A Coalition of the Willing

I posture as a cynic, yet I’m constantly embarrassed by my own naivete.

When Hamas attacked Israel last weekend, I thought the leadership crisis in the House would resolve itself quickly. With the risk of regional war in the Middle East rising and a new government funding deadline approaching, the cost of legislative paralysis had suddenly become prohibitive. “The time for performative nonsense has passed,” Jim Geraghty declared on Thursday morning at National Review. House Republicans, I thought, would agree.

They did not. In this party, the time for performative nonsense is never past.

Hours after Geraghty published his column, Steve Scalise announced he was quitting the race for speaker. A day earlier, Scalise had defeated Jim Jordan in a vote of the Republican conference to nominate a replacement for Kevin McCarthy. Jordan supporters could have bowed to the will of the majority at that point and lined up behind Scalise for the sake of getting Congress back to important business. Instead, a critical mass announced that they wouldn’t back him in a vote of the full House, depriving him of the 217 votes he needed to win the gavel.

The duly chosen nominee of the majority party was dead on arrival 24 hours or so after his nomination. On Friday, Republicans gathered to vote on whether to nominate Jordan for speaker—and he too failed to persuade 217 Republicans to pledge their support for him on the House floor, presumably sending the conference back to the drawing board again.

We’re at 10 days and counting since the House was able to function. There will be no speaker until Monday at the earliest, and very likely not then. Do you, dear reader, appreciate how insane this all is?

Scalise, the longtime No. 2 in the conference, failed to receive so much as a floor vote on the speakership. So has Jordan (as of this writing) despite having faced only token opposition within the conference after Scalise dropped out. Scalise’s supporters were furious at Jordan for having allegedly sabotaged Scalise’s efforts to unite the party (“America wants me” as speaker, Jordan reportedly told him) and refused to reward his sabotage by rallying behind him.

Some backbenchers have taken to calling the MAGA bloc that sank Kevin McCarthy “traitors” and speculating (correctly) that they’d rather be a minority party. Desperate solutions are being kicked around to end the stalemate. Nominate Donald Trump? Renominate McCarthy? Grant Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry with temporary power to move legislation for the next 30 to 60 days?

As if all of that wasn’t bad enough, the awful Nancy Mace repeatedly hijacked the news cycle this week by doing Nancy Mace things for, allegedly, Nancy Mace reasons.

A few House Republicans, evidently disgusted by the chaos, up and left Washington before the conference voted on Jordan’s nomination on Friday. House Democrats, who are also missing members at the moment, warned the GOP that if they tried to force a floor vote on Jordan this weekend and ended up electing him, they’d bring a motion to vacate the chair next week. Imagine two different Republican speakers having the gavel yanked from their hands in the span of two weeks.

I defer to historians but, as far as I’m aware, this is the worst dysfunction Congress has seen since the Civil War. The House GOP—an untenable coalition of populists and conservatives—has finally ceased to operate, and so the House has ceased to operate with it.

Maybe it’s time to think outside the box.

The most embarrassing thing about my failure to predict all of this is that the Republican conference has behaved exactly the way you’d expect a party led by Donald Trump to behave.

It’s been vengeful. Matt Gaetz ruined McCarthy’s career as a matter of spite, supposedly, so McCarthy’s allies spited him right back by ruining MAGA hero Jordan’s chances at the speakership. 

It’s been narcissistic. Three days after Hamas’ attack, with House Republicans meeting for the serious business of choosing a speaker, Mace preened for the cameras wearing a scarlet “A” and whined about people disliking her for being a woman, or something.

It’s been transactional. Once upon a time, it was unthinkable that junior members of the conference would make demands of leadership in exchange for their votes. Nowadays it happens routinely.

The institutional culture of this party has been remade by a guy who spent the week vengefully and narcissistically attacking Benjamin Netanyahu for not honoring his end of a transaction that Trump thought the two had agreed to. Why would I, or anyone, assume that institutional culture would instantly evaporate on contact with something as trivial as the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust?

The heart of Trump’s politics is that his personal needs come before everything else, including—especially, even—the needs of the Republican Party. There is never—never—a time to put aside self-interest and act in the common good, especially when declining to do so raises your media profile. Enough House Republicans have now assimilated to that model of politics to render the conference impotent.

They’ve done so by legitimizing minority rule. In a normal party, the fact that Jordan’s supporters declined to support Scalise after he won the nomination for speaker would outrage Republican voters and lead to electoral repercussions for humiliating the conference. In the GOP, the norms of party loyalty have shattered. Just as Gaetz’s bloc of eight Republicans has paid no price for deposing McCarthy, Jordan’s voters will pay no price for aborting Scalise’s speakership bid. In an authoritarian movement, there’s only one authority to whom loyalty is properly owed.

