Democrats should have backed McCarthy’s short, dysfunctional reign

With Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) historic removal as House Speaker, there are no winners — not the Republican Party, not the Democratic Party and certainly not the American people. 

The obvious takeaway from this chaos is how far the Republican Party has fallen in the past decade. The GOP is a shell of its former self — with no real agenda, platform or direction — and is now dominated by a handful of extremists led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), whose vision of America is at odds with the democratic principles this country was founded on, and who care more about media attention and fundraising than governing. 

Ahead of a Speaker election on Wednesday, Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and longshot Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.) are feuding over who should lead the party. This will only damage the Republican conference further by perpetuating this civil war between the actual conservatives and the far-right populists that have taken over the party, thus leaving the GOP fragmented and unable to govern. 

Republicans will likely pay a price in 2024, as the voters who narrowly put them in control of the House — and kept them from taking the Senate — in 2022 will take note of the GOP’s continued capitulation to the far-right and ineffectiveness in Washington. 

Put another way, no matter how incompetent Democrats have seemed at times and how poorly the public views President Biden’s job performance on the economy, the Republican Party is so rudderless, chaotic and broken that 2024 may well turn into another referendum on the out-party, rather than the president’s party, similar to 2022. 

But yet, Democrats also share some blame for the mess the country is now in, and their decision to put party politics over country — by siding with the far-right McCarthy opponents — was, as a long-time Democratic strategist, both disappointing and politically shortsighted. 

Democrats could have easily saved the country from this mess by having at least some of their members vote “present” instead of “yes” on McCarthy’s removal, which would not have represented an endorsement of McCarthy but at least would have avoided leaving the House without a speaker at a crucial time in the nation’s budget process. 

Yet, they chose to side with the eight far-right Republicans and do what was in their partisan interest, not the country’s, even though McCarthy was ousted for striking a funding deal with them. The House Democrats’ decision is likely to serve them well in the 2024 elections, but not likely to help achieve their short-term policy objectives. 

Michael Bloomberg, who has years of experience effectively reaching across the aisle, is right that the result of this fiasco will be the far-right extremists becoming more emboldened and Congress becoming less effective. He declared, “Democrats now face the prospect of a speaker who will likely be to McCarthy’s right, and who will likely draw from his political demise the worst possible lesson: that the extremists must be heeded.” 

Certainly, helping McCarthy to be ousted was a short-sighted decision. House Democrats should have realized that it was in their best interests to bail out McCarthy, not only to show the American people that they were above the chaos of the Republican Party but to make him dependent on them. 

It was likely that McCarthy would have to continually rely on Democrats as Gaetz was promising to motion to vacate repeatedly. This dynamic would have inherently given the Democratic caucus leverage over the former Speaker. 

Furthermore, whether Scalise or Jordan becomes the next speaker, Democrats will almost certainly be dealing with a leader who is even more to the right and less willing to compromise. Additional military aid for Ukraine is likely out of the question for the time being with the likely Speaker options representing the anti-Ukraine portion of the GOP. 

To be sure, McCarthy bears the blame for his demise as well, and it’s easy to understand why Democrats were unwilling to prevent his downfall. 

McCarthy did not exactly go out of his way to make Democrats feel the need to save his job when he baselessly blamed them for bringing the government to the brink of a shutdown, and reportedly he did not offer to negotiate with them or reassure them that he would be a reliable partner going forward. 

He also got in bed with Gaetz and the far right when he signed on for the job in January and has capitulated to the far right more than any modern-day speaker, including on the impeachment inquiry of President Biden and passing bills with drastic cuts that do not have a prayer of becoming law. 

Democrats have also not forgiven him for voting to overturn the 2020 presidential election and appeasing Donald Trump at every turn. 

McCarthy was a flawed speaker. However, in the two defining moments of his speakership — when faced with the potential of the U.S. defaulting on our debt, and months later, when the government was on the verge of shutting down — he worked across the aisle for the good of the country. The severe dysfunction that will be sure to follow in his wake made him worth saving by Democrats.

Douglas E. Schoen is a political consultant who served as an adviser to President Clinton and to the 2020 presidential campaign of Michael Bloomberg. His new book is “The End of Democracy? Russia and China on the Rise and America in Retreat.”