Coalition Government

Mike Johnson suddenly got it.

The accidental Speaker of the House was, shall we say, reluctant to provide military aid for Ukraine. Then two things happened.  The first thing is that Johnson saw intelligence that showed that Ukraine would end likely end up as a republic in the Russian Federation if it didn't get U.S. aid and that Poland or Lithuania might be next.  The second thing is that one of Johnson's sns has been accepted at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, and the possibility of this son getting into a war in Eastern Europe suddenly got real.  He placed the billon the floor and it passed with the votes of anti-Trump Republicans and Democrats.  

Thus the Democrats and the non-MAGA Republican wing have formed a coalition government in the House of Representatives.

The U.S. constitutional system, of course, isn't meant to support coalition governments, at least not in the European sense. In European countries, multiple parties win seats in Parliament and there is usually no clear-cut majority, so likeminded parties have to form a coalition to pick a prime minister to present his or her credentials to the head of state.  Here, two parties win seats in the House and the Senate and partisan majorities run the shows.  The President - both the head of government and the head of state - is separately elected.   But it is possible for  two of a minimum of three parties to win enough seats in either House of Congress to deny the party that gets the most seats a majority.  That happened in the 34th Congress of 1855 and 1856, when the Democrats lost control of the House in the 1854 midterms and the Whig Party was ceding the role of opposition to the Democrats to the new Republican Party and the American, or Know-Nothing, Party.  The Republicans got the most House seats but not a majority, so the Republicans and the Know-Nothings, along with Whigs and other minor parties, formed a coalition to run the House.

Such deal-making is normal when ther eare three or more parties, but the fact that we're seeing something similar in the 118th Congress when there are only two parties and the Democratic minority is united says a lot about how fractured the Republican Party is.

And the problem is not Mike Johnson.

The New McCarthy Era

Kevin McCarthy was elected Speaker of the House overnight on the fifteenth ballot.  Whenever something happens over and over, my mother uses an expression, always saying it's happened fifteen times whether it' only five or as much as twenty.  As for how many times it took the House to vote before choosing a Speaker, my mother can now use that expression literally.

I may have said that Kevin McCarthy, by giving away so much power to the stupidly named House Freedom Caucus (and selling his soul to the devil - also known as Matt Gaetz) will only cut ribbons a Speaker, but he's already cut something else - his throat.  By giving so much power to the reactionaries to run roughshod over everyone else - especially Democrats - McCarthy has made it impossible to negotiate with anyone in good faith because he has no good faith left.  The default of the federal government later this year must now be seen as inevitable.

In the meantime, the House of Representatives will firs t consider a bill designed to keep President Biden from taking the initiative to hire additional IRS agents over a ten-year period.

"I know the night is late," McCarthy said before adjourning the House for the weekend, "but when we come back our very first bill will repeal the funding for 87,000 new IRS agents.  You see, we believe government should be to help you, not go after you."  In fact, the Internal Revenue Service has the ability  to hire 86,852 full-time employees over the next decade, only a few of which would be enforcement agents.

Also, when was the last time Republican governance helped anyone?

So, I assume that impeaching President Biden and his entire Cabinet (Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg's high crime must be urging people to give up their Chevrolet Tahoes for public transit and electric vehicles) will be second item on the GOP's agenda.

We survived the first McCarthy era in the 1950s.  I'm not so sure we'll survive the second. 

KEVIN!

Ooh, the opening of the U.S. House of Representatives in the new Congress today is going to be fun.

Kevin McCarthy is in line to become Speaker of the House, but he has a bare majority of Republicans and enough of them are so dead set against voting for McCarthy to be Speaker because of his past efforts at compromising and his Washington insider status that it could take more than one ballot to elect a Speaker.  The last time that happened was a hundred years ago - 1923 - in which Speaker Frederick Gillett (R-MA) had to go through multiple ballots to win a third term to the office.

McCarthy has made so many concessions to far-right Republicans that would weaken his own powers and give much more control over the agenda to the pro-Trump wing that he he would have almost no power at all.  But his concessions have satisfied no one among the Trumpist crowd.  Any more concessions from him, and as Speaker he'll end up doing nothing but cutting ribbons.

Democrats, who will be voting for Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker, won't have to do anything to worsen the predicament Republicans are in.  They'll simply sit back and watch the tenuous ties between the so-called moderates and the Trump Republicans unravel faster than the threads on a cheap sweater.

As I said, this is going to be fun.