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Tag: GOP lawmakers

  • Trump Voters Are America Too

    Trump Voters Are America Too

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    In the last spring of the Obama administration, Michelle Obama was delivering her final commencement address as first lady, at City College of New York. Then, as now, the specter of Donald Trump had become the inescapable backdrop to everything. He’d spent the past year smashing every precept of restraint, every dignified tradition of the supposedly kindhearted nation he was seeking to lead. Obama couldn’t help but lob some barely cloaked denunciations of Trump’s wrecking-ball presidential campaign—the one that would soon be ratified with the Republican nomination. “That is not who we are,” the first lady assured the graduates. “That is not what this country stands for, no.”

    The promise did not age well. Not that November, and not since.

    Explore the January/February 2024 Issue

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    “This is not who we are”: The would-be guardians of America’s better angels have been scolding us with this line for years. Or maybe they mean it as an affirmation. Either way, the axiom prompts a question: Who is “we” anyway? Because it sure seems like a lot of this “we” keeps voting for Trump. Today the dictum sounds more like a liberal wish than any true assessment of our national character.

    In retrospect, so many of the high-minded appeals of the Obama era—“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”; “When they go low, we go high”—feel deeply naive. Question for Michelle: What if they keep going lower and lower—and that keeps landing the lowest of the low back in the White House?

    Unthinkable: 50 moments that define an improbable presidency

    Recently, I read through some old articles and notes of mine from the campaign trail in 2015 and 2016, when Trump first cannonballed into our serene political bathtub. This was back when “we”—the out-of-touch media know-it-alls—were trying to understand Trump’s appeal. What did his supporters love so much about their noisy new savior? I dropped into a few rallies and heard the same basic idea over and over: Trump says things that no one else will say. They didn’t necessarily agree with or believe everything their candidate declared. But he spoke on their behalf.

    When political elites insisted “We’re better than this!”—a close cousin of “This is not who we are”—many Trump disciples heard “We’re better than them.” Hillary Clinton ably confirmed this when she dismissed half of the Republican nominee’s supporters—at an LGBTQ fundraiser in New York—as people who held views that were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.” Whether or not she was correct, the targets of her judgment did not appreciate it. And the disdain was mutual. “He’s our murder weapon,” said the conservative political scientist Charles Murray, summarizing the appeal that Trump held for many of his loyalists.

    After the shock of Trump’s victory in 2016, the denial and rationalizations kicked in fast. Just ride out the embarrassment for a few years, many thought, and then America would revert to something in the ballpark of sanity. But one of the overlooked portents of 2020 (many Democrats were too relieved to notice) was that the election was still extremely close. Trump received 74 million votes, nearly 47 percent of the electorate. That’s a huge amount of support, especially after such an ordeal of a presidency—the “very fine people on both sides,” the “perfect” phone call, the bleach, the daily OMG and WTF of it all. The populist nerves that Trump had jangled in 2016 remained very much aroused. Many of his voters’ grievances were unresolved. They clung to their murder weapon.

    From the January/February 2024 issue: Jennifer Senior on what happens to the American psyche if Trump is reelected

    Trump has continued to test their loyalty. He hasn’t exactly enhanced his résumé since 2020, unless you count a second impeachment, several loser endorsements, and a bunch of indictments as selling points (some do, apparently: more medallions for his victimhood). January 6 posed the biggest hazard—the brutality of it, the fever of the multitudes, and Trump’s obvious pride in the whole furor. Even the GOP lawmakers who still vouched for Trump from their Capitol safe rooms seemed shaken.

    “This is not who we are,” Representative Nancy Mace, the newly elected Republican of South Carolina, said of the deadly riot. “We’re better than this.” There was a lot of that: thoughts and prayers from freaked-out Americans. “Let me be very clear,” President-elect Joe Biden tried to reassure the country that day. “The scenes of chaos at the Capitol do not reflect a true America, do not represent who we are.”

