no idea what that is). More noteworthy is his apparent belief that one member of Congress, in this case Republican Matt Gaetz from Florida, got Kevin McCarthy fired from the speakership.
Not only does Mr. Hansson confuse “Congress” with the House of Representatives, but he also exhibits a charming lack of insight into how the Speaker of the House is elected. One person cannot elect the speaker, and therefore one person cannot vote the speaker out of office. To be successful, either vote requires a majority of the House members who are present at the time of the vote. As a case in point, on October 3rd a total of 426 members were present to cast their votes, with 216 voting in favor of vacating the speaker’s office and 210 in favor of keeping McCarthy in there.
In other words, “a single member of Congress” did not end Kevin McCarthy’s speakership, but more importantly: “a single member of Congress” did not bring “the entire political system to a halt.” The vote against McCarthy was initiated by Representative Gaetz, but that was all he did. Just as the prevailing rules in the House allowed him to do, the Congressman from Florida took his dissatisfaction with the incumbent speaker as far as he was allowed to.
It is also worth noting that the rules that allowed him to challenge the speaker were adopted according to due process.
One more point on this: the vote of no confidence did not bring “the entire political system to a halt” in any way. Apparently, Mr. Hansson has not studied up on how the U.S. House of Representatives works: when a speaker is fired from his job, it is not the case that the seat remains vacant and the House ceases to function. A Speaker Pro Tempore steps in and holds the office until a new speaker is elected. This temporary holder of the office is there precisely to make sure the proceedings of the House continue uninterrupted. The only substantive difference between the temporary speaker and a regular one is that the regular speaker is the third in line of succession for U.S. President, after the Vice President and the Secretary of State. The Speaker Pro Tempore is not part of that line of succession.
The only part of Mr. Hansson’s rant that has any real substance is his “vendetta” remark. This is where the speakership vote actually gets interesting, though of course not in the way this Swedish pundit thinks.
Representative Gaetz had well-founded reasons to initiate a vote against Speaker McCarthy, but it has been difficult to hear this through the white noise of media reporting in recent days. Specifically, there have been allegations that the vote on October 3rd was somehow a stunt initiated by Representative Gaetz to distract the House from an ongoing ethics inquiry into himself.
While that investigation exists, it has nothing to do with the animosity between Gaetz and McCarthy. The investigation was started by the Democratic majority long before the 2022 election shifted the House back to the Republicans. There was also a two-year investigation under the Department of Justice, which concluded back in February without any charges being filed against Mr. Gaetz.
That does not mean that Representative Gaetz is some kind of squeaky-clean politician; he is often described as intelligent but immoral. I do not know him and therefore cannot speak to his character, but based on my decades of experience in politics in both Europe and America, I could easily use those same words—”intelligent but immoral”—about countless other elected officials, both past and present, and of all political flavors.
In short, any reference to the ethics allegations against Matt Gaetz is a distraction from the real, substantive reason why Kevin McCarthy lost the speakership. That reason is purely ideological and part of an ongoing battle within the Republican party. At the forefront of that ideological battle is something as mundane as government spending—which, as it happens, was the catalyst for the October 3rd vote.
The members of the conservative wing of the Republican House majority are deeply dissatisfied with how the House passes budgets. Explains CBS:
Except for the use of the word “typically,” this is a correct explanation of the broad strokes of the appropriations process; we can leave the committees and the House-Senate negotiations out of this. The big problem, namely, is that since the Obama administration, Congress has fallen into a habit of not passing a budget on time. Starting with the TEA Party (Taxed Enough Already) movement in 2010, the conservative political movement in America has gradually become more vocal in their opposition to constantly growing government spending.
With Obama in the White House and the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the conservatives that were ushered into politics by the TEA Party wave gained enough momentum to disrupt the Republican establishment in Congress. The GOP, which under Obama held the House of Representatives from 2010 and the Senate from 2012, could not just reach a spending-as-usual deal with Obama.
