The spectacle offered this week by the Washington House of Representatives, which fired its president, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, for the first time in 234 years, thanks to the alliance between the Democratic Party and eight members of the hardest Republican wing, not only this time it deserved it The often used adjective “historic” also confirmed once again the break in the conservative movement in the United States. Even Donald Trump himself said it in a message on his social network: “Why do Republicans always fight among themselves instead of standing against the radical left-wing Democrats who are destroying our country?”
While the drama played out before a public opinion both fed up and resigned to its political class, the question was the only contribution to the major issue of the week in the United States; The former president was busy with more pressing matters in New York, where he appeared in a civil fraud trial. And many analysts in Washington would agree with the answer: The division their people are displaying on Capitol Hill these days has its origins largely in Trump’s performance and in his four years in the White House and in the months that have passed between his defeat in the elections, which he still refuses to accept, and the attack on the Capitol, a time for which he still has two unfinished business in court.
After the initial silence, the former president, who in the polls has the majority for his party in the 2024 presidential election, has once again adopted the script: to initially run as interim speaker until his party agrees; then he threatens to appear in Congress next week, where the circus will start again on Tuesday; and finally, supporting the candidacy of Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan over the other serious candidate, Steve Scalise (Louisiana), who was McCarthy’s running mate and is undergoing chemotherapy for multiple myeloma.
A victory for Jordan would certify the ultimate embrace of Trumpism by the Party of Lincoln and guarantee legislative paralysis on Capitol Hill, where Democrats control the Senate. Jordan is one of its most radical congressmen. Described by his former colleague Adam Kinzinger as a “voter denier, Christian nationalist and outright populist,” he helped found the Freedom Caucus, a group formed in 2015 out of the belief that then-Speaker John Boehner was letting too much get in the way . Tax negotiations with the Obama administration. This faction includes six of the eight divided Republicans who on Tuesday, led by Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, preferred to strip their party of legislative power in order to accept concessions agreed to by McCarthy in order to secure an extension, which would prevent a partial government shutdown. and which expires November 17th.
“Fratricidal Twins”
They all represent Trump’s loyal base, the third of the electorate that would support him again no matter what he does. They are voters that the Republicans – a party that Theodore White famously defined in the 1960s as a “twin party, but more fratricidal than fraternal” – need to win elections. And they are angry: according to political scientist Wendy Brown, “at the displacement of their place in the world in the face of advancing minority rights and globalization, and at institutions.” Prominent among them is the idea of Washington, a city called a swamp (the swamp , which urgently needs to be drained), a vivid picture of a power center corrupted by complacency with the traditional republicanism of the people, among other harmful forces. like McCarthy himself or Senate leader Mitch McConnell. Guys who are derogatorily referred to by the acronym RINO, which stands for Republicans In Name Only.
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McCarthy’s departure – which Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, the intellectual organ of the moderate right, interpreted as “a signal of an even wilder phase of Republican politics to come” – marks the end of a generation of “conservative leaders” that emerged in 2007 from Reaganism and borrowed the title of an ’80s Western to present themselves as “Young Guns” in a book signed by McCarthy, Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan. There they committed to refounding the party — which is “no longer your grandparents’ Republican Party,” they warned — and called for “ideals like economic freedom, limited government, the sanctity of life.” [frente al aborto] and commitment to family.”
It was also at this time that the Tea Party emerged, a movement that even less resembled Grandfather’s party and had already claimed the lives of these three young people on the basis of ultra-populism. After the first attempt to storm Washington, embodied by vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, failed, Trump brought to the White House many of the same ideas that are now entrenched in the party.
But according to left-wing Mother Jones journalist David Corn, it’s worth going back further to find the moment when the Republican Party “went crazy.” In his book American Psychosis, he argues that this Faustian pact with “right-wing extremists, fanatics, fundamentalists and crackpots” is an invisible line that comes from Senator McCarthy’s witch hunt and runs through the anti-communist conspiracy theorists of the John Birch Society or Newt Gingrich’s conservative revolution the nineties. According to Corn, one thing that unites all of these cases is that they “ruthlessly and relentlessly fueled the paranoia, fear, resentment and grievances of conservative voters.” For the analyst, the peak of this trend would come with the attack on the Capitol.
Republican Jim Jordan, candidate to replace Kevin MacCarthy as House Speaker, with reporters Oct. 4 in Washington. EVELYN HOCKSTEIN (Portal)
Last Tuesday, after McCarthy’s impeachment and at the end of a day that plunged Congress into chaos, Tim Burchett (Tenn.), one of the eight Republicans who voted against him, sat on the steps of the main entrance to the Capitol. Looking dejected, he explained that given his leader’s incompetence, he had no choice but to do what he had just done because “his conscience had dictated it to him.” Further afield, Maryland Democratic Representative Jaime Raskin said, after a show of unity unusual in his party’s recent history, “Today we are the only united group there, so I don’t rule out the possibility of being the next speaker.” will be Hakeem Jeffries.” Jeffries is the Democratic minority leader in the House of Representatives and this week he didn’t miss the opportunity to call what happened to McCarthy a “Republican civil war.” For his part, President Joe Biden called for an end to the “toxic atmosphere” in Washington, perhaps relieved that the spotlight on Capitol Hill diverted attention from his disastrous handling of the border crisis in the week that saw the disastrous construction of a new stretch of wall .
It is highly unlikely that Jeffries will be elected: he would need 218 votes and his own only 212. The horizon of a Republican bloc vote also does not seem clear at this point. Both are scheduled to begin voting for a new president on Wednesday. They will vote until they get it. The last time was in January: it lasted 15 rounds – there was hardly any precedent for this either – and the chosen one only stayed in office for nine months. Until then, the position of third authority in the country and second in the presidential line of succession remains vacant.
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