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To the casual observer, watching Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) capture the SINO (Speaker in Name Only) on the 15th ballot in the dead of night after a near brawl in the House chamber probably seemed like peak dysfunctionality for a Republican Party that has known more than its fair share of dysfunctionality over the last six years.
In reality, it is likely only the tip of the iceberg.
Because what has become crystal clear already in the nascent days of McCarthy and Republican rule is that Republicans have zero interest in governing. Instead, they are determined to do nothing more than use the full power of their majority simply to ensure that President Biden and Democrats can't govern.
In other words, dysfunction is not a bug but rather a feature of their new majority. Because chaos, as we have seen in the first weeks of the House majority, is a tool to reach their ultimate goal: a paralyzed government.
This is not a new playbook for Republicans. From former Speaker Newt Gingrich to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to former President Donald Trump, Republicans have mastered the art of distraction, obstruction, chaos, and dysfunction. And the new House majority seems determined to take this tired Republican playbook to new—and dangerous—extremes.
The governing philosophy of Republicans can best be summed up by a quote from their ideological and intellectual leader, three-time indicted white nationalist Steve Bannon, who famously said in 2018 that the best way to win is to "flood the zone with shit."
We've already seen this governing philosophy in full effect. In their first weeks in office, Republicans have introduced more bills to impeach Biden administration officials than bills to deal with inflation, used their first day in power to pass legislation to paralyze the Internal Revenue Service, and are already playing a reckless game of chicken with the economic abyss and threatening to not lift the debt ceiling for the first time in history.
And this is just the start. Because the party that has won the popular vote only once in the last 30 years knows it cannot win on the merits of its policies. So, they flood the zone instead.
The humiliation of Kevin McCarthy by Republicans on the House floor over days for the world to witness was not, as someone wanted to portray it, a great ideological battle over governing philosophy or the direction of the Republican Party. That has long been settled. And when it comes to "flood the zone" and grinding the government to a halt, there is no daylight between McCarthy and his detractors. Rather, it was simply a battle over personality and tactics and whether McCarthy and his leadership team would commit to creating enough dysfunction to appease the nihilists who hold the true power in today's Republican Party.
In giving away the house to win the speakership, McCarthy has all but guaranteed the first week of the new Republican majority will be the floor, not the ceiling, of the dysfunction to come in the years ahead.
And the incentive structure is in place to encourage Republicans to continue to double and triple down on their chaos strategy. Conditioned by years of the spoon-fed opinion environments of Fox News, Newsmax, and right-wing conspiracy theories propagated on Facebook, the Republican base wants more, not less, of the very antics we saw in the opening hours of the new majority. According to a CBS/YouGov poll taken after the speaker fight, nearly two-thirds of Republican voters approved of the way House Republicans handled the speaker vote.
With their base aligned and the speaker fight in the rearview mirror, the gasoline is in place, and now Republicans will light the match to burn the place down, using their majority to vacillate between performative show votes, investigations to please their base, and destructive measures such as defaulting on the debt to grind the government and economy to a halt.
And a year and half from now, when the 2024 campaign is in full swing, these arsonists will be looking at the fire and blaming the Biden administration and Democrats for the lack of firefighters.
Because for Republicans, using chaos and dysfunction to paralyze the government is not just a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.
Doug Gordon is a Democratic strategist and co-founder of UpShift Strategies who has worked on numerous federal, state, and local campaigns and on Capitol Hill. He is on Twitter at @dgordon52. Courtney Hytower is a director at UpShift Strategies and current master's student in the Media, Culture, and Communication program at New York University.
The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
