Finally woke up in a homemade hell Putin? 4 predictions about the course of the war in Ukraine

When you hear that something is a one-time event, it’s usually a symbolic exaggeration. But for what happened in the US Capitol on Tuesday, the term can be used quite literally. For the first time in 100 years, the phrase “No speaker has been chosen” was uttered. Kevin McCarthy, who had led the Republican caucus – until recently a minority, now a majority – in recent years, failed to get enough votes from his own party in three rounds of voting to succeed Nancy Pelosi as House leader. The last time such a thing happened was in 1923. At that time there were also 20 MPs who refused to vote for the vote that the majority of their group agreed with.

As a result, this now means: 434 elected MPs could not be sworn in, the session adjourned, there is domestic political stagnation without the legislative chamber of Congress. Because it can only get started once its members have chosen a spokesperson. And that, in theory, could cost hundreds of extra ballots.

McCarthy could have afforded four dissenters to get the necessary 218 votes. But of a total of 15 Republicans it was already known before the meeting that they did not want to vote for him or at least deliberately kept it open. In the end, there were 19 in the first two and 20 in the third ballot. McCarthy initially had several opponents, but on the second ballot there was only one: Jim Jordan, one of the leaders of the “House Freedom Caucus,” the far-right representative within the Republican faction in the House of Representatives close to Trump.

He allowed himself to be blackmailed more and more brutally

Jordan did not run for office himself and campaigned for McCarthy at the start of the second ballot. Perhaps that was just strategic modesty: People are in favor of Jordan precisely because he doesn’t want the post of spokesman, said Bob Good, one of the right-wing deviants.

McCarthy’s only flaw is that he only needs to claim leadership to get it. In recent weeks, he has allowed himself to be blackmailed by the right wing of the faction, willingly giving them what they demanded: pledges for posts on key committees, even a pledge to lower the bar on a no-confidence motion in the Speaker of the House . – he hung, as it were, a sword of Damocles over his own head. But even that wasn’t enough to secure the vote.

McCarthy was “corrupt,” one of his opponents, MP Matt Gaetz, said between votes. “Maybe the right person is someone who didn’t sell themselves to get the job.” He could hardly have admitted more clearly the game he and the others were playing with McCarthy: they took advantage of his lust for power and venality, only to brand him as power-hungry and corrupt and present themselves as those who challenged the “status quo” and the desire to end “dysfunctionality” in Congress. Dysfunctionality can be translated as follows: They don’t want to accept that the Democrats rule the White House and that the separation of powers still applies.

McCarthy, power to him, trotted it out, believing he would win in the end. But the playing field has long since fallen outside the traditional logic of bargaining, in which one may expect to get something for one’s concessions. There are people in this new Congress whose primary goal is not government, but anarchy.

What McCarthy’s opponents are after is evident from a tweet from Gaetz posted late Tuesday night (local time): “The House of Representatives failed to organize today,” he writes there, “the biggest loser: Selenskyj. The biggest winners: American taxpayers.” One of the most popular slogans of the far-right Republicans is that aid money for Ukraine should go to Ukraine’s own country. The next tranche of such funds has long been decided, but the facts obviously do not play a major role in this context. This makes it all the more clear that it is not so much about McCarthy as a person, but about the shutdown of democratic processes.

The scenes that are so humiliating to McCarthy now are much more than a power struggle. You dissect the state of the Republican Party. It’s not two substantive schools of thought fighting each other, it’s not about a conflict between supposedly conservatives and supposedly moderates. Rather, it is about the long-term consequences of what began in the run-up to the 2016 elections and continues to this day: a willingness not only to tolerate those who despise democracy and the far right, but also to empower them in order to maintain one’s own power or expand further. This strategy is now cannibalizing one of its most prominent proponents.

McCarthy chased Liz Cheney away

Republicans have cultivated the anti-establishment populism that McCarthy has now fallen victim to in recent years, with McCarthy himself at the forefront. He clung so stoically to Donald Trump that he called him “my Kevin,” and while he briefly publicly acknowledged Trump’s responsibility for the January 6 violence, made it a point to impeach him shortly after his term ended. to visit Florida. He gave an example to Liz Cheney, the Trump-critical Republican from Wyoming and daughter of the former US vice president, who was stripped of all her positions in the group under his leadership and literally chased away. To endear himself to the party, he threatened the Biden administration to refuse to raise the debt ceiling and thus default the state – one of the most popular fantasies on the right, for which the main task of a Republican-led led The House of Representatives thus seems to make Joe Biden’s remaining term in office hell.

Now on

McCarthy is now in a hell of his own making. He himself says he will not give in, no matter how many votes it takes. He had his furniture and office equipment cleared in the spokesman’s office days ago, and he signs letters as “designated spokesperson”. This suppression of reality is reminiscent of someone whose support was once worth a lot in this party. And just as the latter supported him at the time, Donald Trump had supported McCarthy’s application for the speaker’s position.

That the MPs who are actually close to him are refusing shows that Trump as a person is becoming increasingly irrelevant. But the spirit that entered Congress under him is more alive than ever. Not just in terms of the hijacked speaker choice, the progression of which is completely open. On other matters, the Republicans are shockingly unanimous: when the session of the new House of Representatives started at noon on Tuesday, they immediately removed the metal detectors at the entrance to the plenary hall, which had been placed there on the Capitol after the attack.

This article was first published on Zeit Online. Watson may have changed the headings and subheadings. Here’s the original.