And if it’s this time next week [House Speaker] Kevin McCarthy is still Speaker of the House of Representatives. That will be because Democrats bailed him out and he can be their chairman, not mine, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz declared on ABC’s This Week.

Almost everything you need to know about the Republican Party’s dysfunction in the House of Representatives can be extrapolated from Gaetz’s petulant promise, which he made good when he introduced a motion to impeach McCarthy on Monday night.

The founders wanted the Speaker to be the second most powerful constitutional office after the presidency. (Vice presidents, while second in the line of presidential succession, have virtually no formal power beyond severing ties with the Senate and, of recent importance, counting electoral votes after a presidential election.) But the drafters did not provide much guidance on how the work should be done. work. A handful cast themselves as apolitical facilitators.

Schulyer Schuyler

Colfax, who held the position during and just after the Civil War, said he came to the chair to provide leadership [the] rules, but not as a party member.

Over time, the work inevitably became partisan. Speakers must be elected by a majority of members, and it would be bizarre if those votes did not come from the speaker’s party. That’s McCarthy’s dilemma. Although he has a nominal majority of five seats, the Republican Party in the House of Representatives is better split into two, with an amorphous minority of self-proclaimed rebels. Labeling this rump is difficult. They would say they are the conservative base of the party, but the word conservative is moot given their radical leanings and their ideological and fiscal volatility depending on whether Donald Trump is president.

Determined to make the perfect the enemy of the good, they want to dictate outcomes that a majority of the House of Representatives will not vote for. Lacking numerical support, they are trying to exploit potential sovereign defaults and government shutdowns, including the weekend’s cliffhanger, to force legislative concessions they cannot win on the merits.

The specific goals of the rebels, which I sympathize with in the abstract, don’t really matter, because the real goal is to cast themselves as tragic heroes taking on the establishment, especially the Republican establishment. Making deals that deliver partial victories or prevent total disaster is tantamount to capitulation. Going down fighting not only proves purity, it also evades the responsibility to govern.

We lost,

Gaetz conceded on Sunday

. But, he predicted, defeat is not surrender.

For Gaetz, who considers himself the leader of

the

rebel rump, McCarthy’s collaboration with Democrats to keep the government open is evidence of his illegitimacy. The whole point of Gaetz’s stubbornness

has been

to force a government shutdown or force McCarthy to work with the Democrats to oust the speakers.

There are only two problems with this thinking: it is hypocritical and stupid. The hypocrisy stems from the fact that Democratic votes are needed to make good on the threat to impeach McCarthy.

From Monday maybe only now

A dozen Republicans would vote to vacate the seat, that is, to remove McCarthy. Gaetz’s commitment is even more dependent on the Democrats than McCarthy.

The stupidity is too deep and broad to fully describe here. But the idea that legislation must be effective

unanimously

and party-line support of the speaker’s party is a ridiculous invention that runs counter to all of American history. Even the Hastert Rule only requires a majority vote to support specific legislation.

Crucially, the cuts and changes demanded by hardliners who wanted to shut down the government last week would not have passed the Democratic-controlled Senate or survived Biden’s vetoes. And shutdowns always hurt the party that launches them. But they don’t necessarily hurt the Gaetzes, who come from safe districts and have a political and financial incentive to make anyone who tries to make the system work look corrupt.

A motion by Gaetz to evict McCarthy could work. But as with the rebels’ shutdown plan, no one can answer what happens next. The Democrats in the House of Representatives are more united than the Republican Party, but just barely. And they suffer from many of the dynamics that plague the Republican Party. If a Democrat votes to keep McCarthy as chairman, it would pose a primary challenge. An impasse in the speakers’ vote would not mean a shutdown of the government, but it would mean the closure of the House of Representatives.

I have a modest solution. For

it’s from the mail

For the first half century, the speaker was chosen by secret ballot. Let’s go back to that. I don’t know if that would save McCarthy’s speakership, but I don’t care. A secret ballot for chairman would allow standards in both parties to find a consensus candidate who would align more closely with Schuyler

of Colfax

view of the track.

@JonaDispatch