Compare Pelosi’s leadership to the dysfunction displayed last week by the new Republican majority, which eventually elected Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as Speaker on the 15th round of votes.
McCarthy has been reduced to a weakling. He will be constantly cringing under fear that a snap vote by the far right will oust him. Such a vote can now be called if even one GOP member asks for it.
The GOP’s far-right also won concessions over a whole host of arcane but important matters such as the make-up of the vital Rules Committee and the Speaker’s power to limit debate and amendments.
Without those levers of control, the GOP leader will be a potted plant in the Speaker’s Office.
They have picked a Speaker but they have no real leader.
And with Trump in decline, there is no national leader of the party going into the 2024 cycle.
With fringe personalities in the lead, the GOP has no agenda other than insults and outrage, chaos, confrontation, and obstruction. Republicans stand on the sidelines, hooting at people trying to make government work.
“The GOP…is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition,” they wrote. “When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”
That was true in 2012 and it is true today.