THE PARTY’S OVER

After yesterday’s ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, it’s official:  The Republican Party is in full disarray.  While I will not miss “My Kevin,” I do not rejoice to see him go.  The last thing Americans hungry for a functioning governing body deserve is another serving of crap in a constipated legislative chamber.

How did we get here?  McCarthy needed only 218 votes to keep his job.  He got 210, with eight members of his party voting to remove him.  How is it that eight members of the House out of 434 were able to vacate the Speaker’s chair and paralyze the House?  The easy answer is that these eight members were elected by extremist primary voters and, in order to secure reelection, dutifully voted to represent their extreme views.  The more difficult answer is that our governmental framework has internal anti-majoritarian structures that, when exploited, can damage the system. 

The Washington Post recently asked and answered the easier question, Who elects these clowns exactly?  As it turns out, almost none of us.  From the Post:

These days, only 82 of the 435 House districts across the country are competitive enough that both parties start out with a decent shot at winning, according to the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman.

That is only half the number of swing districts that existed in 1999, and it has effectively eliminated much of the incentive that the two parties once had to find middle ground on contentious issues. Members of Congress know that playing to instincts and impulses of their populist bases are their surest tickets to reelection, and that they will have little protection if they don’t.

You can blame aggressive gerrymandering, which plays a big role. But Wasserman and others say the greater driver of this realignment is a self-sorting of the electorate into like-minded communities, where Democratic voters are concentrated in cities that have turned deeper blue while Republicans are spread out across exurbs and rural areas that have become more reliably red.

The dysfunction that this creates has been thrown into stark relief in a new study by Unite America, a nonpartisan election reform advocacy organization. It has taken a look at eight Republican House members who have been among the most determined obstructionists: Andy Biggs (Ariz.); Elijah Crane (Ariz.); Lauren Boebert (Colo.); Matt Gaetz (Fla.); Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.); Matthew M. Rosendale (Mont.); Dan Bishop (N.C.) and Bob Good (Va.). (Good is not included in the chart above; he was chosen in 2022 in a party convention, where he received a mere 1,488 votes, compared with his opponent’s 271.) 

All breezed through the November election last year, with the exception of Boebert, who won by only 546 votes in a surprisingly strong challenge by Democrat Adam Frisch, who is running against her again in 2024.

What Unite America found is how small a number of people voted in the GOP primaries, where the real choice to send these people to Washington was made. The average, according to its calculations, was only 68,000 voters, or 12 percent of the number who were eligible. We don’t have a House that represents voters because most voters don’t participate.

Note that, of this group of eight House Republicans studied by Unite America, four voted to oust McCarthy, and each of them was elected by less than 25% of eligible Republican primary voters.           

• Biggs ran unopposed     
•  Crane got 17% of Republican voters to turn out for the primary and vote for him
•  Gaetz got 17% to turn out and vote for him, and
•  Rosendale got 23%

The rest of the Republican voters in these congressional districts couldn’t be bothered to vote in the primaries.  They are now at the mercy of those who did.  This is an anti-majoritarian result, born out of a problem of their own making. 

The more difficult answer to the question of how we got here gets to the heart of the anti-majoritarian elements of our constitutional framework itself.  I have written about this in more depth before in Everything is Working (im)Perfectly, so I will simply recap here. 

The American constitutional system worked beautifully as long as people of goodwill were pulling the levers of power.  But one of our two political parties has been radicalized.  The Republican Party no longer accepts election results; it does not renounce political violence; and it refuses publicly to break ties with anti-democratic extremists.  There is in short, no loyal opposition to the Democratic Party. 

Coincident with this loss are other hallmarks of a system in crisis, if not decay.  Big money has corrupted the legislative and electoral processes.  Voters have self-sorted and/or been gerrymandered into congressional districts where the primary process in all but a handful of states so distorts voting as to be outcome-determinative.  Two Presidents, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, both of whom lost the popular vote, appointed five of the nine current Supreme Court justices.  The Senate and the Electoral College are inherently anti-majoritarian, as their membership is not based on population.  Senate filibuster rules prevent bills with majority support from reaching the floor.  In short, the political system is revealing significant structural flaws and it appears to be crashing. 

Those flaws can—in theory— be fixed by constitutional amendments, provided they are upheld by the Supreme Court.  But in practice, given the divided government we have at the federal and state levels (amendments require 2/3 of each House plus 3/4 of state legislatures to ratify), and given this relatively young 6-3 ultra-conservative Court, fixing those flaws by constitutional amendment looks impossible at present. 

I fear the system will continue to fail us until either the voting demographics dramatically change, which would in my opinion take 2 or 3 generations, or there is some internal or external shock to the system that precipitates necessary constitutional amendments to rebalance the system.  External shocks are unpredictable; internal ones are not, and we could see one as early as next November.  It’s happened before.  The decade after the Civil War saw the ratification of the 13th - 15th Amendments. 

This, I believe, is our current state of affairs. The Republican Party is over and there is no rejoicing here.  There is only a belief in the basic goodness and common sense of the American people and the knowledge that nothing either stays the same nor lasts forever.

Keep it real!

Marilyn