Iowa's US House Republicans Find Their Acorn
But a little leadership in defense of democracy would be welcome
In case there is anybody who still wonders who broke American democracy and national politics, Republicans in the US House answered that question with crystal clarity this past week when they removed Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as Speaker from that position for the heinous crime - the mortal sin - of working with Democrats to keep the government from shutting down.
That’s not anyone’s conjecture. They explicitly said that’s why they were booting him.
He is the first House Speaker to be removed from office in the history of our nation.
Iowa’s Republican House delegation all voted to keep McCarthy - to their limited credit. McCarthy was no prize, but given the options they had, voting to keep him was the right vote for Republicans to cast. As the old saying goes: “Even a blind hog finds an acorn every now and then.”
But what drove McCarthy from office is an anti-democratic hyper partisanship that will not change with McCarthy’s departure and that Iowa Republicans in Congress are doing little to nothing to change. A little leadership in defense of American democracy, currently aflame in Republican circles, would be welcome from the state’s congressional delegation and Republican leaders.
The loathsome debacle that toppled McCarthy this past week has long roots. Those roots far pre-date the arrival of the Anarchist in Chief, Donald Trump, who is the root of much of the evil that now infects America’s body politic. In the assault on democracy that ended McCarthy’s brief Speakership - hyper partisanship - Trump may be its loudest practitioner, but he’s a “Donnie-come-lately” to the cause.
What sunk McCarthy - aside from his own untrustworthiness - are actions that can be traced back to at least 2004 and 2007, by one Republican Speaker - Dennis Hastert - and by two future Republican Speaker, one of whom is Kevin McCarthy himself.
A quick story: I once attended a panel discussion at the National Archives in Washington, DC. The topic was partisanship in Washington, and how things had gotten so bad on that front. Participants included Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (D-IL) (who had not yet been exposed, convicted and imprisoned for financial crimes related to sexual abuse of high school wrestlers he coached before being elected to Congress), and 3-4 former House members, who were all Republicans and “blue dog” Democrats.
They all quickly and easliy agreed that the partisanship in Washington, DC was all President Obama’s fault. Even Woodward who should have known better.
Hastert was the most certain in holding that preposterous view.
I don’t have many regrets in life, but one that I do have is that when the program that night got to the Q&A session, I decided not to ask Hastert about his major role in institutionalizing hyper partisanship in the US House with the so-called “Hastert Rule” he promised to implement upon being elected Speaker.
I thought the National Archives was too august of an institution in which to confront Hastert with a question about his flaming hypocrisy on the matter. I mean, we were in the building that housed the actual Declaration of Independence, US Constitution, and Bill of Rights. So I passed on the quesiton. I just didn’t think it was the place for such a question.
I should have asked him anyway. Hastert was the very architect of hyper partisanship in Washington, Congress in particular, and the US House specifically.
He was the one, in 2004, who came up with the infamous “Hastert Rule.”
That’s the “rule” - an unwritten promise, actually - that said he would schedule no bill for a floor vote in the House that did not have majority support from Republicans in the House, even if there was a majority of House members - Democrats and Republicans combined - that would vote to pass it.
It was an outrageous rule, one that blocked a majority of the House from working its will.
It was exactly such a coalition across party lines that passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in the Senate, under the leadership of Senators Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) and Everett Dirksen (R-IL) working with Democratic President Lyndon Johnson.
Hastert’s “rule” is the very definition of hyper partisanship. It put party over country. It institutionalized “party over country” thinking in the House among Republicans. Yet, Hastert sat there on stage, comfortably pinning everything on President Obama.
For the record, I have never again, similarly bitten my tongue at a public program in Washington, DC when faced with such glaring hypocrisy when there was a Q&A session where that hypocrisy could be challenged.
This is the very thing that cost McCarthy his job: using Democratic votes to pass needed legislation when Republicans alone couldn’t put it over the top. He didn’t have enough Republican votes to keep the government’s lights on, so he accepted Democratic voes to get it done.
It cost him his head as Speaker.
Hastert may have started the hyper partisanship ball rolling and institutionalized it among House Republicans. It certainly played a big role in McCarthy’s demise.
But McCarthy himself played an even bigger role. And I’m not just talking about the lies, flip flops, and betrayals he practiced daily as House Speaker that made everyone distrust him, Republican as well as Democrat.
Go all the way back to 2007.
That’s when when Republican “rising stars” Reps. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Paul Ryan (R-WI), and Eric Cantor (R-VA) began to recruit a new class of Republican candidates to run in the 2008 House elections. They actually wrote a book about their effort called Young Guns, as if the democracy disabling business they were engaged in was some kind of fun and entertaining cowboy movie.
As outlined in the book, McCarthy, Cantor and Ryan purposely recruited Republican House candidates who would not compromise.
The three blamed the paucity of Republican policy victories in Congress on Republicans who already served there and who were too willing to work with and compromise with Democrats in order to pass legislation. The “Young Guns” purposely sought candidates who would hold firm, dig in,l and insist that only Republican ideologies - often extreme - be enacted with no compromise.
Even though Republicans actually lost US House seats in 2008, recruiting hard line, no compromise, ideologues for the House became the Republican model going forward.
Then Mitch McConnell (R-KY), over in the Senate, further institutionalized their dysfunction by announcing during President Obama’s first days in the White House that the top priority for Republicans in Congress was to make certain Obama was a one term president by ensuring that none of his agenda was enacted.
Republicans in the Senate were now on board with “party over country” thinking, too. Which is why we have so often seen and heard Senator Chuck Grassley - who used to know better - doing and saying so many embarrassingly partisan things.
And so Republicans are where they are today: - eagerly cannibalizing even their own House Speaker rather than even entertain the idea of working with or compromising with their fellow Americans on the other side of the aisle.
That’s not exactly how you learned in high school civics class that Congress in a democracy is supposed to work - which is probably why Republicans are working so hard to get civics courses out of school curriculums these days. What you don’t know can’t hurt them.
Nineteen years ago, future convicted and imprisoned felon Dennis Hastert adopted a rule as House Speaker that institutionalized hyper partisanship in the House.
Sixteen years ago, future House Speaker Kevin McCarthy helped plant the seeds of an anti-democratic, hyper partisanship that took their political dysfunction to the next level, by stocking the House with Republicans unwilling to work with anyone who has a different view, and who look on reaching across the aisle to find common ground and agreement to be a mortal sin.
It. may be fitting that such cluelessness about how democracies work eventually claimed one of its own creators - Kevin McCarthy - but there is nothing about this mess that is good for America.
While Iowa Republicans in the House may have found their acorn - the vote not to punish McCarthy for working with Democrats - the forces that drove McCarthy from the Speakership are deep rooted in their party. They are also quite damaging to their party and to American democracy. Those forces are not going to heal themselves.
Iowa’s delegation needs to be more visible in working toward bipartisan democracy and more vocal in saying things that can help save their party and our democracy from the anti-democratic ideologues and heedless self-promoters in their ranks.
Right now, on that front, the crickets are drowning them out.