The essence of the Republican hostage crisis since 2015 is that a meaningful minority of the American right will refuse to support the GOP in elections if the party and its officials don’t loyally serve Donald Trump. That’s minority rule. And as some Republican members of the House are realizing, it’s no longer just a voter phenomenon.

Last week, Democrats exposed the Republican hostage crisis by daring Gaetz and his co-conspirators to shoot the hostage. This week they have a chance to end that crisis—in the House, at least.

All it’ll take is a touch of Sorkin-ism.

Aaron Sorkin created the television show The West Wing. Devotees loved it for its idealistic storylines about sensible centrists in the two parties figuring out creative ways to work together for the common good. Cynics (or those of us who posture as cynics) accordingly have come to treat the word “Sorkin” as a byword for silly fantasies about bipartisanship. Americans are way, way too polarized for the moderates in their leadership to chuck off electoral pressures and unite against the fringes on both sides.

Unless, perhaps, Congress were to become so dysfunctional as to leave them no choice?

“The only way out is to enter into an enlightened bipartisan coalition of the willing in order to get things back on track,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said of the House GOP stalemate. Some moderate Republicans heard that and wondered whether he’s serious. Because if he’s interested, they’re interested.

“There’s a sentiment building around [a bipartisan deal] among Democrats and Republicans,” Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.), a member of Democratic leadership who represents a swing district, told Axios.

“We’re open to anything that’s reasonable,” said Rep. Maria Salazar (R-Fla.), a member of the moderate Republican Governance Group. “Bipartisanship is not a sin.”

Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), a perennial bipartisan dealmaker, said “at this point, there are enough Republican and Democrats saying we’ve got to get this fixed.”

Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the Armed Services Committee, told reporters on Thursday that he’s convinced no member of his conference can get 217 votes for speaker without Democratic help. If that’s true, the GOP will have no choice but to reach across the aisle. “We’re still the majority party, we’re willing to work with them, but they gotta tell us what they need,” he said of Jeffries’ caucus.

Some Democrats are skeptical, grumbling that moderate Republicans have thus far had more to say about this to reporters than they have to Jeffries. It’s plausible that chatter from Rogers and his bloc is little more than a scare tactic aimed at the GOP’s recalcitrant MAGA wing: If you don’t stop the obstruction and elect a speaker we prefer, we’re going full Sorkin.

Centrists are capable of taking hostages too, you know.

Except … they never do in practice. The Republican Party is a mess because moderates and conservatives are forever letting themselves be extorted by the MAGA base without reciprocating. They’re too partisan to partner with Democrats against the grassroots right, even a right that’s post-liberal and plainly cares nothing for the GOP. The chatter from Rogers et al. must be a bluff.

But what if, for once, it isn’t? Watching the House break down might plausibly have convinced some members of the Conservative Party that a governing coalition with the Democratic Party would be more fruitful than a governing coalition with the MAGA Party. In a coalition with the MAGAs, the Conservatives in the House are effectively the junior partner despite the fact that they’re larger in number. In a coalition with the Democrats, it would be the other way around. Because the GOP controls a majority, Jeffries and his caucus would have little choice but to let centrist Republicans lead.

It’s never happened before. It would be almost unthinkable. But the same was true a few weeks ago of deposing a sitting speaker, and now here we are.

What would Congress look like for the next 15 months if we had a de facto parliament instead of a House?

Sources tell Axios it’s not a bluff. “A bipartisan group of roughly ten House lawmakers is quietly holding ‘very’ serious discussions” about a compromise speaker candidate, according to a moderate Republican involved in the talks. In the meantime, four centrist Democrats have sent a letter to McHenry, the acting speaker, floating temporary powers to help get the House moving again.

I doubt such a coalition could last. “The only unforgivable sin in Republican politics is making deals with Democrats,” Jonathan Last wrote on Friday, correctly. A moderate House Republican would face less risk of being primaried after being indicted four times than he would from torpedoing a Jim Jordan speakership for the sake of partnering with Hakeem Jeffries.

Any alliance with the left would need to end well in advance of primary season via a new motion to vacate that replaced the bipartisan speaker with a more dogmatically right-wing one. Riding with a Democratic-backed speaker all the way to the next election would extinguish any chance a pro-alliance House Republican would have of holding their seat.

