When MAGA Forced The Vote
Republican dissidents show the Squad how it's done
Yesterday, for the first time in a century, the majority party in Congress failed to elect a Speaker of the House. After the first round of voting, Hakeem Jeffries stood at 212 votes with unanimous Democratic support. Kevin McCarthy amassed 203 Republican votes, far shy of the 218 threshold needed to secure the Speakership. Andy Biggs, GOP Congressman from Arizona, garnered 10 votes, and a handful of others split the remaining 9.
Given most Republicans’ eagerness to put this battle behind them, MAGA favorite Jim Jordan made a plea to the Freedom Caucus holdouts to capitulate and vote for McCarthy in the second roll call. In response, leading dissenter Matt Gaetz nominated Jordan for Speaker and roasted McCarthy in a scathing two-minute floor speech.
Gaetz’ address was successful in consolidating the entire anti-McCarthy coalition behind Jordan, who racked up 19 and 20 votes on the second and third rounds, respectively. At the end of the day, Congress adjourned without a Speaker for the first time since 1923.
This historic act of defiance reminded many on the Left of their own intra-party feud from just two years ago, when progressives in the “Squad” faced pressure from the Left to leverage their votes to extract concessions from party leader and presumptive Speaker, Nancy Pelosi. This grassroots effort became known as #ForceTheVote; the goal of which was to guarantee a promise from Pelosi to bring Medicare For All to a floor vote in exchange for progressive support.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rejected this suggestion, making the excuse that #ForceTheVote didn’t account for what would come next, assuming Pelosi didn’t agree to their conditions and progressives denied her their backing.
Of course, “step 2” would be “second” round of votes, and assuming the same result, a third, then a fourth, and so on. This process would have repeated itself until either one side caved to the other, or a consensus candidate emerged that would serve as a compromise between the Pelosi supporters and the progressive holdouts. This is exactly what’s playing out right now on the Republican side, where MAGA dissenters are in precisely the same position as the Squad of January 2021. The difference: MAGA committed to the strategy of disruption on which they ran, whereas the Squad backed down when they had the same opportunity.
This comparison holds, right down to the specifics of #ForceTheVote. Yesterday’s events transpired in a matter of minutes, but were actually months in the making. Despite Gaetz’ blistering takedown of McCarthy’s corruption, it seems as though his faction of conservative dissidents were in fact lobbying McCarthy behind the scenes for concessions in advance of decision day.
Congresswoman Lauren Boebert told Fox News last night that she had met with McCarthy on Monday evening and assured him she had the votes to secure his Speakership if he agreed to certain terms. Most important among them: floor votes (sound familiar?) on both a border security bill and a term limits bill. According to Boebert, McCarthy “smugly rejected” her proposal. The result: McCarthy lost all three rounds of voting, party leadership was humiliated, and Republicans were thrown into disarray. The resulting pressure to settle upon a Speaker has forced McCarthy to consider a number of concessions to the Freedom Caucus in order to bring in enough votes to close the deal. As of now, McCarthy is poised to lose yet again on day two of voting.
It’s now obvious that if McCarthy is somehow able to secure his position as Speaker of the House, it will only be after having ceded to a multitude of demands from the stubborn minority who proved they were serious about denying him victory absent those compromises. With each passing round of voting, his prospects grow dimmer and the GOP dissidents strengthen their hand.
And so AOC’s “step 2” speculation in December 2020 was nothing more than concern trolling. The uneasiness that builds with each repeated failed Speaker vote is exactly what’s given the Republican hardliners more leverage in each subsequent round, and the same would have been true two years ago if the Squad had the courage to exert the same leverage over Democrats’ centrist majority. MAGA’s “Force the Vote” strategy worked as planned: McCarthy’s failure to make a deal when he had the chance has only weakened his position to the point where his candidacy, at this writing, is on life support.
As this chaos unfolds in the GOP, Democrats are united in lockstep behind Hakeem Jeffries, an avowed enemy of the party’s progressive wing who promised he’d never “bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism.” Nonetheless, Jamaal Bowman - himself a member of the Democratic Socialists of America - took to Twitter during yesterday’s proceedings to taunt the Republicans for their failure to unite behind a leader.
