A week ago, Republican Colorado representative Ken Buck drew a line in the sand against giving the House Speakership to Jim Jordan. “I think it’s really important that the Republican Party state unequivocally that President Trump lost the 2020 election,” he said.
“If we don’t have the moral clarity to decide whether President Biden won or not, we don’t have the moral clarity to rule in this country, period.”
Period became an ellipsis. A week later, Buck assented to making Mike Johnson Speaker. Johnson played an even more central role in aiding Trump’s attempt to secure an unelected second term than Jordan did — endorsing ludicrous theories about the ghost of Hugo Chavez planting vote-stealing software in the vote-counting machines and pressuring Republicans to sign onto Trump’s lawsuit to reverse the election.
Buck told reporters, “Jim Jordan was involved in all of the — not all of it, but most of the post-election activity. Mike Johnson was not,” which is absolutely false. He then rationalized his support by saying, “I think it” — “it” being Johnson’s central role in trying to end democracy in the United States — “is a mistake, but I think people make mistakes and still can be really good Speakers.” And where Buck had previously insisted that Jordan acknowledge Trump lost the 2020 election, he said of Johnson only, “I have not gotten that promise from Mike. I hope he comes around to that point.”
Most revealingly, when confronted with Johnson’s authoritarian record, Buck explained that it was just time to move on. “Yes he did, and most of the conference voted to decertify, and I think it’s very important that we get a Speaker and that we move forward.”
Buck’s inspiring stance for democracy protest was like a Nelson Mandela hunger strike, except if by the first day Mandela was feeling peckish, he decided he had made his point by skipping breakfast and had some brunch.
“Moderate” Republicans, as the media has absurdly taken to labeling conservative Republicans who have qualms about seizing power through non-electoral means, have shown through the last few weeks precisely how serious they are about their principles. They are willing to fight for them, for a short period of time, before arriving at the same position as their right-wing coalition partners.
The main source of division within the Republican Party was that a handful of far-right Republicans were willing to withhold support for the majority of the caucus’s Speaker choice in order to force the rest of their party to accept their terms. The party’s institutionalists objected to this tactic because it gave the minority disproportionate power.
The two factions went several rounds vetoing each other’s candidates because they couldn’t agree which set of rules to use to choose a Speaker — if the principle was that a candidate who had majority support within the caucus must then be approved by the entire party, the institutionalists demanded, then why couldn’t they have Kevin McCarthy, the GOP’s most popular pick?
The far right refused to accept the principle that they would go along with the majority of the party and insisted on retaining a veto. And so the deadlock went on, for days.
But the deadlock was broken the way it usually is: by the least extreme Republicans capitulating to the most extreme ones.
The institutionalists have tried to paint their opposition to Jordan as proof they can’t be bullied. Jordan infuriated the institutionalists by inspiring a series of wild violent threats against them (a tactic that is ordinarily reserved for use against Democrats). “Their prediction,” writes National Review of the Jordan supporters, “was that these members would fold to public pressure once their opposition became public. That strategy ended up backfiring spectacularly.”
But the strategy only failed in the narrow sense of elevating Jordan’s personal ambitions. The larger ideological goal of giving the most right-wing Republicans a veto over their leadership was an unambiguous success.
New Speaker Mike Johnson is a hero of the far right — not only for his leadership role in pushing Trump’s coup attempt, but also in his comprehensive commitment to right-wing policy across the board. He has endorsed the Paul Ryan style and spending rollbacks, expressed militant hostility to gay marriage and abortion, and voted against aid to Ukraine.
Representative Matt Gaetz, the ringleader of the rebels, was exultant in triumph. “I believe history will assess these three weeks as the most productive weeks of the 118th Congress,” Gaetz gloated, “because now we have both a man and a plan.”
A contest between a faction that is willing to bear any burden to gain leverage and another faction that is primarily concerned with holding together the party can only end one way. The three-week protest by the institutionalist Republicans may be remembered only because it is their idea of an exhausting twilight struggle.
