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What Could a Person of Integrity Have Done in Kevin McCarthy’s Position? [1]
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Date: 2023-01-10
This piece is running as an op/ed in newspapers in the very red congressional district (VA-06) in which I ran as the Democratic nominee in 2012.
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There’s no doubt that Kevin McCarthy was in a difficult position. The Republican majority was so small that the opposition of only five of his caucus would be sufficient to prevent his getting the 218 Republican votes he sought in his quest to become Speaker of the House.
The previous recent Republican Speakers – John Boehner and Paul Ryan – had larger majorities, and could afford to lose considerably more votes from their caucus. And, as proof of the difficulty of being a Republican Speaker in this era, we should note that both Boehner and Ryan eventually resigned their speakership and left politics altogether.
But, even given that difficulty, the choices McCarthy made look shabby, even foolish. As everyone could observe, he “gave away the store,” making concession after concession to the 10% of the Republican caucus that held him hostage.
He got his speakership, but at the cost of
giving up any real power of leadership;
humiliating himself; and
damaging serious national interests.
Regarding the national interest, McCarthy has agreed to give an extremist element -- displaying nakedly destructive impulses -- the power to push the United States into default. The debt ceiling will need to be raised. (And no, it is not about spending, it is about paying bills already incurred.) And the people who took McCarthy hostage are openly threatening to push the national and global economies over the cliff to extort concessions (like cutting Social Security and Medicare).
To become Speaker, McCarthy repeatedly chose to give the worst people in his party the most power.
More than one commentator has cited the biblical line, “What does it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his soul?” (Mark 8:36) (Though all McCarthy gained was a title.)
But we already knew that McCarthy was a man without integrity, having witnessed how his craving for “exalted” position had led him to abandon the truths he spoke in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, and kiss the ring of the man he’d just denounced.
So the question arises: What would a person with integrity have done in McCarthy’s position?
One answer is that someone with integrity would simply have abandoned his long-time ambition to become Speaker, refusing to make all the ugly and destructive concessions that McCarthy made.
He or she might have thought: “The results of the 2022 midterms were disappointing for my Party because too many of its candidates were like those trying to extort me now. The health of the Republican Party clearly requires that we move away from the extremists who deny valid elections and peddle lies. So it would be a disservice to my Party to give more power to precisely the kinds of anti-democracy nihilists who are extorting me to gain more power to do more damage. No rewards for ‘legislative terrorists.’ Better to lose than to feed the monster that, regrettably, dwells in my Party.”
Better indeed-- even if McCarthy’s prize were not so greatly diminished by all the power he gave away.
But there’s another approach that I think that I would have taken.
It is a sign of McCarthy’s fundamental weakness as a leader that, even while the extremists in his caucus were threatening him with defeat, McCarthy never wielded any threats of his own. Even though a good and reasonably plausible threat was available to him.
On five different occasions during John Boehner’s difficult reign as Speaker of the House, in order to get the nation’s necessary business conducted, Boehner had to turn to the Democrats who, combined with less extreme Republicans, helped provide a bipartisan majority.
McCarthy could have said to the holdouts, “I’d rather lead a Republican majority to get the necessary business done. (Starting with the election of a Republican Speaker.) But if this minority of Republicans – minority because I did get overwhelmingly elected Party leader after the election – insists on standing in the way, I will negotiate a way forward with the help of the people on the other side of the aisle.”
And he could have made that threat real by visibly entering into such negotiations.
My guess is that the Democrats would have been willing to negotiate. (We’ll apparently never know whether terms could have been reached that had the agreement of enough Democrats plus Republicans to constitute the necessary majority of the House.)
(The demonization of Democrats having proceeded further in recent years may well have made it politically more difficult for even the less extreme Republicans to be seen working with Democrats.)
But even the sight of such negotiations, combined with a strong position of “I will not be blackmailed,” might have induced the Republican hold-outs to capitulate. They might well have figured, “Better to be part of the majority than to be rendered irrelevant.”
But even if that effort failed, a person of integrity would have preferred such a failure to the kind of “success” that McCarthy achieved.
And it will become clear, in the coming two years, that such a bi-partisan coalition would have served the nation better than what McCarthy has set up: nothing legislatively will be accomplished or, if it is, it will be by going around McCarthy and the “legislative terrorists” he has now empowered.
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