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U.S. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) reacts to the cheers of his Republican colleagues.
What We’re Watching: Capitol Hill chaos, Putin’s biceps, Myanmar’s ‘vote’
The House speaker fiasco: Day 2
Another day, another letdown for Kevin McCarthy. For a second consecutive day, the Republican stalwart again failed to clinch enough votes from his own caucus to become House speaker, one of the most powerful jobs in US government. After six rounds of voting over two days – and a late-night team huddle on Wednesday in which McCarthy said he was willing to make significant concessions – 20 anti-establishment Republicans still refused to cast their ballot for McCarthy. Though they have some different demands, the broad consensus is that McCarthy is a creature of the swamp, slavish to special interests. What’s more, former President Donald Trump reportedly called on the group of detractors – a ragtag of his most ardent devotees – to “knock it off.” But the group shows no signs of backing down – for now – going so far as to say that Trump should have instead called on McCarthy to withdraw. Resolving the stalemate could still take days or weeks, and whoever prevails will emerge a weak leader with limited ability to control an unruly caucus. The last few days, however, have been a boon for President Joe Biden and the Democrats. Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of the QAnon variety, has distanced herself from some far-right members of the GOP by supporting McCarthy’s bid. She said on Wednesday that the current House speaker fiasco “makes the Republican Party look totally inadequate and not prepared to run the country.”
Putin’s latest flex
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin likes to flex his muscles. Sometimes the effect is comic, like when the Kremlin publishes a calendar with promotional photos of shirtless Putin on horseback or shirtless Putin bathing in icy waters. At other times, the effect is tragic, as when Russia fires missiles at Ukrainian cities to prove that, though it can’t conquer Ukraine, it can still punish its people. Other flexes are confusing. On Wednesday, Russia sent a frigate toward the Atlantic Ocean armed with hypersonic cruise missiles. His defense minister noted that “This ship, armed with ‘Zircons,’ is capable of delivering pinpoint and powerful strikes against the enemy at sea and on land.” It’s not clear what Russia is threatening (Armageddon?) or whether this is mainly a bid to save face after Ukraine used US-supplied weapons to kill dozens, maybe hundreds, of Russian soldiers in a single attack earlier this week. Or maybe this flex was planned well in advance. But a downside of Putin’s need to project strength is that it keeps young Russian men on high alert that their government may soon force them to pick up a rifle and head to Ukraine. A little-known organization called the “Soldiers’ Widows of Russia” has called on Putin to order a “large-scale mobilization” of new troops to Ukraine. If that’s another Putin flex, it’s one that has an impact at home.
What We're Ignoring: Myanmar's "election"
To mark the 75th anniversary of independence from British colonial rule on Wednesday, Myanmar's ruling junta pardoned over 7,000 prisoners — including some political detainees — and announced it will hold an election later this year. But temper your democratic expectations: What Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing calls a "genuine, discipline-flourishing multiparty democratic system" is code for “the army always wins.” In other words, the generals want a sham vote to normalize their stranglehold on power since Feb. 2021, when the military took over in a coup after losing big in the country's last democratic election. Ousted leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who is serving a 33-year jail sentence, is notably not among the released political prisoners. Meanwhile, her party, the National League for Democracy, has largely been dismantled, with many of its leaders behind bars, in hiding, or in exile. In the almost three years since the coup, Myanmar has become a de-facto pariah state with an undeclared civil war between the junta and a fragile coalition of pro-democracy rebels and armed ethnic groups. And with any dissent typically met with heavy-handed repression by trigger-happy soldiers, Myanmar's upcoming "election" will be anything but free and fair.House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
Rinse, repeat: Republicans fail to agree on the House speaker
Traditionally, the first day of a newly elected Congress is filled with pomp and circumstance. Children wearing little suits and frilly dresses accompany their parents to the House floor where a new class of lawmakers is sworn in.
But the first day of the 118th Congress was not very joyous for one man in particular: Kevin McCarthy. In an embarrassing series of events, the leader of the House GOP failed to secure a majority of votes – 218 – needed to become House speaker. After three rounds of voting, 20 Republican holdouts still refused to budge, backing candidates not named McCarthy for the role. What’s more, McCarthy actually shed a vote in subsequent ballots.
This infighting over the speakership is not only extremely embarrassing for the Republican Party, but it's also extremely rare. Indeed, it's the first time in 100 years that the House failed to elect a speaker on the first ballot. In 1923, it took nine rounds of voting to coalesce around a single candidate. McCarthy is now headed to round four.
The House speaker is a big gig. Whoever assumes this role is second in line to the presidency after the vice president and is responsible for overseeing all legislative and administrative proceedings in the lower chamber. In short, the speaker matters. They decide which bills come to the House floor for a vote, and assign caucus members to committees that have powerful subpoena powers. What’s more, because the lower chamber holds the power of the purse, the speaker of the House has an outsized role in deciding how and when to fund the federal government.
