(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Republicans in Disarray [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-24 I grabbed this image from Mother Jones after seeing it in ads in my social media flow inviting me to subscribe. (I did and do — although getting to the cover story shown above is proving problematic.) Considering that it appeared on the January-February 2023 issue, it was remarkably prophetic. In any case, I thought I’d spend a little time grabbing some headlines from The NY Times digital edition for 10/24/23 for a little schadenfreude. House Republicans were meeting behind closed doors to grind through multiple votes to find a nominee for speaker, with several members vying for the post. Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the No. 3 House Republican, emerged on Tuesday as his party’s latest leading contender for speaker as the G.O.P. ground through rounds of closed-door votes to break a deadlock that has left Congress paralyzed for three weeks. Mr. Emmer won the first rounds of secret balloting, according to lawmakers who participated, and the field was winnowing as the lowest vote getters were forced out. That left four Republicans, none of them with a national profile, vying for the post. Still in the race were Representatives Mike Johnson of Louisiana, a conservative lawyer who sits on the Judiciary Committee; Byron Donalds of Florida, a charismatic younger member of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus; and Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, the chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee. The free-for-all reflected the deep divisions within the House G.O.P. The party began meeting Tuesday morning and was to remain cloistered behind closed doors for much of the day, grinding through multiple rounds of voting by secret ballot to try to coalesce around a candidate. Whoever ultimately wins a majority of Republicans will become the party’s next nominee for speaker and advance to the House floor. Out of the nine candidates who put their names forward after Jordan got booted, seven of them voted against accepting the 2020 election results. Quite a choice to be second in line to the Presidency, right? Emmer at least voted to accept the results — but still spread doubt about the election. The Republican free-for-all for speaker reflects a web of overlapping blocs that have made the party nearly ungovernable. ...Back at square one after 20 days without a speaker, many House Republicans have found themselves asking: Are we simply too dysfunctional to govern? With a free-for-all raging in their ranks, House Republicans were huddling behind closed doors on Monday evening to hear from no fewer than eight contenders for speaker even after a lesser-known candidate, Representative Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania, dropped out as the meeting began. They were to meet again on Tuesday morning to grind through several rounds of voting by secret ballot, eliminating the lowest vote-getter as they go, a process that could take hours. But the tangle of crosscurrents dividing them means that there is no guarantee that the victor can actually win the post on the House floor. “Are we simply too dysfunctional to govern?” To answer that question: Well duh! Michelle Cottle attempts to explain who these people are, and why they can’t just get along. When it comes to Congress, Americans have come to expect a certain baseline of dysfunction. But I think most of us can agree that the current House Republican majority is something special. Overthrowing a speaker for the first time in history. Rejecting multiple nominees to replace him. Members publicly trashing one another. One faction’s supporters threatening opposing members. And so here we languish, with the government’s most basic functions held hostage by a conference divided over everything from ideological differences to petty personal slights: Candidate X broke his promise! Candidate Y ignores me! Candidate Z never votes for my bills! It’s like watching a pack of middle schoolers hopped up on hormones and Skittles. To help make sense of this dark farce, it is useful to dig into the warring factions that have already destroyed the speaker dreams of multiple colleagues. Boiling down the action so far: A tiny gaggle of eight Republicans, mostly hard-right extremists, took down Kevin McCarthy. Then a larger group of hard-liners quashed the candidacy of Steve Scalise, the majority leader, before it even came up for a floor vote, with an eye toward elevating one of their own, the chronically belligerent Jim Jordan. But a coalition of moderates, institutionalists and members who just can’t stomach Mr. Jordan struck back, voting him down again and again and again — and again, if you count Friday’s closed-conference ballot effectively stripping him of the nomination. Meanwhile, the ‘fair and balanced view’ from the other side — Rich Lowry, conservative voice and editor in chief of National Review weighs in with some truly bizarre interpretations of what’s happening, but an appreciation of just how dysfunctional the assorted GOP factions are. It is tempting to interpret the chaos in the House as the function of a dispute between the pro- and anti-Trump elements of the party, but this isn’t quite right: The deposed speaker, Kevin McCarthy, is in no way anti-Trump. Instead, there were pre-existing trends, either represented or augmented by the rise of Donald Trump, that have undermined G.O.P. coherence and made the Republican House practically ungovernable in the current circumstances. Lowry goes on to make this about a weakened GOP establishment unable to impose discipline on ‘real conservatives’ who insist on ‘purity’. You know he’s coming from bizarro world when he makes this comparison: Mr. Trump is a little like Bernie Sanders — a forceful critic of his party’s mainstream who isn’t at his core a member of the party. (Senator Sanders isn’t a registered Democrat, while Mr. Trump became a Republican again after flitting among various affiliations and would surely quit once more if things didn’t go his way.) The difference is that Mr. Trump won the Republican nomination in a hostile takeover, whereas the Democratic Party had the antibodies to resist Mr. Sanders. Try this comparison as well: In the last Congress, Nancy Pelosi had a slim majority like Mr. McCarthy and a restive handful of members on her left flank, the so-called Squad. Yet she held it together. The difference is that Ms. Pelosi still had considerable legitimacy as a leader, which gave her the moral power to keep everyone together. It is instructive to contrast her not just with Mr. McCarthy, but with the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell. Whereas Ms. Pelosi, an institutionalist concerned with getting things done, is a legend among Democrats, Mr. McConnell, also an institutionalist concerned with getting things done, is hated by much of his party’s own base and constantly attacked by the party’s de facto leader, Donald Trump. Neve mind that Moscow Mitch is a lying, conniving, hypocritical S.O.B. who trashed the Supreme Court and saved Trump’s ass twice instead of removing him from office — he’s an “institutionalist”. The Squad is nothing like the crazies of the Freedom Caucus, but sure Mr. Lowry, pretend it’s comparable on the left. (I seem to recall “The Squad” was as much a creation of right wing media trying to portray them as a scary bunch of lefty radicals as it was an actual definitive subgroup on the Left. It’s largely faded out, just as they’ve stopped talking about “woke”.) Lowry has this summation: The situation in the Republican House caucus has now developed into a sort of tribal war, where memories of real or alleged wrongs committed by the other side lead to more conflict and more bad feelings. So, establishmentarians and relative moderates were willing to take down the speaker candidacy of the House Freedom Caucus co-founder Jim Jordan, rejecting his new argument that everyone had to come together for the good of the whole. This is the party you helped create Mr. Lowry. Perhaps you should read “American Psychosis — A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy” by David Corn. It documents the decades-long journey that got the GOP here. (Now available in paperback!) Meanwhile, the Republicans in Disarray are providing plenty of fodder for late night comedy. Stephen Colbert named actual candidates for the job before switching to made-up politicians — “and literally no one knows when I did, including me.” Along with Colbert, there are also clips from The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel, and others. Here’s the clip in which Colbert takes on the House speaker battle and goes on to take on Trump’s legal woes. 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