    One hoped that Biden was correct, that we were in fact not a nation of vandals, cranks, and insurrectionists. But then, on the very day the Capitol had been ransacked, 147 House and Senate Republicans voted not to certify Biden’s election. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, skulked back to the ousted president a few weeks later, and the pucker-up parade to Mar-a-Lago was on. Large majorities of Republicans never stopped supporting Trump, and claim they never stopped believing that Biden stole the 2020 election and that Crooked Joe’s regime is abusing the legal system to persecute Trump out of the way.

    Here we remain, amazingly enough, ready to do this all again. Trump might be the ultimate con man, but his essential nature has never been a mystery. Yet he appears to be gliding to his third straight Republican nomination and is running strong in a likely rematch with an unpopular incumbent. A durable coalition seems fully comfortable entrusting the White House to the guy who left behind a Capitol encircled with razor-wire fence and 25,000 National Guard troops protecting the federal government from his own supporters.

    You can dismiss Trump voters all you want, but give them this: They’re every bit as American as any idealized vision of the place. If Trump wins in 2024, his detractors will have to reckon once again with the voters who got us here—to reconcile what it means to share a country with so many citizens who keep watching Trump spiral deeper into his moral void and still conclude, “Yes, that’s our guy.”

    This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “This Is Who We Are.”

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    Mark Leibovich

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  • Jim Jordan Could Have a Long Fight Ahead

    Jim Jordan Could Have a Long Fight Ahead

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    Updated at 3:46 p.m. ET on October 17, 2023

    On Friday, immediately after nominating Representative Jim Jordan as their latest candidate for speaker, House Republicans took a second, secret-ballot vote. The question put to each lawmaker was simple: Would you support Jordan in a public vote on the House floor?

    The results were not encouraging for the pugnacious Ohioan. Nearly a quarter of the House Republican conference—55 members—said they would not back Jordan. Given the GOP’s threadbare majority, he could afford to lose no more than three Republicans on the vote. Jordan’s bid seemed to be fizzling even faster than that of Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, whose nomination earlier in the week lasted barely a day before he bowed out in the face of opposition from within the party.

    Yet, by this afternoon, Jordan had flipped dozens of holdouts to put himself closer to winning the speakership. The 55 Republicans who said last week that they wouldn’t support him had dwindled to 20 when the House voted this afternoon. He earned a total of 200 votes on the floor; he’ll need 217 to win. Jordan will now try to replicate the strategy that former Speaker Kevin McCarthy used to capture the top House post in January: wearing down his opposition, vote by painful vote. It took McCarthy 15 ballots to secure the speakership, but Jordan may not need that many. The Republicans who voted against him on the floor have not displayed the defiance that characterized the conservatives who overthrew McCarthy. Several of them have told reporters that they could be persuaded to vote for Jordan, or would not stand in the way if he neared the threshold of 217 votes needed to win.

    Read: Steve Scalise bows out

    Should he secure those final votes, Jordan’s election would represent a major victory for the GOP hardliners who, led by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, toppled McCarthy with the hope of replacing him with a more combative, ideological conservative. The switch would also give Donald Trump, who endorsed Jordan, something he’s never had in his seven years as the Republican Party’s official and unofficial standard-bearer: a House speaker fully committed to his cause. Although McCarthy and the previous GOP speaker, Paul Ryan, accommodated the former president, Jordan has been his champion; as documented by the House committee on January 6, Jordan was deeply involved in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election and urged then–Vice President Mike Pence to throw out electoral votes from states that Trump was contesting.

    His election would look a lot like Trump’s, each the result of establishment Republicans falling in line with a leader many of them swore they’d never support. Throughout Trump’s four years in the White House, GOP lawmakers, aides, and even members of the Cabinet sharply criticized the president in private, either to reporters or to their own colleagues, while offering unequivocal support and praise in public. That dynamic played out for Jordan this afternoon, when the floor vote revealed that dozens of the Republicans who’d opposed him in a secret ballot were unwilling to put their names against him on the record.

    Some of them had made awkward public reversals in the run-up to the vote. On Thursday, Representative Ann Wagner of Missouri was asked whether she would back Jordan in a floor vote. “HELL NO,” she told Scott Wong of NBC News. By Monday morning, she was saying that Jordan had “allayed my concerns about keeping the government open” and securing the southern border; she would vote for him. One by one, other senior Republicans who had initially said that they were determined to block Jordan’s ascent—Representatives Mike Rogers of Alabama, Ken Calvert of California, Vern Buchanan of Florida among them—declared that they, too, had come around.

