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Dispatch The Backchannel #1: Collision
Originally Published: November 23, 2022 11:50 a.m.
Coming out of the 2022 midterms, conventional wisdom pointed to one lesson for the GOP: Voters didn’t like Big Lie MAGA Republicans. The Big Lie and MAGA have become all but indistinguishable. But to the extent they are distinguishable, if you came to the game on the back of a Trump endorsement, you probably didn’t fare well in 2022. The best example are all those Big Lie secretary of state candidates in swing states. Every last one of them lost. That and related defeats are what has given rivals in the GOP at least an opening to challenge Trump for leadership of the party. After years when he could make or break anyone in the GOP, in 2022 Trump looked like an electoral loser. Conventional wisdom is usually most noteworthy for what it misses. But the signal here was so strong as to be undeniable: Trump had a stranglehold on the GOP. But in a general election his embrace was toxic, except in solidly red states.
So Trump and MAGA are out. Only, of course, they’re not out. Not even close. And we see that most clearly in the House of Representatives where Republicans will hold sway in less than two months. Kevin McCarthy should be flexing his muscles and preparing to take control of the House. But he’s in the midst of something between an extended job interview and a Reality TV feats-of-strength contest. Yesterday McCarthy traveled to the border to demand that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas resign or face impeachment in the GOP House. The bill of particulars is essentially that he hasn’t pursued a Trump line on border security issues. This comes after McCarthy announced a growing list of House Democrats he’ll strip of all committee assignments and a string of other promises. Then there’s investigating Tony Fauci, Hunter Biden and what House GOP leaders now routinely call “The Biden Crime Family.” In other words, Kevin McCarthy, before even taking up the Speaker’s gavel, has been reduced to taking a kind of Fox News guest/MAGA influencer performance art tour with a series of shrill and over-the-top demands to coax a dozen or so members of the Freedom Caucus to allow him to become Speaker.
The Freedom Caucus, which has called the shots in the GOP House since 2011, has told Kevin McCarthy he’s got to dance and he’s dancing.
It is worth noting that, as far as I know, only one Cabinet member has ever been impeached. That was 144 years ago and that guy, Secretary of War William W. Belknap, was acquitted. Impeaching a Cabinet member is simply not something that happens. The debate currently in the GOP conference is whether to impeach Mayorkas, Garland and Biden or just Mayorkas and Garland.
Meanwhile Rep. Matt Gaetz is running an online campaign against McCarthy, demanding, among other things, that the January 6th Committee be rebooted as a pro-insurrection committee to “exonerate our Patriots,” i.e., the men who stormed the U.S. Capitol.
And those are McCarthy’s enemies. Wait ’til you hear about his friends. McCarthy’s two most important allies at the moment are incoming Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) and MAGA firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). They are at least as far right as those couple dozen members blocking McCarthy’s ascent to the speakership. But they’ve decided to advance their agenda by backing him rather than bucking him. In terms of what the GOP House majority will look like and act like, the upshot is the same: a full-throttle, Hunter-Biden-or-bust, all-investigations GOP majority with a steady helping of government shutdowns and debt limit defaults.
We can debate how good or bad that is for the country. But for present purposes, for all the talk about the GOP moving on from the toxicity of election denial and MAGA maximalism, DC Republicans are cued up to move in precisely the opposite direction: MAGA on steroids.
There’s still a bit of conventional wisdom that people like Mitch McConnell and his allies have their opportunity to wrest the party back from Trump and MAGA politics. But if you look at what is actually happening, it is all moving in just the opposite direction.
If you’d like to email me your thoughts or comments or questions you can always reach me at tpm at talkingspointsmemo dot com.
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