The Democrat president, on the other hand, refused to negotiate with Republicans. Where his predecessor Bill Clinton commendably worked with a Republican-led House back in the 1990s to curb spending and balance the federal budget, Obama basically abandoned any budget talks where he would have to give anything of substance to the Republicans. As a result, Congress kept the funding of the federal government going by passing an almost unending series of so-called continuing resolutions, CRs.
Since Obama, the use of CRs to keep spending money has become a convenient way for Congress to abridge party divisions over spending. The result has been exceptional bloating of the federal budget: in the first six months of this year, the federal government spent $3,234 billion. If this keeps up, total spending for 2023 will almost reach $6.5 trillion.
That is a 36% increase over 2019, the last year before Congress lost all sense of fiscal sanity as a result of the pandemic.
This number is enough to understand why fiscal conservatives in Congress are deeply unhappy with an appropriations process that locks them out from any influence over the federal budget. The reliance on CRs to fund government by default means that current spending levels simply continue for as long as the CR is in effect.
Back to the CBS article:
According to Representative Gaetz and other fiscal conservatives, this meant that McCarthy walked away from promises he had made when he sought their support for his speakership.
It is worth noting that while the CR just passed by the House does not contain any funding for Ukraine, that particular spending item has not been a driving force for Gaetz and other fiscal conservatives in their opposition to McCarthy. The U.S. government has already supported Ukraine with significant amounts of money—anywhere from $75 billion to $119 billion, depending on how the funds are classified. However, these are minor amounts in a federal budget that in its totality exceeds $6 trillion.
In other words, the battle for the speakership is not nearly as politically spicy as it has been made out to be. However, that does not mean it will be easy for the House majority to unite around a successor to McCarthy. The two main candidates are Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan. These are two strong candidates, both of whom have earned a reputation for being strong conservatives.
Scalise currently has the position of Majority Leader for the Republicans, which means that he is the second-ranking Republican after the Speaker. He was almost killed in an assault in 2017. A Democrat-supporting activist, inspired by the left’s raging anti-conservative hatred online, opened fire on a group of Republican members of Congress while they were practicing for the annual Congressional baseball game. After shooting 50 rounds, the Democrat-supporting activist was gunned down by Capitol Hill police officers. Steve Scalise was one of the wounded and nearly succumbed to his injuries.
Over the years, Congressman Scalise has earned the respect of Republican Congressmen from both the moderate and the conservative sides. After the 2022 election, he was apparently elected majority leader with a simple voice vote of unanimity. This was a sign of strength at a time when it took Kevin McCarthy 15 votes to secure the speakership.
Jim Jordan chairs the important House Judiciary Committee, which has significant investigative powers. Jordan is also one of the founding members of the Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative members of the House with a record of vocally opposing the sprawling powers of the federal government. He is the key figure in the House impeachment inquiry focused on President Biden’s alleged penchant for taking bribes.
Again, both Scalise and Jordan are strong candidates. That does not mean either of them will have an easy job maneuvering legislation through the House. Whatever comes out of the House will have to have some chance of passing an almost evenly divided Senate, and then get President Biden’s signature.
Biden himself is scared of agreeing to anything that has even the pretense of being conservative in nature. He fears making any deals that offend the radical left wing of his own party. One of his many problems is that he is trapped between, on the one hand, the environmental agenda of that very radical wing, which includes a transition from regular cars to electric vehicles, and on the other hand the de facto demands from the auto workers that the federal government stop subsidizing their jobs out of existence.
With all that in mind, the Republicans are going to come out of this stronger and more united. It will reinvigorate them as they go into the hugely important 2024 election year.
READ NEXT
Putting Down Our Parent Civilisation: Do We Live in the West, or Euthan-Asia?
Trump’s Triumph—a Turning Point for Europe?
Pan-Conservativi: A New Global Conservative Reality