But what about a temporary coalition of the willing?

In Israel, Netanyahu’s ruling bloc just reached a power-sharing agreement with the opposition in the name of forming an “emergency unity government” to prosecute the war. America isn’t facing an emergency, but it is facing a series of crises—new logistical support for Israel, continued logistical support for Ukraine, and the small matter of funding the federal government for the next year before the money runs out in November.

A House “unity government” could resolve all of that before turning the reins of the chamber over to Jordan or whoever. It’s little different from the proposals to give McHenry temporary power as speaker to move legislation. “We only did it to avert a disaster,” moderate Republicans who support the unity government could tell angry GOP voters.

Not supporting a deal with Democrats would also come with political risks. A House managed by Speaker Jim Jordan would be more likely to stumble into a government shutdown, to tank Ukraine funding, and to arm Democrats with potent attack-ad material. If you represent a district won by Joe Biden in 2020, surviving a primary isn’t your only electoral problem.

The fragility of the House Republican majority also works in the moderates’ favor. As MAGA candidates line up to primary them for locking arms with Democrats, the incumbents will be able to say—honestly and correctly—that nominating a populist kook for a House seat in a purplish jurisdiction is the fastest path to a Democratic majority in 2025. Maybe (maybe?) Republican voters have learned some hard lessons about, ahem, “candidate quality” since the great disappointment of 2022.

I mean, almost certainly not. Look who’s leading the GOP presidential primary polls. But maybe it’ll be different down ballot.

And meanwhile, Republican moderates who worked with Jeffries to form a unity government will be able to take credit for having done something bold and nonpartisan to avert a series of crises that would have hurt America and America’s allies. There are few things the voters of this country love more in 2023 than political independence. Partnering with the other party to solve a few major looming problems is about as independent as it gets.

Why, it might even insulate those Biden-district Republicans (a little) from having Trump at the top of the GOP ballot next fall.

The unity government might last through the end of the year, say, before a fresh start in early 2024 with a new consensus Republican speaker. In a way, it would make everyone in the party happy. Moderates would be pleased to have, for once, made populists pay a price for their obstructionism. If you resent the tyranny of the minority in the GOP conference, one way to make Matt Gaetz think twice about his next crusade against a speaker is to show him and his fans that that path leads straight toward more power for House Democrats.

And populists would love it. The worst thing that could happen to the burn-it-all-down caucus in the House is having to govern. Governing isn’t why they got into politics; as Yuval Levin put it, they “have a vision of their jobs that abjures core legislative work as illegitimate.” Being absolved of that duty by a cabal of treacherous RINO moderates would be a dream come true for them, leaving them free to caterwaul about the “uniparty” on Newsmax and to fundraise about another establishment betrayal. They wouldn’t need to get their hands dirty on funding the government or funding Ukraine.

If minority rule is good enough for the MAGA Party, why not for the Conservative Party? At least for a few months.

It’s a great Sorkin plot arc. Even better would be if the new unity government took Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips’ advice and made procedural reforms to the process of filing discharge petitions, allowing a coalition of 218 members to force votes on popular legislation going forward whether or not a right-wing speaker wants that legislation on the floor. Moderates on both sides seldom collaborate on discharge petitions since members of the majority don’t want to undermine their own party. But that norm would be out the window once a unity government is elected.

And there are some matters of such great urgency, like resupplying Ukraine, where even moderates might be willing to offend their leadership for the sake of moving bipartisan legislation through the House.

Sorkin plot arcs may be silly, but they’re fun.

Yet if I’m being honest, and at the risk of embarrassing myself again, I … kind of want to see Speaker Jordan. Not because it would be good for the country in the short-term—it would not—but because it’s what Trump’s Republican Party and its enablers deserve. And that might be good for the country in the longer-term.

Moderate Republicans don’t want to be saddled with Jim Jordan as the face of the conference on Election Day next fall, but as Jonathan Last notes, that cake is baked. Barring something amazing happening in the Republican presidential primary, they’ll be saddled with Donald Trump as the face of the conference instead. So why not Jordan?

For more than a decade, first as Tea Partiers and later as MAGA Republicans, populists have been spared the burdens of having to work with Democrats for the sake of governing. Electing Jim Jordan speaker would strip them of either their purity or their pretensions to competence by forcing him to decide between compromising with the other partly or staunchly refusing to do so. Some important constituency, whether populist Republicans or swing voters, will end up disillusioned with MAGA government. It’ll be a hard lesson for America to learn, but an important one. Some lessons can only be learned the hard way.