Capitol Police stand outside the speaker’s office, after the House voted to remove Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) from the speaker’s role at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
When the House of Representatives voted to oust Kevin McCarthy as Speaker on Tuesday, it was the first such removal in American history, a vivid rebuke of his leadership and an escalation of the civil strife within the Republican Party.
But historians and political scientists say it is something more: a warning sign for the health of American democracy.
“If you want to know what it looks like when democracy is in trouble, this is what it looks like,” said Daniel Ziblatt, professor of government at Harvard University. “It should set off alarm bells that something is not right.”
The vote reflected the enormous power that a small group of representatives camped on their party’s ideological fringe can wield over an entire institution, said Ziblatt, co-author of the book, “Tyranny of the Minority.” It also showcased how difficult it will be for anyone to corral the House in a way that’s functional, with major decisions over the budget and Ukraine funding up ahead.
Congress arrived at this point for myriad reasons, all of which build on one another, scholars say: Social media and cable news incentivized politicians to perform for the camera, not for their constituents. Aggressive gerrymandering created deeply partisan districts where representation is decided in primary contests, not general elections. Weakened political parties became captive to their loudest and most extreme members.
Taken together, those factors handed a small number of lawmakers the power to throw one of the three branches of government into disarray and, for now, paralysis.
The band of eight hard-right House Freedom Caucus members who rejected McCarthy were opposed by 216 of their fellow GOP representatives, all of whom voted to keep the speaker in place.
The rebels collectively represent just 1.8% of the country, all in safely Republican districts. But with Democrats voting in lockstep against a speaker who they said had repeatedly broken their trust, that was enough to secure McCarthy’s defeat in a closely divided House.
Led by Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, McCarthy’s antagonists said they were voting to end runaway federal spending and protest government dysfunction.
“Washington must change,” Gaetz insisted from the House floor.
Scholars said the actions of Gaetz and his allies have only deepened the dysfunction, leaving the House rudderless and with no clear path to effective leadership. Having narrowly avoided a government shutdown over the weekend, another looms next month. Future assistance to Ukraine as it fends off a Russian invasion is also at stake.
“We are watching a very small number of folks from the House Republican conference have an outsize role in promoting a lot of congressional dysfunction and fiscal dysfunction,” said Laura Blessing, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University. “This is a move for volatility and not a move to pass legislation.”
The members who voted against McCarthy are in the extreme minority, not only within the House overall but within their own party, she added.
“They do not have the votes [for their own policy proposals] and they know that,” she said.
McCarthy has not endorsed a would-be successor, leaving Republicans to scramble to find a viable candidate. Barring an unlikely and unprecedented consensus speaker who receives support from both parties, aspirants will need to earn the favor of nearly the entire Republican caucus, which ranges from relative moderates representing districts won by President Biden to the hard-right faction that just toppled one of its own.
Gaetz set off Tuesday’s vote by moving on Monday to vacate McCarthy’s speakership. The fourth-term Floridian said he was acting in response to McCarthy’s decision over the weekend to turn to House Democrats for help in passing a 45-day stopgap spending bill that avoided, for now, a government shutdown. McCarthy had failed multiple times to win enough votes in his own party, with hard-right members — including the eight who voted against him Tuesday — blocking his efforts.
Tuesday’s debate — and the conversations that preceded it — were unusual for the willingness of McCarthy allies to openly scold their own GOP counterparts for deepening the dysfunction in the chamber.
Many lobbed allegations of the sort normally reserved for members of the opposite party, accusing McCarthy’s opponents of seeking attention, aiming to boost their fundraising and generally wreaking havoc.
“My colleagues here today have a choice: be a chaos agent or get back to work,” said Rep. Ashley Hinson of Iowa, a McCarthy ally, ahead of the vote.
After he was deposed, McCarthy himself voiced fears about how to legislate in an environment where the leader is captive of his own side’s most intransigent faction.
“My fear is the institution fell today because you can’t do the job if ... you have 94% or 96% of your entire conference, but eight people can partner with the whole other side,” he said Tuesday evening. “How do you govern?”
