Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemy
Republican congressman Kevin McCarthy always wanted to make history—and he did when, earlier this week, he became the first Speaker of the House to be ousted from the job after eight Republicans joined Democrats to approve a motion to vacate the position. How does a motion to vacate work? What events led to McCarthy's fall from grace? How deranged is the Republican caucus in the House, and how did they get that way? Were Democrats right to not bail out McCarthy? In this episode, Matt and Sam are joined by New York's Eric Levitz to provides answers to all these question—and more.
Listen:
Todd Snider, "Conservative, Christian, Right Wing Republican, Straight, White, American Males" (2004)
Sources:
Robert Draper, Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind (Penguin, 2022)
Eric Levitz, "The GOP Is More Ungovernable Than Ever Before," New York, Jan 5, 2023
Ettingermentum, "The Art of Losing the Speaker's Gavel," Oct 3, 2023
Matthew Loh, "Mitch McConnell Says House Republicans Should Get Rid of the Motion to Vacate Because It 'Makes the Speaker's Job Impossible,'" Insider, Oct 5, 2023
What we basically see is, you know, we saw previously power move away from the Republican old guard, the Bushites, the McConnell's, towards Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and this populist conservative media. Now, in the age of social media, when Matt Gaetz can assemble for himself a direct channel to an audience of two million people and can throw up a fundraising link to those people and immediately generate campaign funds by himself without a reliance on the party structure, this really radically decentralizes authority. So you end up in this situation where in January, you had everybody pushing in one direction and a critical mass of Republican backbenchers, nevertheless, holding out until the very last moment until they were able to get things like this motion to vacate rule and other demands that have made it extremely difficult for Republicans to govern. It's difficult to map this on to an interesting, sophisticated conversation about the sort of rifts within the party over policy or over populist economics because it doesn't seem to be a conflict over some kind of like material stakes. It doesn't seem to be really ideological in any kind of robust way. You could say that it's strategic, but as you pointed out, there isn't really a strategy here for this redounding to the benefit of conservative goals. Yeah, the substantive effect of the brinksmanship by Gaetz and his allies has been to push policy in the opposite direction that they ostensibly want it to go. It led, again, to McCarthy having to rely more on house Democrats to avoid a debt limit breach and thus a more liberal budget agreement that was reached back in April. You see earlier, with the Tea Party back in the Obama years, we didn't cut Medicare and Social Security, which the Tea Party ostensibly wanted to do, not because of Barack Obama who put those on the table, but because they wouldn't take yes for an answer in terms of a compromise that would have included any tax increases. You kind of see time after time that the brinksmanship on the right sets back the cause if the cause is not just owning the establishment, but actually trying to get specific conservative policy goals advanced. [Music]
Eric Levitz of New York Magazine joins to discuss the fate of Kevin McCarthy and the GOP meltdown in Congress. Subscribe on Patreon to hear the rest.
