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Republicans ousted their Speaker without a clue about what they'd do next [1]

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Date: 2023-10-03  

If there’s anything the media ought to glean from Tuesday’s events, it’s that House Republicans do not take their jobs — or the American people they were elected (and actually sworn) to represent — very seriously, if at all.

As reported by Annie Karni, writing for the New York Times, the Republican House members who started this fire seem to have put remarkably little thought into how they might put it out.

As Karni reports:

“I think there’s plenty of people who can step up and do the job,” Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, one of the rebels bent on pushing Mr. McCarthy out, said Tuesday morning, but he said he did not know who he had in mind for the job instead.

As Karni notes, another profile in self-righteousness, Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona, similarly begged off. saying “he wasn’t there yet in terms of supporting someone else.”

Of course, some names were being “bandied about.”

Some names were starting to be bandied about, even as all of the potential successors vowed that they were not looking to replace Mr. McCarthy, whom they said they still supported.

That sounds … ambiguous.

As Karni reports:

Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the No. 3 Republican in the House who serves as the majority whip, has also been mentioned by some of his colleagues as a viable option. Mr. Emmer, who has hosted many late night sessions in his office with various factions of the Republican conference, trying to help the group find common ground, has gained the trust of the far-right members. But they don’t view him as a particularly strong leader. “He’s a good sounding board. He’s got some nice conference rooms. He doesn’t lie to us,” Mr. Gaetz said of Mr. Emmer in an earlier interview. “We know he can’t make anything happen.”

“We know he can’t make anything happen.” Very encouraging.

One would expect that having engineered a takedown of their House Speaker, Republicans such as Fl. Rep. Matt Gaetz would have something more to offer than mugging for the camera afterwards. But other than voicing tepid support for Rep. Steve Scalise (who apparently doesn’t want the job as he is currently undergoing chemotherapy for blood cancer), it appears that the House’s most virulent bomb thrower is content to let someone else — anyone but himself, in fact — pick up the pieces.

The fact is that the most reactionary and radical members of the Republican caucus voted for a historically unprecedented removal of their own Speaker without giving the slightest thought to who would replace him. This is one they can’t pin on the Democrats, either. It’s not the Democrats’ job or even prerogative to pick McCarthy’s successor, and it wasn’t the Democrats who instigated the motion to vacate, even though McCarthy’s perfidious conduct certainly deserved it.

The media are going to get lost in the horserace of McCarthy’s ouster and its aftermath, but they’ll probably forget its most important, most consequential aspect: These people are supposed to be representing their constituents, but they tossed out their own leader — the third person in line to the presidency — and effectively shut the peoples’ House down, without even bothering to consider who would replace him. Worse, their main reason appears to be that McCarthy refused to shutter the government and throw millions of federal workers under the bus in the process.

That shows how little they care about their own voters, not to mention the rest of the country.

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