The House Republican caucus slowly inched toward something resembling stability Tuesday, nominating Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., for speaker by a vote of 113-99 over Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. But even if Scalise manages to get the requisite 217 votes to actually land the job, the odds look long for him to create the stable governing majority his predecessor (and frenemy) Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., couldn’t.
Yes, McCarthy had particular flaws that made his speakership so tumultuous. He was prone to doing whatever it took to survive each day, promising one thing behind closed doors and then shifting when it was to his advantage. But the challenges Scalise would face as speaker are more systemic than any personal issues McCarthy brought to the table. In effect, Scalise is now the nominee of a caucus that has been built for one thing — winning a majority in the House — but, as a result, has lost its ability to govern.
There are multiple reasons for this failure, but at the base is the number of gerrymandered congressional seats. The number of truly competitive districts has plummeted over the years. Within these safe districts, the primary becomes the key battle, not the general election. Democratic Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Don Beyer of Virginia made that point in a recent essay for MSNBC arguing for the importance of ranked choice voting:
Consider the district held by Rep. Byron Donalds, the MAGA insurgent put forth in opposition to McCarthy on multiple ballots in January. Donalds won his GOP primary in 2020 with just 22.6% of the vote, or a total of 23,492 votes, then cruised to victory in the gerrymandered general election. In a district of 834,988 people, a remarkable 2.8% of all residents effectively selected the winner.
Most of the 20 members who shook down McCarthy and caused the chaos in January represent some of the most skewed and lopsided districts in the nation. Almost all of them owe their seats to some combination of partisan redistricting and low-turnout primary elections that place extreme fringe candidates in uncompetitive general elections they can’t lose.
Both parties have engaged in gerrymandering, though more Democratic-controlled legislatures have opted for nonpartisan commissions for redistricting. A recent study found that efforts to skew the electorate have more or less balanced out at the national level, “resulting in only a two-seat advantage for Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives compared to what could have been drawn under geographic and legal constraints.” But the authors of that study also cautioned that partisan redistricting biases “decrease electoral competitiveness and responsiveness, limiting the voter’s ability to hold politicians accountable.”
Now let’s consider how that has played out for Republicans since the 2010 census. That was a time when the tea party and the related backlash against President Barack Obama’s election were ascendant, which led to a “shellacking” for congressional Democrats in the midterms. Republicans also swept control of the majority of state legislatures and governorships that year, giving them the keys to redistricting. Those two factors combined helped them have one of the largest majorities the party has ever held — 247 seats to just 188 held by Democrats — after the 2014 midterms.
But many of the newcomers in the 114th Congress were products of the prevailing political climate. Throughout that period, and going back to the Republican Revolution of 1994, which set us on this path, we’ve seen the House GOP caucus become steadily more conservative as more liberal and moderate members either retired or lost primaries to more ideologically pure opponents. At the same time, modern conservative media exploded, first as talk radio and cable networks, then as blogs and other websites. An internal war on “Republicans in Name Only” became the name of the game, promoting first the tea party and later its eventual sublimation into the MAGA movement.
Taken altogether, that means we’ve had more than a decade of freshman classes that were filled with House members who have never learned the basic motor functions of governing. Moreover, many of them have had no incentive to do so. The House during the Trump administration was packed with far-right members who were still overruled when it came to the sort of deep spending cuts they’ve made their main policy demand. Instead, the more seasoned legislators steered the course on the Hill, while the House Freedom Caucus and other like-minded members jeered from the sidelines.
We’ve had more than a decade of freshman classes that were filled with House members who have never learned the basic motor functions of governing.
Even Jordan, the Freedom Caucus firebrand who has most become a member of the establishment, has shown little interest in actually legislating. Instead, from his perch as chair of the Judiciary Committee, he’s more geared toward stunts masquerading as oversight than toward actually drafting and passing laws. And with the Senate and the White House in Democratic hands, much as in Jordan’s early years in Congress, the need for compromise remains high, even as Republicans’ appetite for it has never been lower.
The far right of the GOP caucus accused McCarthy of betraying it in his deals on the debt ceiling and avoiding a shutdown. That may be true on one level, but it’s clear that the real “betrayal” here was that he was willing to make the necessary compromises to keep the House — and the government — actually functioning. Scalise may avoid a fate similar to McCarthy’s if he becomes speaker. But the very forces that have put the GOP constantly within reach of winning a majority in elections will make the next speaker’s job difficult, if not impossible, as the clock ticks down toward another possible government shutdown.