    By this afternoon, however, Jordan was still well short of the votes he needed. “I was surprised at the number. I think everyone was surprised,” Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, a Jordan supporter, told reporters after the vote. The big question now is whether Jordan can close the gap on subsequent ballots, or whether the small cadre of Republican holdouts will grow into a more formidable bloc against his candidacy. The safer assumption seemed to be that Jordan’s opposition would melt away. After all, this group of Republicans is a different breed than the recalcitrant conservatives who forced out McCarthy. The anti-Jordan contingent is, if not ideologically moderate, then far more pragmatic and committed to stable governance than the anti-McCarthy faction.

    The lack of a House speaker for the past two weeks has paralyzed the chamber in the middle of ballooning domestic and international crises. The federal government will shut down a month from today if no action is taken by Congress, which has been unable to offer more assistance to either Israel or Ukraine in their respective wars with Hamas and Russia. A number of Jordan skeptics have cited the upheaval outside the Capitol as a rationale for resolving the impasse inside the dome, even if it means voting for a conservative they consider ill-suited to lead.

    Lee Drutman: Matt Gaetz is half right

    Democrats believed that the election of such a polarizing Republican could, along with the general collapse of governance by the GOP, help them recapture the chamber next year. But they were appalled that Republicans might elevate to the speakership a far-right ideologue many of them have labeled an insurrectionist. A former wrestler who brought a fighter’s mentality to Congress, Jordan rose to prominence as an antagonist of former Republican Speaker John Boehner a decade ago, pushing against bipartisan cooperation. “He is the worst possible choice,” Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, a 25-year veteran of the House, told me before the vote.

    Jordan’s record, and the possibility that he would be an electoral vulnerability for the GOP, was clearly weighing on Republicans before the vote. As he walked into the chamber shortly after noon, Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a Republican who represents a swing district on Long Island, told reporters that he still hadn’t decided how to vote. He ultimately joined 19 other GOP lawmakers in backing someone other than Jordan. Other mainstream Republicans justified their vote for Jordan on the grounds that he alone had the credibility to persuade far-right Republicans to avert a government shutdown in the coming weeks and months. “If he says it, they think it’s a strategic move. If I say it, they call me a RINO,” one Republican told me on the condition of anonymity after voting for Jordan.

    By the end of the vote, as many Republicans had opposed Jordan as had initially tried to block McCarthy in January, before the former speaker embarked on a five-day period of private lobbying and dealmaking to win the gavel. It was unclear whether Jordan would be able to do the same. He appeared relaxed as he sat through the nearly hour-long roll call, showing little reaction as his defections mounted. When the vote ended, he huddled with supporters, including McCarthy, and the House, having failed once more to elect a speaker, recessed so Republicans could figure out their next move.

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    Russell Berman

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  • The Humiliation of Kevin McCarthy

    The Humiliation of Kevin McCarthy

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    Shortly before 4 p.m.yesterday, Kevin McCarthy, the man who desperately wanted to be House speaker, had just suffered two brutally public rejections in a row. For some reason, he was unbowed. “We’re staying until we win,” McCarthy assured a crush of reporters waiting for him outside a bathroom in the Capitol.

    Moments earlier, McCarthy had sat and watched as a small but dug-in right-wing faction of his party twice defied his pleas for unity and ensured the 57-year-old Californian’s ignominious place in congressional history. Trying to avoid the first failed speaker vote in 100 years, McCarthy could afford to lose only four Republicans in the crucial party-line tally that opens each new Congress and allows the majority party to govern. McCarthy lost 19. The clerk called the roll again, and once again 19 Republicans voted for someone other than McCarthy. By the hyperpolarized standards of the modern Capitol, this was a rout.

    Outside the bathroom, McCarthy explained how the votes would wear down his opposition, how they’d come to see that there was no viable alternative to him. He pointed out that the Republican whom all 19 of his detractors had backed on the second ballot, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, didn’t even want the speaker’s job and was supporting him. “It’ll change eventually,” McCarthy said.

