At the opening of the 118e So predictable in Congress was the embarrassing mess in the Republican majority in the House of Representatives that several Democrats came with buckets of popcorn to watch the spectacle.
• Also read: Still no “speaker” in the US Congress
After two days of deadlock, the outcome of the election process for the Speaker of the House of Representatives remains unclear.
Even if Kevin McCarthy, the putative Republican leader, has already moved his boxes to the office vacated by Nancy Pelosi, his chances of settling there are slim.
The chances that whoever fills this office can run the house effectively seem to be nil.
Historical deadlock
This mess is the prelude to a session that promises to be chaotic in the House of Representatives, nominally controlled by a fragile 222-212 majority for the Republican Party, which remains deeply influenced by the master of chaos, Donald Trump. is embossed. although Trump failed to persuade his supporters to support McCarthy.
This is the first time in a hundred years that no speaker has been selected in the first round. In 1923 she had taken nine laps. The 1855 record is 133 laps over several weeks.
Kevin McCarthy said he was ready to break the record, overcoming resistance from around twenty of his peers. It probably won’t come to that, but despite the concessions made to them, the insurgents appear determined to sink McCarthy.
a taste
Regardless of the outcome of this stalemate, Republican leadership in the House of Representatives is almost certainly extraordinarily weak.
Elected Republicans will largely be content to put obstacles in the way of the Biden administration and launch bogus investigations into largely imaginary scandals. This ensures they get regular coverage on Fox News, allowing them to delve into their supporters’ savings to fund their re-election.
The Party of Chaos
Those early days show that the Republican Party is no longer driven by clear convictions—the ideas of McCarthy’s supporters are as incoherent as those of his opponents—but by an ideological nihilism whose only guiding principle is the dismantling of the state and the seizure of power as a goal in itself.
For the current Republican Party, heir to the Trump years and decades of conservative dogmatism, politics has become a form of “performance art” at which one can succeed by capturing the attention of the right-wing media echo chamber draws and exploits the divisions, resentments and exploitation of voter disillusionment.
The symbol of this political approach is undoubtedly new York State Republican Assemblyman George Santos (if that’s his real name), who was elected after brazenly lying about every aspect of his past and his fellow Republicans refusing to denounce him . since they have always refused to denounce Donald Trump’s lies.
Among other things, what will stick in our minds of the chaos in the Republican Party is that the denial of the legitimacy of the state, which is the basis of the nihilistic conservatism that is now fashionable in much of the right-wing dominant philosophy, cannot be viable .
