Republican party

In the Quaker denomination, they have a term: “bloody-minded objector.” Because the Society of Friends requires consensus on all matters concerning their meetings, they make exceptions for those who are needlessly gumming up the works for personal or wrongheaded reasons. Today, Florida Man Representative Matt Gaetz is leading a band of twenty bloody-minded objectors who refuse to vote for Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House — and that's not all. He and they are also making Donald Trump look like an absolute fool. McCarthy and Trump have a good relationship and Trump has endorsed the GOP leader for the speakership. As a presidential candidate, Trump needs his endorsements to matter; he needs to show that he is still the leader of the MAGA cause.

For the last thirty years, the Republican Party has been a battleground between two competing ideologies. One of these is fundamentally liberal, although it is packaged and sold under a variety of brand names: “compassionate conservatism,” neoconservatism, classical liberalism, and — most misleadingly — Reagan conservatism. The other ideology is a rejection of modern liberalism and the post-Cold War elite consensus in American politics. It is skeptical of free trade, large-scale immigration and US involvement in foreign conflicts. Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump are the primary representatives of this view, which is often called populist or nationalist. The two sides are not evenly matched.

All that Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy wants for Christmas is the four votes he needs to hold the gavel as speaker of the House of Representatives. But at this point it looks like it will take a Christmas Miracle™. This past week, five members of the contrarian House Freedom Caucus restressed their antipathy for McCarthy. Representatives Andy Biggs, Ralph Norman, Matt Gaetz, Bob Good and Matt Rosendale have promised as a bloc to vote against McCarthy, denying him the 218 votes he needs to become speaker. Biggs ran against McCarthy for Republican majority leader after November’s lukewarm midterm elections — and lost. He knows he is playing spoiler. But what then?

Lame-duck sessions of Congress are rarely uneventful. Whether it’s cramming through spending at the last minute or cramming through even more spending at the last minute, our legislature can always be counted on to rubber-stamp bills that lacked political support before Mariah Carey returned to the airwaves. Leading the charge for the opposition this time around is the self-declared speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy. A Bloomberg headline recently proclaimed that “McCarthy Draws Line on Spending,” and trumpets seemingly blared out from the heavens heralding that Republicans had — finally — rediscovered their fiscally conservative bona fides. But not so fast: this is a script we’ve seen before.

Even doomed political campaigns throw victory parties — or pretend to. No-hope candidates have to keep up the pretense that they’re in with a chance — right down to the election-night canapés. On election night last month, a gathering of Republicans at a hotel in downtown Washington was set to be the real deal. To the assembled RNC employees, Hill staffers and assorted hangers-on, winning was a certainty and they were ready to celebrate. “Take back the house,” read the banners on the ballroom wall. The anticipatory chatter was of the margin of victory. All of which is to say, the crowd was confident. None more so than the party’s host. For Kevin McCarthy, November 8 was set to be more than just a very good night for his party.

The GOP absolutely blew a historic opportunity in the 2022 midterms and, sadly, it seems nothing in the party will change. For all the talk of accountability and blame last week, many in the GOP now seem content to just… move on. All eyes have turned to the 2024 presidential nomination with former president Donald Trump’s announcement Tuesday night that he would be running for a third time. Trump’s rally handed the establishment a welcome distraction from their own failures in the midterms; now, the debate is over how badly Trump hurt the party with his endorsements and whether or not he and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will officially go to war. The party — and more importantly the voters! —  should decide if they still want Trump to be their leader.

Former president Donald Trump called for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to be replaced by Senator Rick Scott during a rally in Ohio late Monday night. Cockburn is not terribly surprised that the former president would choose to attack his party a day before what promises to be a Republican wave — after all, he's aligned with the voices on the left who consider the GOP "the Trump Party." Trump branded McConnell a “lousy leader,” saying he “has been very bad for our nation” and “very bad for the Republican Party.” He also praised Scott as a “very talented guy” who is the “likely candidate” to replace McConnell.