Let’s face it: the Republicans’ tenure as majority party leading the U.S. House of Representatives has been a hot mess. Calling it unimpressive would be too kind.
Watching the ongoing chaos, much of it self-inflicted, reminded me of my all-time favorite Dr. Seuss book, appropriately titled "If I Ran the Zoo." I read it aloud to my young sons so many times, I can still recite whole tracts verbatim:
"It’s a pretty good zoo, said young Gerald McGrew — and the fellow who runs it seems proud of it too… But if I ran the zoo, I’d make a few changes. That’s just what I’d do!"
The reality, of course, is that actually doing something generally turns out to be a lot tougher than throwing rocks at those who are doing it. The new speaker, Mike Johnson, R-La., is the GOP’s Gerald McGrew — and he has his hands full running this zoo.
As an example, I recently received a fundraising plea from Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., — he’s embarking on a “RINO hunt” and needs financial support. No thanks. With both the world and our nation in turmoil, the last thing we need is for Republicans to organize a posse to find and root out other Republicans whose commitment to conservatism is insufficiently pure.
The single factor which jeopardizes GOP prospects for gaining leadership in both chambers of Congress this November — an otherwise achievable goal in today’s political climate — is their demonstrable inability to lead themselves, made painfully obvious by their wheel-spinning false starts and reversals in selecting a House Speaker.
Gaetz and his like-minded colleagues rightly strive to ensure that GOP-sponsored House legislation reflects their strongly-held priorities; but as elected representatives it is their job as well to constructively support a House operation that meets the nation’s needs. Surely, they must recognize that pushing legislative proposals that are doomed to go down in flames achieves absolutely nothing. That’s performance art, no more.
It's not a pretty picture. But from the GOP’s painful ordeal, there are some positives as well:
1. Mike Johnson has demonstrated that he’s up to the job. Clearly, he has recognized that he is speaker of the whole House, not just the speaker of the Republican representatives, and certainly not just the speaker of Republican flame-throwing crowd.
By now, he recognizes as well that it’s a thankless job. His successes in consensus building across the aisle have earned him mountains of scorn — but evidently, he is willing to take the heat, and he’s unwilling to let keeping his job take priority over doing it properly. Whether his is a short or long-term speakership, he has earned our respect.
2. The stopgap process employed by the new speaker to break the logjam in authorization for defense aid to Ukraine and Israel serves also as a test platform for substantial improvement in the House’s legislative process. By simultaneously putting forward several simple, clear and concise bills, and by providing ample time to read and digest them, he made it possible for House members to cast informed up or down votes on each.
This is a dramatic improvement over the now-common mega-bills with thousands of pages of impenetrable detail — bills like the pending ObamaCare legislation once described by Nancy Pelosi with the words “we’ll have to pass it to find out what’s in it.”
3. Perhaps most importantly, the Republicans’ adventure in attempting to manage a razor thin (now down to one-vote) majority in the House of Representatives demonstrates conclusively that fringe minorities, far left or far right, cannot carry the day for very long. The only sustainable success path is finding common ground, inevitably near the center.
The reason? That’s where the country is on many issues — also split right down the middle. The GOP House leadership’s difficulty in moving forward despite competing constituent interests is fundamentally the same as that facing whoever is chosen to be our next president.
Joe Biden’s lurch to the left following his 2020 election win is a case in point. It seemed to work for a while — owning the White House and both chambers of Congress will do that — but it was never in tune with the mood or the wider interests of the nation. Democrats lost the House (albeit barely) in 2022, and the growing public disconnect with the administration’s lead in many areas is becoming glaringly apparent in opinion polling now — and could cost Biden the election.
Perhaps years of bowing to fringe elements on both left and right has opened the door to a very fresh-thinking, practical electorate. Our public is aching for common sense actions on obvious problems and is weary of unnecessarily partisan opposition at every turn.
As one example, House Speaker Mike Johnson made it clear that we don’t have to choose between protecting our borders and helping our allies fend off savage attacks, and we can engage both sides of the political divide in making such decisions.
In doing so he was rewarded by accusations of treachery, weakness and cowardice. It may cost him is job. But I’d call it leadership.
