Zamuel wrote:I disagree, he'd have won handily yesterday. The final vote would have required a little arm twisting, but that's nothing new. The T-Party types may be resolute but they aren't suicidal. Best reason I can envision is that McCarthy decided he didn't want to be Speaker next year when the Republicans loose the presidency and most of the radical right is replaced.
The situation is worse than you picture it. Previously, House leadership had levers to pull that kept minorities in line. Earmarks were granted or withdrawn. Leadership positions dangled or denied. Power in the House rested in a few leaders who could browbeat recalcitrant members. In particular too, money for campaigns was heavily controlled by the GOP itself, which could be generous or penurious, depending on a member's record.
Today all that has changed. House leadership is impotent. Earmarks are gone and money is no longer funneled through parties, but through the candidates directly, both in hard money and soft money. In effect, each member is now almost wholly independent and he or she owes nothing to the leadership of the party or of the House. The result is the election of kamikaze candidates who truly don't mind committing suicide to both fulfill their lunatic ambitions and to appeal to the fanatical voters who sent them to Congress. Or perhaps more precisely, the successful candidate now owes much more to his
donors than to anyone else, including the voters. The House is now top-heavy with loose cannons. These kamikazes will gleefully shut down the government and make the entire nation pay hideous prices to please the people who wrote them checks or wrote them to their PAC. More than at any other time in our history, political donations buy politicians.
One result for McCarthy is that he knew he couldn't win. He had zero leverage against the crazies. They would see him as Boehner Lite and crucify him the way they've done Boehner. He might eke out a conference vote, but the floor vote was a predetermined failure.
There is no Republican Party now. There are warring factions that receive their supplies from disparate points, so there is no choke point from which to enforce discipline. Congress has devolved into the chaotic state that Henry Clay found when he arrived generations ago and saw that he had to whip his colleagues into line. Speaker after Speaker since has done the same thing, but Boehner was in the office when the Speakership was whittled down to figurehead status. If this were a parliamentary system, the Republican Party would be two or more parties, but our two-party system prevents that, at least for a while. There are hordes of voters and candidates who would love to find a home in a centrist-right environment, but that doesn't exist much anymore, not even in most quasi-conservative Democratic holdouts. And with
Citizens United still the law of the land, and the ability now to quite literally buy an entire Congress, the situation will only get worse, not better. The crazies will not be ejected any time soon, because there is no mechanism for doing so.