The new U.S. Congress has spent its first three days in limbo. It might\u00a0well prove to\u00a0be an omen.<\/p>\n
For the third straight day, Republicans in the House of Representatives on Thursday appeared to have failed to elect a Speaker\u00a0\u2014\u00a0a historic\u00a0debacle unseen in\u00a0100 years.<\/p>\n
This was supposed to\u00a0be the easy part.<\/p>\n
But the\u00a0days of duress for Republican Kevin McCarthy, who’s now\u00a0broken the post-Civil War record for most lost speakership votes, foreshadow likely\u00a0dysfunction in the incoming Congress, and the consequences\u00a0could reach\u00a0beyond the U.S.<\/p>\n
This crew struggling to elect a Speaker will soon be asked to perform far more difficult tasks that touch\u00a0the global economy:\u00a0like funding the U.S. government and approving U.S. debt payments.<\/p>\n
“It is a really worrying portent,” said Geoffrey Kabaservice, an\u00a0author, historian of conservatism and centre-right Republican himself.<\/p>\n
“Basically it comes down to the fact that the Republican Party, as presently constituted, is not really governable,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I think that even a lot of the Democrats, who are kind of gleeful over this vision of Republican chaos right now, understand that this is going to cause real problems later on.”<\/p>\n
The paralysis in the House illustrates a warning for 2023 by the geopolitical risk-assessment Eurasia Group: that American political dysfunction could hurt other countries, and it specifically mentioned\u00a0Canada.<\/p>\n
The standoff has historical precedents.<\/p>\n
Historical echoes of current feud<\/p>\n
Several times before the Civil War, then again in 1923, it took a gruelling series of votes to muster up the necessary majority for any one candidate to lead the U.S. House.<\/p>\n
These moments were transition points defined by political crises. Kabaservice notes a common factor of those moments: a rise of anti-immigration\u00a0politics, following\u00a0 surges\u00a0in immigration and demographic change.<\/p>\n
There are other relevant parallels.<\/p>\n
Like today, the 1923 standoff was driven by the same two overlapping factors,\u00a0according to a contemporaneous\u00a0report: personal power-struggles and policy differences.<\/p>\n
Like today, Republicans were fresh off a difficult midterm.\u00a0 Backbenchers insisted on a course-correction in policy, though in that case, the rebels were centrists. Personal ambition was also at play, with demands for coveted positions.<\/p>\n
Once again, after a disappointing midterm, it’s a season of rebellion.<\/p>\n
The Republican Party barely has a majority and a small group of insurgents have\u00a0used their\u00a0 newfound power to stall the chamber.<\/p>\n
MAGA vs. MAGA<\/p>\n
Those seeking to oust McCarthy tend to be uncompromising right-wingers who are\u00a0drawn disproportionately from the pool of members that\u00a0backed Donald Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election and rejected compromise with Democrats.<\/p>\n
But it’s more than that.<\/p>\n
This is an intra-MAGA feud: you have\u00a0staunch pro-Trump Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene and even Trump himself backing McCarthy, versus a cast of rebels including pro-Trump types like Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert.<\/p>\n
A stew of causes has coalesced here.<\/p>\n
Policy disagreements are one ingredient, just like in 1923. As is power: Rebels want\u00a0committee assignments\u00a0and an easier way to dump leaders, and they also want party brass\u00a0to stop funding\u00a0primary challenges against them.<\/p>\n
Lauren Bell, a\u00a0scholar\u00a0of the U.S. Congress at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, said there’s also a performative element from politicians who prize building an anti-establishment brand.<\/p>\n
But she said there are real policy differences \u2014 like a desire to enact maximum term lengths,\u00a0toughen border protections,\u00a0cut budgets and shift power to backbenchers.<\/p>\n
Given the right circumstances, Bell\u00a0said this sort of insurgency could happen on the Democratic side as well, but she said Republican backbenchers simply contest their leaders more often.<\/p>\n
For example, she noted that progressives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar vote against their party about\u00a0four per cent of the time, while conservatives Boebert and\u00a0Gaetz do it about 25 per cent of the time.<\/p>\n
Then there’s the most basic human element of all: Personal rivalry.<\/p>\n
Matthew Continetti, a conservative who has studied and\u00a0written about\u00a0the history of the Republican Party, said the poorer-than-expected midterm performance created a perfect storm \u2014 with a narrow majority that left McCarthy vulnerable.<\/p>\n
