by Hugh Jackson, Nevada Current
October 5, 2023

House Democrats, including the trio from Nevada, who this week all voted to tell Kevin McCarthy “you’re fired” (or words to that effect), made an assortment of points, including but not limited to: 

1) McCarthy is an untrustworthy buffoon

2) Republicans built this, it’s their problem

 3) Getting rid of McCarthy offers the hope that House dysfunction will end and House Republicans will start governing responsibly.

Nevada Democratic Rep. Dina Titus reiterated the first two points in a statement yesterday. McCarthy “has weakened our democratic institutions, gone back on his promises, called for a bogus impeachment inquiry, and brought us to the brink of a disastrous shutdown. It’s up to Republicans to get their own house in order.”

But there is little if any evidence in support of the third point – that things will somehow be better under a new Republican Speaker.

At the end of May, over objections from his party’s hard-right extremists, McCarthy put a negotiated debt ceiling measure on the House floor, so that Republicans and Democrats both would have a chance to vote on it. It passed with bipartisan majorities, and a default on the nation’s debt that would have cratered the economy was averted. 

Last week, McCarthy put on the floor a resolution to keep funding the government after he and his House Republican colleagues didn’t come anywhere in the vicinity of meeting budget deadlines. McCarthy, again over objections from the hard-right extremists, relied on Democrats for passage, and a government shutdown was (however temporarily) averted.

One of the things a House Speaker has is a lot of influence over what will or won’t go to the full House floor for a vote. There is no way of knowing if whoever Republicans select to be the next speaker will share McCarthy’s willingness (at least on two occasions) to end-run the more extreme of the party’s extremists and allow floor votes on legislation Democrats will support.

That’s one of the reasons Democrats were entertaining the possibility of striking a deal with McCarthy after it became clear the group led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Media) was coming for McCarthy’s job. Some House Democrats thought the situation might present an opportunity to extract concessions from McCarthy in exchange for helping him survive.

Alas, McCarthy’s occasional reliance on Democrats to get things done did not extend to keeping his job.

McCarthy “rushed a vote to the floor of the House on the motion to vacate without opening any negotiation with Democrats,” observed Nevada Democratic Rep. Susie Lee in a statement yesterday.

Maybe McCarthy’s incompetent. Maybe McCarthy was just sick of the job. Not that the two are mutually exclusive.

In any case, lack of assurances, or even communication, from McCarthy made House Democrats’ decision to vote him out all the easier.

But McCarthy’s departure also comes with no assurances that Titus, Lee, or Nevada’s other House Democrat, Steven Horsford, can provide to their constituents that congressional chaos won’t get even worse.

“The fact remains that in a divided Congress, nothing will be accomplished without the support of both Democrats and Republicans,” Lee said. “As House Republicans hold discussions to figure out their path forward, I hope that they will see this truth and be willing to move forward from the past nine months of dysfunction by bringing bipartisanship back to the House.”

Note the “hope.”

Good luck with that.

The self-destruction of the Republican House is a House Republican production. Republicans, not Democrats, broke the House. They own the chaos. 

But when it came to removing McCarthy, it’s not as if Democrats were helpless innocent bystanders. Had they all voted present instead of aye, the vote to remove McCarthy would not have been 216 to 210 in favor, but 210 to 8 against.

In January, at the onset of the Republican-created chaos, when McCarthy’s madcap attempt to become Speaker was careening through 15 ballots, Democrats were reveling in schadenfreude. They smiled and laughed and took selfies with popcorn on the House floor while Republicans snarled at each other.

Good times.

No similar Democratic frivolity and frolicking accompanied this week’s first-ever House vote to remove a Speaker.

Nor should there have been. Lee, Titus, Horsford and every other House Democrat may have concluded getting rid of McCarthy was the appropriate thing to do. Whether it was the wise thing to do remains to be seen.

Washington and its media is now wallowing in its new favorite parlor game: “Who will Republicans select as Speaker?”

We don’t know who that Republican will be. But it’s a rock solid lock that whichever one it is, they won’t be, as Lee put it, “bringing bipartisanship back to the House.”  

The more pressing question than which person from the party of Trump will be Speaker is, How will the United States get by between now and January 2025 when a new Congress is sworn in? A shutdown on Nov. 17 seems inevitable. Scenarios for resolving that impasse seem unimaginable. And prolonged paralysis for much of the U.S. government would inflict pain on millions of people and land a perhaps crushing body blow to the economy.

Sure,  the outlook would have been much the same if Democrats hadn’t joined with Gaetz and Friends to toss McCarthy out of his job. 

But if anybody in the House, be they Democrat or Republican, has a plausible plan for getting the federal government – and its vital services and programs people rely on – through what’s left of this year and all of next without the wheels coming off, they’re keeping it to themselves.

Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com. Follow Nevada Current on Facebook and Twitter.