One of the most striking elements of House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s bid for speaker is how quickly the events unfolded.
On Oct. 4, House Republicans launched a successful effort to oust then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Roughly 24 hours later, Scalise announced his candidacy to succeed him. One week after that, at roughly 3 p.m. ET, the Louisiana congressman won a secret ballot election and formally received his party’s nomination. His colleagues started referring to him as “Speaker-designate Scalise.”
About an hour later, the House adjourned because Scalise didn’t have the votes — from his own conference — to get the gavel.
A day later, around noon, GOP officials maintained high hopes that Thursday would be the day in which the drama ended; the House would finally have a speaker again; and the chamber could go back to work. Scalise, at least publicly, expressed optimism.
Six hours later, it became painfully obvious that House Republicans were at an impasse. Texas Rep. Troy Nehls told reporters that one of his colleagues privately conceded that the GOP conference would struggle to get behind “Lord Jesus himself,” adding, “That says that we’re dysfunctional. We’re disorganized and we’re broken.”
And two hours after that, as NBC News reported, Scalise withdrew from consideration.
Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., informed Republicans in a closed-door meeting Thursday night that he was dropping his bid to be House speaker, one day after he captured the GOP’s nomination for the top job. Moments later, Scalise, the No. 2 Republican in leadership, confirmed the news to reporters outside the room.
“I just shared with my colleagues that I’m withdrawing my name as candidate for the speaker designee,” he said, adding that it was “quite a journey.”
The arithmetic was unyielding: In the 221-member House Republican conference, Scalise could lose no more than four of his own members. The precise number of his GOP opponents is the subject of some debate, but there are two things everyone can agree on: The total was a lot more than four, and there was no reason to believe the total would shrink to a manageable number.
Stepping back, there’s no great mystery as to why McCarthy was stripped of his gavel. The California Republican had fierce intraparty opponents, and their case against him had merit.
The former speaker, among other things, made promises he didn’t keep, made contradictory commitments to different factions, picked fights he couldn’t win, failed to count well, pushed vulnerable members to cast difficult votes for no benefit, directed his conference to focus on foolish trivialities, and never learned the value of making plans, preferring instead to “wing it” in the hopes of surviving the day, becoming a chess player who only thought one move at a time.
If someone were to ask me to explain why the former speaker lost his job, it’d be fairly easy to review McCarthy’s many failures. He had a tough job, which he did poorly.
Explaining why Scalise failed to get the House GOP’s support, however, even after winning his party’s nomination, is vastly more challenging. His detractors’ explanations were all over the place, making it that much more difficult to imagine what he could’ve done to avoid failure. What we’re left with is the latest in a series of examples in which many Republicans resist the very idea of majority rule. The party held an election; the results were clear; one candidate prevailed; and much of the House GOP conference replied, “We don’t care.” Indeed, almost immediately after Scalise gave up on his bid for speaker, several backers of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan — the one who lost the intraparty election to Scalise — said the party should move forward with Jordan as its choice. It reflects a striking perspective in Republican politics. “We in the GOP minority weren’t satisfied with the wishes of the GOP majority,” these voices are effectively arguing, “and now that we’ve successfully forced out the majority’s choice, the minority’s choice should prevail.” Will Jordan, in fact, be the next Republican nominee? Will Speaker Pro Tem Patrick McHenry stick around? Will someone entirely new move toward center stage? Will some GOP members start reaching out to Democrats in the hopes of reaching some kind of bipartisan agreement? For now, no one seems to have any idea. The only obvious fact right now is that House Republicans appear to be a ridiculous and divided mess, unwilling and unable to govern. Or as Republican Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia put it, “It makes us look like a bunch of idiots.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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