What a mess. On Wednesday, nine days after Kevin McCarthy was ousted from the House Speakership—for little apparent reason—Republicans were scheduled to gather in a closed-door meeting to elect a new one. Going into the session, Thomas Massie, an archconservative congressman from Kentucky, put the chances of Republicans settling the matter that day at two per cent. That turned out to be overly optimistic. A majority of House Republicans did in fact select a choice to replace the ill-fated McCarthy: his former deputy and longtime internal rival, Steve Scalise, of Louisiana. But ninety-nine Republicans voted for Scalise’s opponent, the Donald Trump-endorsed Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, and enough of them refused to get on board with Scalise after Jordan’s loss that, more than a day later, Scalise still had not locked up the requisite two hundred and seventeen votes to secure the Speakership. Member after member emerged from a conference meeting on Thursday fuming—and forced to admit that the Party was at an impasse. “Eight traitors” have “paralyzed” the House, Mike Rogers, of Alabama, a Scalise ally, told reporters. His gloomy prognosis was that no one might ever emerge with enough votes to win.
This is a Republican civil war that is hard to explain beyond the simple fact that the G.O.P.’s majority in the House is so narrow it requires near-unanimity to govern—a level of unity that Republicans simply do not have. It’s not an ideological fight: Scalise and Jordan are equally far right. The gang of eight rebels who brought down McCarthy, led by the Florida Republican Matt Gaetz, are themselves split over whom to vote for in his place. As of midday on Thursday, it appeared that a dozen or more Republicans, along with the Party’s ostensible leader, Trump, remained firmly against Scalise. The bottom line is that, even after more than a week of the House of Representatives being unable to conduct any business because it is literally leaderless, the new Republican candidate for Speaker had even more Republicans publicly opposing him than the old Republican candidate for Speaker, who was so weak he got thrown out of the job. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that by Thursday evening, Scalise abruptly dropped out of the race. What would happen next was anyone’s guess. The chaos party, it appears, is going to keep on chaos-ing for a while.
This unseemly spectacle of internal Republican disarray could hardly have come at a more embarrassing moment for the Party. Government funding is scheduled to run out in little more than a month, when a temporary spending resolution—the passage of which helped cost McCarthy his post—is set to expire. The fate of American aid to Ukraine is up in the air—an especially poorly timed bit of U.S. political dysfunction given the ongoing Ukrainian counter-offensive against Russia. And, since dawn on Saturday morning, there is a whole new war to reckon with, as Israel—the favored foreign-policy cause of many Republicans in recent years—responds to the deadliest terrorist attack ever committed on its territory.
Is it all one big crisis? Should it be presented as one? Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, floated the notion of an all-purpose national-security-funding bill—with aid for Ukraine linked to aid for Israel and “maybe” money for Taiwan and border security, too. This seemed to be a smart application of the Eisenhower principle in American politics, recalling the famous maxim often attributed to the general turned President: “Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger.”
But McCaul’s suggestion did not appear to convince the doubters in his own Party. And it’s not just a matter of getting the House a new Speaker, as daunting as that currently seems. Even before McCarthy’s ouster, some Republicans on Capitol Hill seemed to be more than willing to have Congress abdicate even basic functions of government, like appropriating money to keep it open and confirming Presidential nominees. In the Senate, Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville has, for months, single-handedly blockaded hundreds of senior military appointments—and says he will not stop, even after the Hamas attack—until the Pentagon ends its policy of reimbursing personnel who need to travel out of state for abortions. In the House, Gaetz and others had been pushing for a government shutdown and are likely to do so again in a few weeks. One of their demands has been to stop providing assistance to Ukraine, despite strong public support for it. The attacks in Israel quickly provided fodder for more of this opportunistic grandstanding. Consider, for example, this tweet by the Missouri senator Josh Hawley: “Israel is facing existential threat. Any funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately.” Never mind that the invasion of Ukraine by hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers, whose leader denies Ukraine’s basic right to statehood, is almost the textbook definition of an existential threat.
Opportunism is one Washington response to a tragedy such as that which is unfolding in Israel. Toxic partisanship is another. How else to explain some of the wildly overheated statements emanating from some Republicans after the attack? Senator Tim Scott, with his Republican Presidential campaign floundering, decided to torch his own reputation as an unusually civility-minded politician at an unusually uncivil moment in our politics by claiming that President Biden had “blood on his hands” and was “complicit” in the Hamas massacre—an outrageous claim stemming from a recent hostage-swap deal with Iran, the longtime state sponsor of Hamas and other anti-Israel terrorist groups in the region. The Biden Administration, seemingly stung by the criticism, said on Thursday that it had, with Qatar, decided to freeze a six-billion-dollar bank account for humanitarian purchases belonging to Iran that had been unfrozen as part of the hostage deal. It should be noted that Iran apparently never accessed any of the funds.
Crises, however, can also produce the clarity that is often lacking from the day-to-day battles of politics. I was particularly struck by some of McCaul’s public comments about the more global implications of his own party’s dysfunction. “I see a lot of threats out there,” he told reporters waiting outside the House Republican Conference meeting on Thursday. “One of the biggest threats I see is in that room.” Over the weekend, McCaul had been even more explicit: “What kind of message are we sending to our adversaries when we can’t govern, when we are dysfunctional, when we don’t have a Speaker of the House?”
At the White House this week, President Biden offered a different kind of clarity—the moral kind. He repeatedly denounced the Hamas terror attack in crisp terms that dispensed with the whataboutism that has clouded much political argument on the American far right and left. In an address to the nation on Tuesday, he spoke of “pure, unadulterated evil,” of “sheer evil,” and of “abhorrent” behavior by Hamas “in violation of every code of human morality.” He said that “there is no justification, no excuse,” and his call—repeated twice—was simply to “stand with Israel.”
On Wednesday, in a meeting with Jewish leaders, he again emphasized how unequivocally he viewed the situation. Jeremy Ben-Ami, the leader of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel group that has long been critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, was in the room, and he told me later that he was struck by Biden’s “very, very visceral” reaction. “There was a moment when he basically just exploded in rage,” Ben-Ami said. “It was really clearly a deeply personal and passionate thing.”
It was also a reminder of a different era in American politics, when there would have been more Biden-esque no-limits rallying round Israel and much less of the sniping heard from various Republicans in recent days. That includes Trump, Biden’s once and quite possibly future Presidential rival, who dumped on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for being “not prepared” and, at a rally in Florida, praised the Hezbollah terrorist group as “very smart.”
“I do think the President represents a forgotten era of this, in a way,” Ben-Ami told me. “In the twenty-twenties, when every issue gets pushed to the edges in a partisan way, it is a throwback.” Of course, Biden’s staunch backing of Israel inevitably comes with its own political challenges, not least of which will be what to do about Israel’s military response to the attack in Hamas-controlled Gaza, in which more than a thousand Palestinians have already died and many thousands more are likely to suffer the costs of retribution for Hamas’s horrific actions. Will Biden speak up about it? Will Netanyahu listen if he does?
By Wednesday, Israel had formed a national unity government to prosecute the war. The terrorists, in other words, jolted the partisans into a ceasefire among themselves, at least temporarily. In Washington, though, there is little chance of that. Republicans cannot even agree with one another, let alone with Democrats. The safe bet is that, over time, this new war in the Middle East will only reinforce the differences; I have little doubt that many Republicans will soon be back to praising Netanyahu and many Democrats will soon return to criticizing him. Biden’s impassioned defense of Israel in its moment of agony is vintage America, but so, too, is the circus on Capitol Hill, where, if we learned anything this week, it’s this: the show must go on. ♦
This article has been updated to include news developments.
