In times of chaos and dissension, you will often hear pundits, professionals, and those who self-identify as serious call for an “adult in the room”. The “adult in the room” is a person willing to make difficult compromises, a person willing to sacrifice vanity for pragmatism, a person with a clear eye of their own priorities and needs and more determination to achieve them than a desire to make a point.
Over the past weeks, some have called for “an adult in the room” at the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives: as the House majority party fails, over and over again, to find a new speaker, having exiled Kevin McCarthy from the post on 3 October, it can seem that what the Republicans need is someone more level-headed and serious, someone willing to accept imperfect compromises and to subvert his own ego for the good of the party, someone who might even possess a quality that passes for dignity.
But to call the Republican House caucus children, to declare that the far-right firebrands who ousted McCarthy from the speakership at the beginning of the month and are now trying to hoist Jim Jordan into it, would be to miss the point. The far-right caucus that has instigated the Republican speaker fight is not constituted by hysterics driven by emotionalism. They are acting rationally, pursuing their own very clear incentives.
Last week it looked, briefly, as if all this might be put behind us. The House Republican caucus nominated Steve Scalise to be speaker. The Louisiana Republican once gave a speech at a gathering hosted by a white supremacist group, and has called himself “David Duke without the baggage”. This, we were told, was the Republican party’s pragmatic consensus candidate. His support fell apart almost immediately, and his candidacy for the speakership never proceeded to a floor vote.
Next up was Jim Jordan, an insurrectionist from Ohio, whose claims to fame range from allegedly helping to cover up sexual abuse of student athletes while he was a wrestling coach at Ohio State, to largely causing the 2013 and 2018 government shutdowns, to helping to coordinate Trump’s attempted coup in the wake of the 2020 election. That last effort included pressuring Mike Pence to illegally throw out the electoral votes at the January 6 congressional joint session, and overturn the election results.
Jordan defied subpoenas from the House January 6 committee, and has still never admitted that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election. After the January 6 insurrection, he reached out to Donald Trump’s administration in search of a pardon. John Boehner, the former Republican House speaker, once called Jordan a “legislative terrorist”, but it’s not clear that he actually does much legislating: during his nearly two decades in the House, not a single bill that he has introduced has become law.
On Tuesday, Jim Jordan failed to garner enough votes to win the speakership on the House floor. The chamber adjourned, and the Republican party slipped deeper into the backbiting and dysfunction that has paralyzed even the most basic functions of Congress one month before a government shutdown and amid a slew of mounting national crises.
Let’s be clear about something: men like Scalise and Jordan – extremists and election deniers, comfortable with white supremacy and willing to discard democratic principles – have ascended to what counts for leadership in the Republican conference not in spite of the depravity of their positions, but because of them. They are the products of rightwing political, fundraising and media apparatuses that incentivize candidates to move further and further to the right – and which have left the Republican party itself both unable and unwilling to impose discipline on its politicians.
In many ways, the Republican party brought this internal dysfunction on itself. In a project that spanned decades, Republicans and their allies built a vast conservative media infrastructure and developed an impressive skill for shaping and whetting the ideological appetites of their audience, creating a more and more conservative base.
At the same time, Republicans seized control of state legislatures and their congressional redistricting powers, creating safely Republican House seats that were insulated from democratic competition, and where the only meaningfully competitive elections were in Republican primaries – thereby insuring that dozens of Republican congressmen would view the greatest threat to their careers as a primary challenge from their right. And so a base of more and more conservative voters began demanding – and electing – more and more conservative politicians, a cycle that has given us Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene and no small number of other embarrassments.
It has also given us the rise of a new and sinister character: a Republican politician with no interest in public service and an ideological opposition to government functioning, whose incentives drive them not to govern or compromise, but to make constant demonstrations of their own conservatism – to offend and shock, throw sand in the gears, prevent the ordinary functioning of government bodies, and above all, to draw as much attention as possible to themselves.
Viewed from this angle, it is not hard to see why the Republicans have failed, over and over again, to elect a speaker or assure the functionality of their conference. Why would they? With the drama high and the cameras trained on them, the obstructionist Republicans are already getting everything they want.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
