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After the vote that ended Kevin McCarthy’s tenure as House speaker, Republicans met for a closed-door meeting. By all accounts, nothing of great significance transpired at the gathering, though the ousted GOP leader told his colleagues he would not try to reclaim the gavel.
After the meeting, Axios reported that the House Republican members were “distraught, furious and concerned for the future of their party.” Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota added, “Frankly, one has to wonder whether the House is governable at all.”
The frustration is understandable. The observation is not.
We know the House remains a “governable” institution because recent memory tells us so. In the most recent Congress, spanning 2021 and 2022, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi racked up a series of legislative successes with a small majority that was identical in size to the one McCarthy failed to manage.
At no point during Pelosi’s tenure — or more to the point, either of Pelosi’s tenures — did it occur to any of her Democratic members to say, “Frankly, one has to wonder whether the House is governable at all.”
The exasperated declaration did, however, come up when John Boehner and Paul Ryan held the gavel.
It’s enough to make one wonder whether the problem has less to do with the institution and more to do with the party responsible for leading it. As a New York Times analysis summarized:
[I]n today’s Republican Party, doing the right thing is considered a transgression, not a virtue — a sign of unforgivable allegiance to the political establishment. That was the central problem for Mr. McCarthy, and for his eventual successor. House Republicans, beholden to a base that reveres former President Donald J. Trump and detests compromise, have become ungovernable. And it is doubtful that his precipitous downfall will break the fever.
Politico published a related assessment, under a headline that read, “The House GOP is a failed state.”
McCarthy’s ouster is dramatic evidence, if redundant, about the state of the modern GOP. A party that used to have an instinctual orientation toward authority and order — Democrats fall in love, went the old chestnut, while Republicans fall in line — is now animated by something akin to nihilism. The politics of contempt so skillfully exploited by Donald Trump is turned inward on hapless would-be leaders like McCarthy with no less ferocity than it is turned outward on liberals and the media.
Is the House governable? Yes. Are contemporary House Republicans members of a governing party? No.