He suddenly needs near-unanimous party support to get the required 218 votes and he needs it from representatives of hardcore Republican districts.<\/p>\n
Those people are not necessarily huge admirers of their current leader, a nine-term party establishment player from California.<\/p>\n
“The rebels’ main complaint is personal. They don’t trust McCarthy,” said Continetti, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who says he can’t see an obvious path now for McCarthy.<\/p>\n
“They see him as tied to a pre-Trump congressional leadership.”<\/p>\n
McCarthy has already tried giving his opponents some of what they want:\u00a0He’s made peace with members like Taylor Greene; he’s promised\u00a0rules\u00a0that make it easier to\u00a0oust a Speaker; he says he’ll give lawmakers more time to read bills; he pledged to investigate the federal government’s pandemic restrictions and investigate the origins of COVID-19; and, on Wednesday night, he\u00a0reportedly agreed\u00a0to limit establishment involvement in primaries.<\/p>\n
The rebels have spent days pushing for more.<\/p>\n
What the rebels want<\/p>\n
Boebert\u00a0said a group this week pressed McCarthy to fight for term limits for members of Congress; budget spending restrictions; and a suite of border measures that\u00a0include\u00a0a wall with Mexico.<\/p>\n
“He eagerly dismissed us,” Boebert said Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Gaetz derided the Republican leader as the so-called political swamp’s biggest alligator, calling him untrustworthy and evasive during weeks of policy discussions.<\/p>\n
“All we got was a handful of ‘howdy’ and a mouthful of ‘much obliged,’ ” Gaetz said during a news conference Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Then he got personal, essentially calling McCarthy a liar and noting that McCarthy’s own mentor says it, too.<\/p>\n
Bill Thomas, the former lawmaker who once held McCarthy’s\u00a0 California seat, echoed a common criticism of his former protege: that he’s a back-slapping stereotype of a politician who tells audiences what they want to hear.<\/p>\n
“Kevin basically is whatever you want him to be,” Thomas\u00a0has said. “He lies. He’ll change the lie if necessary. How can anyone trust his word?”<\/p>\n
What’s next?<\/p>\n
One of three things must happen.<\/p>\n
The most dramatic, and by far the least likely, would involve a power-sharing deal between Democrats and Republicans; where a critical mass of moderates from both parties would back a unity candidate.<\/p>\n
A likelier possibility? The rebels give up. After gaining some new concessions late Wednesday, some could back McCarthy or simply boycott the final vote.<\/p>\n
Barring that, Republicans could move on and find a replacement for McCarthy, with one possible alternative being caucus whip Steve Scalise.<\/p>\n
The Louisiana lawmaker,\u00a0who survived a 2017 shooting, is a touch more conservative than\u00a0McCarthy, according to\u00a0different\u00a0statistical\u00a0 scorecards.<\/p>\n
In any case, the discord on display won’t evaporate. And it didn’t emerge overnight \u2014 John Boehner was forced out as Speaker by conservatives and his successor, Paul Ryan, retired early.<\/p>\n
Eventually, the new House majority, led by McCarthy or someone else, will find unity in opposing Democrats. Republicans will launch multiple\u00a0aggressive investigations.<\/p>\n
But enacting legislation will be harder.<\/p>\n
Two major economic events are looming this fall and they’ll require action. U.S. federal funding will lapse, and the U.S. will hit its notorious debt ceiling.<\/p>\n
Failure to pass funding bills could lead to a government shutdown or, worse, the U.S. defaulting on debt obligations.<\/p>\n
Canada, and the rest of the world, have about\u00a031 trillion\u00a0reasons to care about that.<\/p>\n
That’s the size of the U.S. debt, and projections about the potential economic consequences of an American default range from\u00a0bad\u00a0to\u00a0catastrophic.<\/p>\n
Then, suddenly, the rest of the planet could feel McCarthy’s pain.<\/p>\n
\u25aa\ufe0e Report by CBC News (www.cbc.ca)<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Once-in-a-century chaos strikes Congress \u2014 and its effects could reach beyond the U.S. House still leaderless after Kevin McCarthy breaks post-Civil War record of 9 lost speakership votes The new U.S. Congress has spent its first three days in limbo. It might\u00a0well prove to\u00a0be an omen. For the third straight day, Republicans in the House […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":61533,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5787],"tags":[2733,5431,5436],"class_list":["post-61547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-politics","category-world","tag-congress","tag-mccarthy","tag-post-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/61533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}