It is a question that scholars are posing as well, seeking explanations and historical antecedents.
“If American democracy is already suffering and weak from various maladies, this unruly crisis in the House is just going to kick it a little further in that direction,” said Alex Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. “You are taking a set of institutions and you are weakening them and then pointing to their weakness.”
The eight Republicans who revolted against McCarthy represent districts that do not look like the rest of the country, according to a Washington Post analysis. They are, on average, 71% white, compared to 59% of the U.S. population; and 8% Black, compared to 14% of America. Their districts are also deeply red: They averaged a score of +12 Republican on the Cook Partisan Voting Index, a measure of a district’s partisanship.
As unprecedented as Tuesday’s vote was, this moment is a continuation of a trend in American political culture, said Joseph Postell, a political scientist at Hillsdale College. He pointed to the troubled tenures of previous Republican speakers of the House such as John A. Boehner and Paul D. Ryan, both of whom struggled with stiff resistance from their right flank.
“What McCarthy faced today is another domino in the many dominoes that have fallen over the last decade or so,” said Postell.
The House Republicans who objected to the budget and to McCarthy’s speakership may have had legitimate concerns about spending and deficits, Postell said. But “now they are no longer incentivized to bargain with one another,” he said. “They are incentivized to remain in conflict.”
He attributed those incentives in part to televised committee hearings that make legislators into budding social media stars. Congressional committees “are no longer venues for Congress to have dialogue with administrative agencies. They are there to get viral memes,” he said.
McCarthy told reporters Tuesday night that he believed Gaetz’s motive was “all was about getting attention from [the media].” The speaker’s allies had earlier scolded Gaetz for fundraising off his effort to oust McCarthy even as the speaker’s fate was still being decided.
To some conservative thinkers, the failed vote to pass a spending bill that immediately preceded McCarthy’s ouster reflects a government that has grown so big it is imperiling the country’s health. The budget “is just too big for any democracy,” said David Ditch, senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
“America is much larger in terms of population and geography than England or Japan or Germany, and we have more ideological and cultural diversity, which makes it harder for us to have consensus to agree on policy prescriptions,” he said.
Political backlash against the rise of a multicultural democracy has stoked the country’s divisions, academics agree. So has the tendency for people to sort themselves into urban and rural divides, as well as the way congressional districts are organized by partisan state legislatures - many of which are controlled by Republicans.
But that’s not to say the parties are ultimately in charge.
“The one big thing everybody tends to get wrong is most people look at the parties and they think the parties are very strong and polarized,” said Ian Shapiro, a professor of political science at Yale University. But the parties themselves have grown weaker, he argues, because they are controlled by those on the fringes.
The potential for primary challenges has long existed, but what is new is the steady rise of congressional districts that are reliably Republican or Democrat. Such districts choose their representatives during primary elections, with the general election little more than an afterthought.
“The activists on the fringes of the parties are the people who turn out in primaries, so those are the people deciding those districts,” said Shapiro, the author of “Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy from Itself.”
Other democracy advocates say the loss in faith in the government itself has created a vicious cycle, one in which some elected representatives appear determined to prove that the government doesn’t work by actively undermining it.
“We can and should have vigorous debates about spending priorities and national debt,” said Mark Medish, co-founder of Keep Our Republic, a nonpartisan civic education organization. “But if we are inclined to repeatedly call into question the functioning of the state, we are on the road to unraveling as a republic.”
As disconcerting as the events of the past few weeks have been, more worrying is what might come next. History has shown that government dysfunction can be a prelude to the erasure of democracy altogether, with authoritarianism rising in its place, said Harvard’s Ziblatt.
“What precedes a democratic breakdown is political stalemate and extreme dysfunction where there’s a sense that nothing can get done,” Ziblatt said. “When governments can’t respond in genuine crises, it has a delegitimizing effect, and it reinforces the sense among citizens that we have to resort to other means.”
Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.
