The "(D) Stands for Designated Driver" Mini-Edition
McCarthy's ouster is a symptom of instability, not a cause
I no sooner put out an edition than the House of Representatives ousts Kevin McCarthy from the speakership. This is objectively hilarious and yet historically unprecedented—no speaker has ever lost a “vacate the chair” motion, and the only speaker with a shorter term was some dude who died of tuberculosis in the 1870s. But your question to me is, is this destabilizing? My best answer is: not necessarily, only a little bit, and we need to remember how this happened.
Not Necessarily
The House of Representatives is the most small-d democratic and representative body in our government, and the speaker the closest person we have to a prime minister in a parliamentary system. Remember: parliamentary systems are more democratic than ours. In a parliamentary system, every day for a prime minister is another day to try to hold his/her government together via a parliamentary majority. Elections aside, one can lose one’s majority at any moment if one loses the confidence of one’s fellow members.
Our quasi-parliament is much less unpredictable because our two-party system and regular elections simplify the speaker’s challenge: s/he doesn’t have to hold multiple small fractious parties together like in Israel or Italy, they just have to keep their bigger party on the same page. This is why there hasn’t been a successful “no confidence” vote in U.S. history until now: only now have we had a speaker so incompetent they couldn’t hold their one-party majority together. As many have noted, Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi had the same narrow majority as McCarthy, her own set of bumptious, not-always-satisfied “Squad” members, and yet never faced the slightest challenge. The biggest takeaway from this is what an incredibly weak human being Kevin McCarthy must be.
So, in a more-democratic union, we’d have more parties, they’d be more fractious, and speakers would be at some risk fairly regularly. That’s not instability, that’s just parliamentary democracy in action in a way we’re not used to, and that might actually be much more stable than our status quo. For example, in a lot of parliamentary democracies, we’d solve this by having a new election in 90 days. Instead, the people voting for a new speaker will be the exact same people who needed 15 votes to pick the last speaker. That’s actually a much bigger stability problem—and failure of our constitutional order—than the speaker’s ouster itself.
Only a Little Bit
Ok, so there is the government to keep open. And aid to Ukraine to support. These are really important things we can’t do until the House has a speaker, and that’s definitely a problem. In a parliamentary system, we’d be scheduling an election right now, and that would at least promise us a solution in 90 days.
Here, we’re kind of fucked. McCarthy has said he won’t seek speaker-ship again, though I’m not sure I’d trust that toad not to hold out for it. 2/3 of Congress would as soon expel Matt Gaetz as elect him speaker. In a normal parliamentary system, some number of moderate “problem solver” Republicans would be negotiating with Hakeem Jeffries to pass him the speaker’s majority, but that’s not how things work in ‘Murica. As long as the Magas stick with the Pedophile Rule—named for pedophile former Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert—and only vote how the majority of the party does, then we’re looking at a lot of ballots for individuals who, honestly, don’t even want the job, because they know they won’t be any stronger than Kevin.
The inevitable result of this is a lot of commentary that Democrats should have been the responsible party and stepped up to keep McCarthy in office, and it’s their fault we’re now in this limbo. This is the “I’m totally drunk, so it’s up to you, sober-looking stranger, to drive me home” attitude I flagged in the title. As anyone knows, if you want a designated driver, you ask for one in advance. You don’t approach the least-drunk-looking person at the party after you’ve funneled your seventh beer.
America is used to the Democrats being the designated driver, so much so that even many Republicans feel free to order another round of shots, because they’re certain the Dems will come take their car keys and call them a cab. They get furious when they realize the Dems actually left the bar two hours ago.
In countries accustomed to parliamentary government, prime ministers in McCarthy’s position approach a rival party for coalition promising key positions and platform changes to bring that party aboard. McCarthy did none of those things. He defended Trump, justified insurrection, de-funded Ukraine, un-seated Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and Ilhan Omar from their committees, supported a specious impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden, and as late as this weekend blamed Democrats for the House’s problems, even though they’re a minority and delivered him the key votes to keep the government open that he couldn’t get from his own party.
McCarthy basically told Democrats “you have to put up with whatever I do, because the alternative to me is even worse.” But since Dems don’t know what that alternative is, and they control the Senate and White House, why should they settle for that? Why let themselves be dragged into intra-Maga crazy for no purpose? Obviously, they should be ready to enter into some kind of coalition with a Republican, but that doesn’t mean entering into this coalition with that Republican.
If you’re at a party, and you’re sober, and some sloppy-drunk dude has groped and harassed you all night, you do not owe it to that dude to be his designated driver. The Dems do not owe it to the Republicans—or to us, who voted for this Congress—to get Kevin and his frat bros home safely. What they deserve is for the rest of us to say, as not a few Republicans are saying, “Wow. That party cannot be entrusted to govern. We should support Democrats, who don’t make an embarrassing ass of themselves.”
Stand by. The Magas will figure out how to make this worse.