The ouster of Rep. Kevin McCarthy from the House speaker’s office, instigated by a small contingent of far-right Republicans, has left the House leaderless just days after lawmakers barely dodged a government shutdown by voting to fund the federal government through mid-November. The move to dump Mr. McCarthy was not unexpected, no matter how unprecedented. In January, to obtain enough GOP votes to win the speakership, Mr. McCarthy agreed to a set of rules that would allow for his removal at the whim of an individual member.
In this episode of History As It Happens, historian Jeremi Suri discusses what Mr. McCarthy’s demise means for the state of American democracy as public trust in government institutions sinks to historic lows. In the view of Mr. Suri, an expert on public policy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, the Republican leadership fiasco recalls the congressional divisions after the Civil War.
“After the Confederate states come back into the Union, when they start sending Democrats to Congress, you have a similar dynamic. You have a portion of the Democratic Party from some of the former Confederate states that is made up of anti-Reconstruction, anti-civil rights members. … They act in ways that look very similar to Matt Gaetz and Andy Biggs and others who are in the far right of the Republican Party today. The position of those Democrats in the late 1860s and ’70s is to blow the government up, to stop the government from functioning,” said Mr. Suri, the author of “Civil War By Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy.”
As Mr. McCarthy said on Saturday, the House is paralyzed until a new speaker is chosen. As of this episode, it is not clear who the new speaker might be, under which rules he or she might govern, and how long it will take to settle the matter.
History As It Happens is available at washingtontimes.com or wherever you find your podcasts.
