The United States Congress – a powerful legislative body tasked with keeping our country running — has been limping along for almost exactly a decade, held back by an extremist wing of the Republican Party quashing any hope of bipartisan moderation.
That fringe element – metamorphosed from the Tea Party to the Freedom Caucus — won the day last week with its successful ouster of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy who is now just a regular representative. Never before has a speaker lost his or her position through what is effectively a vote of no confidence. It’s tempting to look at McCarthy’s fall and applaud the shaking up of a power structure that is failing the American people.
But make no mistake – the architect behind this chaos is not interested in actually governing or reducing the deficit or fixing immigration or developing a sound international policy to keep our enemy Russia in check.
Rep. Matt Gaetz may be saying in public that he is driven by the laudable desire to create a government funding system that allows for more congressional oversight of the hundred-billion-dollar purse, more line-item analysis of discretionary and defense spending, and fewer pork-barrel, pet-projects tacked onto a must-pass omnibus spending bill.
Gaetz, however, isn’t serious about those goals.
“Nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy,” Gaetz told reporters moments after the vote, belying his true personal motive. “Kevin McCarthy has made multiple contradictory promises and when they call came due, he lost votes of people who maybe don’t ideologically agree with me.”
Gaetz is driven by a deep ideological agenda that has little to do with federal funding provisions and everything to do with continuing a false narrative that helps disgraced former President Donald Trump. Gaetz said he is upset that McCarthy is compromising with Democrats and hasn’t subpoenaed Hunter Biden, the president’s son, about Hunter’s shady foreign dealings using shell companies to get paid millions. Ironically Gaetz’s motion required the support of almost every Democrat and only included eight Republicans.
Gaetz’s harshest critics say he is in fact demanding behind closed doors for the investigation into his own alleged ethics violation to be quashed by house leadership. McCarthy has refused.
In sharp contrast, Colorado’s Rep. Ken Buck also supported the motion to vacate McCarthy from the speaker’s office.
“There were some of us that felt so strongly about spending, about the irresponsibility of having $36 trillion of debt at the end of next year based on the deal Kevin McCarthy cut that we stood up and did something about it,” Buck told Fox News defending his vote.
We often disagree with Buck’s protest votes on spending bills, but he is not wrong about the growing federal debt and the unsustainable trajectory of American taxing and spending. We just don’t see the wisdom of shutting down the federal government with so little hope that it would actually result in a better budget. The solution must come from a bipartisan group passing legislation similar to President Barack Obama’s deal with Republicans — the Budget Control Act of 2011 and its unpopular sequestration that was abandoned by lawmakers a few years later.
Buck can tilt at windmills all he wants – usually it’s not as harmful as causing an upheaval in the U.S. House or grinding government to a standstill during a budget impasse – but to reduce the deficit will take compromise that avoids the devastating effects of austerity measures by using a combination of holding spending steady for several years while increasing revenue with smarter tax policy.
The only way the ouster of McCarthy could work to the advantage of the American people is if moderates crossed the political aisle to create a consensus vote to put someone in power who could broker such a deal. Congress is no longer limping toward that goal; the institution has been brought to its knees by Republicans.