This afternoon, he retweeted that same post, gloating that “The Republican Party is a mess!”
Of course, Jamaal Bowman was elected to join the Squad - a block of Democrats whose MO was supposedly to disrupt the regular order business of the Democratic Party much like the Freedom Caucus is now disrupting the GOP.
Bowman ran as a primary challenger to Eliot Engel, a 16-term moderate incumbent. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder (and just weeks before the primary), Engel was heard at a community event saying that ““If [he] didn’t have a primary, [he] wouldn’t care” to speak about racial justice issues. In spite of these awful comments, Jeffries endorsed Engel over Bowman - a decision consistent with Jeffries’ war on the Left. Jeffries’ ascension to top Democrat on Capitol Hill all but ensures that none of Bowman’s priorities are enacted for years, if not decades, to come.
Regardless, Bowman is apparently very proud of his party’s unity behind the odious and belligerent Jeffries, in contrast to the “mess” that the anti-McCarthy caucus has made of the GOP. He touts his conformity and subservience to party leadership while mocking the very fighting spirit on the other side that he himself boasted during his 2020 campaign.
What all of this demonstrates is that the revolutionary fervor that once defined Left politics is now nowhere to be found in mainstream left-of-center circles. Progressive Democrats who ran as agitators are now gleefully touting their cooperation with the same corporate-captured party establishment they ran against and promised to upend.
They now express the same smug contempt for Republicans’ internal debates that one would expect from the most banal of MSNBC pundits. In fact, AOC herself was all smiles last night on Alex Wagner’s primetime program, where she emphasized that “on the Democratic side, we didn’t have a single defection.”
Surely, this kid-gloves treatment she now enjoys on the #resistance liberals’ flagship network is a result of her newfound approach of acquiescence to party leadership. Had she delivered on her initial promise to be a thorn in the side of her party’s establishment - as Gaetz, Boebert, and co. now are to theirs - she’d continue to receive similarly hostile treatment.
Conservative commentators - from millennial podcasters like Ben Shapiro to Fox News geysers like former Speaker Newt Gingrich - are mostly united in their support for McCarthy and their condemnation of the dissenters’ obstructionism.
Even former President Donald Trump - reluctant to inject himself into this conflict but also concerned about the implications of a prolonged power struggle - chimed in this morning on Truth Social urging the anti-McCarthy Republicans to stand down.
Despite all of this pressure to conform - from influential right-wing media figures and the leader of the Republican Party himself - the defectors are holding strong, and the struggle for Speakership continues with no end in sight.
It’s impossible for progressives to imagine anyone in their caucus mounting this kind of resistance to the Democratic Party and its media enforcers. At this point, they don’t even seem to want us to believe they could. They’ve found their new homes in the halls of power and in the studios of corporate media channels. They no longer respond to the kinds of grassroots movements that empowered them in the first place, most of which have now been co-opted anyway.
The Democratic Party is no longer a forum for disagreement and debate - which is to say, it’s no longer a place for politics. Rather, it functions more as a social club in which conformity is required to remain in good standing. If there were any desire on the part of the Squad to shake the proverbial etch-a-sketch and create a more robust and dynamic vessel for political expression and momentum, they’d be wise to take a page out of the Republican dissenters’ playbook.
But alas, no such desire exists. The events of the past two days prove that the #ForceTheVote strategy was a potent one all along. Progressives thought of it first, but our leaders lacked the will to implement it. Instead, we watch as Republicans engage the long overdue intra-party melee that we hoped to instigate on our side.
The Squad simply never had it in them.
The amazing thing to me is that these Republicans didn't even need a grassroots movement to push them to do this as the left tried with the Squad during FTV. They just saw the opportunity the Speakership vote with a narrow majority afforded and pounced.
And one of the concessions they are demanding, the restoration of the motion to vacate the speakership, would ensure that they retain this leverage for the entire term. It makes the floor vote on Medicare for All, committee assignments, and minor rules changes that we begged the Squad to demand two years ago look like peanuts.
Could not agree more