Comment: Don’t expect House GOP to end its mess anytime soon

By Jonathan Bernstein / Bloomberg Opinion

Are you perplexed or disgusted by the chaos among Republicans in the House of Representatives? Here are some thoughts I have that might provide a useful framework for considering what’s afoot.

• Majority Leader Steve Scalise withdrew his candidacy for speaker after it became clear he didn’t have the votes to win on the House floor. But the leadership contest remains basically a sideshow. The real contest is finding a way to pass spending bills to keep the government running when a large chunk of the Republican Party would rather force a shutdown than make deals with the Senate and President Biden; or even compromise with various factions within their own party. It’s not likely to get any better regardless of who ends up as speaker.

• Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who was defeated by Scalise in the Republican conference vote to replace ousted speaker Kevin McCarthy is making another run for the top job. For those who supported McCarthy and/or Scalise, the situation is clear. Unless they block Jordan they will be letting the handful of rebels who removed the party’s choice twice know that they are always willing to be bullied by a small minority. (Eight of the 221 Republicans and every Democrat voted to remove McCarthy. Because there was no final vote, we don’t know how many Republicans refused to support the party majority for Scalise, but it appeared to be as few as a dozen and as many as 40 or so.) That doesn’t just apply to leadership battles. It also matters on the upcoming spending bills.

• A bipartisan solution is almost certainly not the way out. Yes, there have been examples of such things at the state level. But the gap between the parties in the House is so large that a stable coalition would be almost impossible to put together. As congressional scholars explain it, the point isn’t to put together a one-time majority to elect a speaker. What’s needed is a long-term coalition to control the House floor every day of the session. It’s hard to see how — or why — that could happen.

• Scalise didn’t get the job, but as far as I could tell he acquitted himself reasonably well, given what he was dealing with. Unlike McCarthy’s habit of pushing for votes on the House floor and just hoping it would all work out, Scalise followed the more sensible path of waiting until he had the votes. When it was clear he didn’t, he dropped out rather than subject himself and the party to further humiliation.

• Unless Republicans are ready to replace Scalise with someone who can assume the post right now, it’s time to empower acting Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry so that the House can conduct business while they figure out what comes next. McHenry and both parties have been acting as if his only job is presiding until a new speaker is chosen. But the procedure under which McHenry was chosen was a post-Sept. 11 attempt to assure continuity in government in the case of some major disaster. It makes no sense to act as if McHenry can’t perform the basic duties of the speaker. There’s a lot of uncertainty about what exactly the job is supposed to entail, but if McHenry simply started acting as a de facto speaker and the House backed him, then it would be settled. Otherwise, they’re setting a very narrow precedent that would be dangerous in a real emergency.

Dysfunction within the Republican Party in general, and the House in particular, has been building for at least three decades and there’s no reason to expect a solution to arrive any time soon. The best we can hope for is that they’ll find a way to muddle through without doing too much damage.

In the meantime, it’s hard to see why anyone who has the skills to be a capable speaker would want the job; or whether anyone with those tools could win the backing of enough Republicans to win it.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics. A former professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, he wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.