    He walked back to the floor and watched as the House rejected him a third time, now with 20 Republicans casting their votes for Jordan. When the chamber adjourned for the day at about 5:30 p.m., McCarthy had already left the floor, his latest bid for speaker thwarted at least momentarily, and perhaps for good.

    As the first day of the new congressional term began, McCarthy made a final defiant plea to Republicans inside a private meeting, the culmination of two months’ of negotiating and concessions. The pitch rallied McCarthy’s allies; Representative Ann Wagner of Missouri told me she had never seen him so fiery. But it also “emboldened the other side,” Representative Pete Sessions of Texas told reporters before the votes.

    Read: The Republican majority’s opening debacle

    Expected or not, the failed votes amounted to a stunning humiliation for McCarthy, who in recent days had been projecting confidence not only in word but in deed. More than measuring the speaker’s drapes, he had begun using them: McCarthy had already moved into the speaker’s suite of offices in the Capitol. If the House elects someone besides him in the coming days or weeks, he’ll have to move right back out.

    But yesterday was a broader embarrassment for a Republican Party that, at least in the House, has squandered most of the chances that voters have given it to govern over the past dozen years. A day of putative triumph had turned decidedly sour—a reality that many GOP lawmakers, particularly McCarthy supporters, made little effort to disguise. “This costs us prestige,” Sessions lamented after the House had adjourned. “The world is watching.”

    What the world saw probably left many viewers confused. Democrats, the party that voters had relegated to the minority, were giddy and celebratory. “Let the show begin!” one exclaimed after the House formally convened. Representative Ted Lieu of California posed outside his office with a bag of popcorn. During the three rounds of ballots, Democrats flaunted their unity, casting with gusto their unanimous votes for the incoming minority leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York. “Jeffries, Jeffries, Jeffries!” now-former Speaker Nancy Pelosi exclaimed in the fourth hour of voting.

    By that point, the House chamber had lost most of its energy. Lawmakers who had brought their children to witness their swearing-in as members of Congress had sent most of them away; there would be no swearing-in, because that, too, must wait for the election of a speaker. As the third ballot dragged on, a few Republicans seemed on the verge of nodding off, and others grew chippy. “Because I’m interested in governing: Kevin McCarthy,” Representative Bill Huizenga of Michigan snapped when it was his turn to vote again.

    McCarthy’s strategy entering the day had been to keep members on the floor, voting again and again, in hopes that his opponents would grow tired, or buckle under pressure from the House Republicans backing him. But when Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a McCarthy ally, made a motion to adjourn before the fourth vote could be taken, no one put up a fight. “We were at an impasse,” Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, whose defection to Jordan after voting twice for McCarthy might have helped prompt the adjournment, told reporters afterward. “Right now it’s clear Kevin doesn’t have the votes. So what are we going to do? Go down the same road we already saw with [the initial] ballots? It doesn’t make sense.”

    After the adjournment, members left for meetings that many hoped would break the stalemate in time for the House to reconvene today at noon. McCarthy was still gunning for the gavel, but his position seemed more precarious than ever. Republicans who had stuck with him for three ballots were openly discussing alternatives. Could Jordan, a fighter even more conservative than McCarthy and closer to Donald Trump, win over GOP moderates? Was Representative Steve Scalise, McCarthy’s deputy, an acceptable alternative? And while some Republicans still proclaimed themselves “Only Kevin,” others suggested that they might be open to someone else. “I’ve learned in leadership roles, never say what you’re never going to do,” Wagner told me before the voting began.

    If there was a consensus among Republicans last night, it was that few if any of them had any idea whom they could elect as speaker, or when that would happen. “I think everybody goes in their corner and talks,” Representative Ken Buck of Colorado, a conservative who voted for McCarthy, told reporters. I asked him if there was a scenario in which McCarthy, having lost three votes in a row, could still win. “Oh, absolutely,” he replied. Was that the likeliest scenario? Buck answered just as quickly: “No.”

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    Russell Berman

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