The dysfunction on Capitol Hill is a regular element of Republican politics, not a departure of custom

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Americans watching the chaos on Capitol Hill – the ouster of a House speaker followed by two weeks of fruitless struggle to agree on a replacement, at a time of military tumult abroad and economic uneasiness at home – are discovering a fundamental lesson of politics that is not taught in civics classes.

They are learning that dysfunction is not an event, but a process. They are finding that it has no single cause – not simply the yawning wealth gap; not only the bedlam around Donald Trump; not merely restiveness among blue-collar Americans; not just an insurgency on the right accompanied by a lurch to extremes on the left – nor a single effect.

Four major economic indicators have been on the decline in this past fortnight: a Congress paralyzed while vital questions of the role of the United States in the Middle East go unanswered; the possibility of a government shutdown looming; the threat of a downgrading of U.S. bonds by credit rating agencies remaining; and one of the country’s major political parties – the one regarded only a generation ago as the sturdy, dependable safeguard of stability – in upheaval. It has become clear that the dysfunction has deep roots and cannot be extirpated easily.

All of these factors are contributing to the mayhem on Capitol Hill that results in a phenomenon that troubles its participants as much as its observers: A Republican House that set out to make disruptive policy is instead merely making disruptive history.

The new week begins with one of the candidates who withdrew from the Speaker’s race only days earlier, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, now with the most votes in the House Republican Conference, as the party’s caucus is called. But he is clearly without sufficient support among Republicans to prevail in a vote on the House floor.

The wrangling is set to continue with no clear route ahead for the other candidate, Rep. Jim Jordan. To resolve the impasse in a legislative body that itself is so evenly split that a few members – either the rebels who are holding the chamber hostage or the moderates who view the entire spectacle with mouth-agape horror – have the capacity not to resolve the matter but instead to plunge the House into even more immobility.

So much so that some Democrats are even weighing the possibility of a bipartisan deal to bring the chaos to a conclusion. One of the impetuses is the decline in the past two weeks in four measures of economic confidence, as measured by the Penta-CivicScience Economic Sentiment Index: in the overall American economy, in buying a new house, in finding a new job and in making a major purchase.

None of this moves in a straight line of logic.

Mr. Jordan has close ties to both Mr. Trump and Kevin McCarthy, the speaker who lost his gavel when the GOP rebels prompted his removal. Those mutineers have now lined up behind Mr. Jordan, who in January had nominated Mr. McCarthy for speaker on the second round of the entropy that surrounded his selection in the first place.

A party that once personified order has, for the second time in a quarter-century, toppled the order when the speakership became vacant.

For decades, the House moved methodically to honour seniority and to move with the precision that ordinarily characterizes a political hierarchy. A majority leader – the second-highest position in the House and the one Mr. McCarthy occupied when he finally prevailed after 15 ballots nine months ago – ordinarily moves seamlessly to the speakership when it becomes vacant.

Democrats Carl Albert of Oklahoma, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill of Massachusetts, Jim Wright of Texas, and Tom Foley of Washington state all moved directly from majority leader to speaker. Nancy Pelosi, who had served as minority leader, twice became speaker when the Democrats regained power, first in 2007 and again in 2019.

Even so, Mr. Scalise, the current Majority Leader and the early frontrunner in the current Speaker sweepstakes, withdrew from the race. He ascertained he could not win after he ran afoul of ultra-conservatives who believed he was too much a supplicant to the old Republican ways and of members loyal to Mr. McCarthy. The speaker and the majority leader barely spoke, itself a measure of dysfunction and a cause for more dysfunction.

These kinds of internecine battles have become regular elements of Republican politics rather than departures from custom.

Four GOP figures of disruption became important figures in the party: The commentator, Patrick Buchanan, who challenged the renomination of the fellow Republican George H.W. Bush for president in 1992; Newt Gingrich, the political guerrilla who tormented the leader of his own conference, Rep. Bob Michel, before becoming speaker in 1995; governor Sarah Palin, who as the party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2008, prided herself as a maverick; and Mr. Trump.

The ascendancy of the four set the predicate for this month’s upheaval in the House Republican Conference.

“This is a symptom of a chronic problem that should not be surprising,” said Victor Menaldo, a University of Washington political scientist. “The Republican Party has had a very strong tension between the populist elements and the regulars since the end of the Cold War. It has reached the point of open conflict.

“Now the mavericks who are uncompromising are holding everyone hostage.”

 

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