In an interview with Politico, former Republican Rep. John Katko, R-N.Y., described the damage to his party since Speaker Kevin McCarthy was deposed more than three weeks ago: “The chaos that’s ensued has really illuminated the divisions in the party. Not only has it illuminated them, it’s kind of deepened and hardened those divisions.”
After cannibalizing three possible successors to McCarthy, an exhausted and exasperated group of House Republicans finally settled on Rep. Mike Johnson, an obscure 51-year-old lawmaker from Louisiana whose main virtue seems to be an absence of enemies. But this thin veneer of unity cannot hide the dysfunction and disarray that Katko describes.
“It’s a pretty sad commentary on governance right now,” Rep. Steve Womack, an Arkansas Republican, told reporters. “The American public cannot be looking at this and having any reasonable confidence that this conference can be governed. It’s sad. I’m sad. I’m heartbroken.”
There are many reasons and rivalries fragmenting the Republicans today, but they can essentially be divided into two main factions: the Reality Caucus and the Chaos Caucus.
This division is often — and erroneously — described as moderates vs. conservatives. In fact, almost all of them are conservatives, since moderates are practically extinct in the modern GOP. What really distinguishes the two caucuses is their philosophy of governing — why they came to Congress in the first place.
Members of the Reality Caucus take a pragmatic approach to their jobs. They understand that America is a vast country containing huge differences — geographic, economic, social, racial, religious, ethnic — and the only way it can be ruled effectively is if lawmakers respect and accommodate those differences and see compromise as an essential element of the legislative process, not an act of betrayal.
They accept the reality that Donald Trump lost the last election, and sided with then Vice President Mike Pence in voting to uphold the results. They recognize that Democrats control the Senate and the White House, and that they must negotiate with those power centers. When the Treasury almost ran out of borrowing authority last spring, 149 members of the Reality Caucus backed a bipartisan compromise to protect America’s economic reputation. When the federal government was about to run out of money last month, 126 GOP realists supported a bill that kept the doors open.
The Chaos Caucus takes a very different approach. They are performers, not legislators; speech-makers, not deal-makers. Their primary goal is ideological purity, not practical accomplishment; disruption, not progress. Their loyalty is to a person, Donald Trump, not their party — or even their country — and they refuse to admit he actually lost the last election.
They come from totally safe districts, and have no fear of political accountability. They are bolstered by right-wing broadcast outlets that provide them platforms and social media channels that give them direct access to political soulmates and campaign contributors.
Their true colors have been on full display during the speaker fiasco. Eight members of the Chaos Caucus voted to eject McCarthy in part because he had actually taken the business of governing seriously and engineered compromises with the Democratic “enemy.”
Then the Chaos Caucus backed one of their own for speaker, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who had once been described by Republican Speaker John Boehner as a “legislative terrorist.” Boehner said of Jordan on CBS: “I just never saw a guy who spent more time tearing things apart — never building anything, never putting anything together.”
The realists rallied to block Jordan, but when they nominated Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota for the top job, he was torpedoed by the chaosists because he voted to keep the government open and freely admits that Biden won the 2020 election. Trump helped seal Emmer’s fate by weighing in on social media, denouncing him as a “Globalist RINO” — a Republican In Name Only.
Trump is a hero to the Chaos Caucus because he fully embodies their core values. The former president demands total fealty, and anyone who strays from the True Path of MAGA Nation is branded a heretic. Trump is not, ironically, a builder at all, despite all the fancy structures that bear his name. He is, in fact, a demolition expert whose specialty is blowing up alliances with anyone who doesn’t wear a red hat and kiss his ring — Democrats, Europeans, even fellow Republicans.
Johnson, the new speaker, has promised to run the House “like a well-oiled machine,” but there is only one way to do that. He must choose reality over ideology; facts over fantasy; compromise over chaos.
Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University.
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