A problem of his own making. McCarthy, who rose through the ranks of California’s Republican Party, has played an active role in shaping the contemporary House Republican caucus. Not only has he helped recruit a class of hardline GOP candidates over the past decade, but he’s also positioned himself as a political contortionist who bucks party trends for his own political gain. Consider that in 2013, McCarthy, then majority whip, voted against a financial fiscal cliff bill that he had been trying to garner votes for in order to endear himself to hard-right conservatives.
Now what? The role of speaker is so central to the business of government that nothing can get done until this dumpster fire is sorted and someone clinches 218 votes. Given that McCarthy still doesn’t appear to have the numbers, that process could go on for days – or even weeks. But even if McCarthy manages to eke out a victory, he’ll emerge a diminished figure beholden to the ultra-conservative wing of his party that’ll threaten to pull the plug on his speakership if/when they don’t get their way. So far, McCarthy is not thriving in 2023.
Exclusive Maru/GZERO poll: Tired of fighting, slim majority of Americans back divided government
Many pundits in the US have long declared the age of political bipartisanship dead. And in the age of QAnon, “lock her up,” and “defund the police,” it’s easy to see how they might have reached such a conclusion.
Still, as divided government returns to Washington – with the GOP now in control of the House of Representatives – it appears that the constant mudslinging between Democrats and Republicans is not necessarily appealing to American voters.
An exclusive new poll conducted by Maru Public Opinion and GZERO Media found that a narrow majority of Americans – both Republicans and Democrats – think divided government is better for the country. Of the randomly selected 1,517 American adults polled (estimated margin of error of +/- 2.5%), 51% said they prefer split government, meaning that both parties control one chamber of Congress each, or that control of the legislative and executive branches is split between the GOP and Dems.
Indeed, this sentiment is even stronger among Republican voters, with 32% of them saying it is better for one party to control both chambers of Congress compared to 52% of Dem-leaning voters who said they prefer unified government.
The thing with divided government is that it means that an increased number of divergent views will seek to shape the law-making process. In short, less law-making gets done. To make progress and overcome obstructionist efforts, compromise is key.
Still, with the awareness that less legislation will get passed by a divided government, voters polled by Maru still think this is the better way. Consider that 69% of those polled said that it’s more important for the new Congress to pass less legislation with bipartisan support than for one party to get more done without buy-in from the other side.
While that conciliatory sentiment might seem incongruous with what we’ve seen in US politics in recent years, it reflects the main takeaways of the recent midterm elections, when US voters mostly repudiated intransigent candidates on both sides of the aisle. Consider that 83% of polled voters said they are more likely to back a candidate who supports bipartisanship, a call backed by 79% of GOP voters and 88% of Dems. Interestingly, just 17% of those polled said they would be less likely to back a lawmaker who supports bipartisanship.
At a time when US politics is framed as a zero-sum game – with a legislative win for President Joe Biden often cast as a loss for the GOP – how then do we reconcile recent political trends with the poll’s findings? (In the GOP, for instance, lawmakers who bucked the party by speaking out against former President Donald Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot on Capitol Hill were shunned.)
John Wright, Maru’s executive vice president, says that “the nature of US politics is most often the desire of opposing sides to want the other party to act in a bipartisan fashion to get things done to achieve their own ends.”
“Because of that built-in bias,” Wright explains, “the sentiment may be there for compromise, but it’s almost always a one-way street of expectation, so it rarely occurs.” Indeed, this view, whereby many lawmakers fear that compromise will lead to electoral backlash, helps explain why legislators on both sides of the aisle have doubled down on their positions on many divisive issues, like abortion, rather than seek a middle ground.
So with the 118th Congress having just been sworn in, what might we expect over the next two years? “Given the split between the House and the Senate for the next couple of years, especially with the run-up to the presidential election [in 2024], compromise may be almost impossible to find,” Wright says, suggesting that the recently passed $1.7 trillion spending bill is likely to be the last bit of compromise we see for some time.
US Dems and GOP can be thankful this Thanksgiving
What are Republicans and Democrats thankful for this holiday season?
Democrats are thankful for three Republicans named Mehmet Oz, Don Bolduc and Blake Masters, who lost three winnable Senate seats in Arizona, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania, allowing Democrats to keep their majority. Democrats keep the majority; it means they can continue to confirm judges and confirm any executive branch nominees that President Biden puts forward should there be any openings. These were clearly winnable seats for the Republicans in this cycle that should have strongly favored them, but we saw Trump aligned nominees like these three give up winnable seats.
Republicans are thankful that there are alternatives emerging to President Donald Trump in the Republican primary in 2024. President Trump has declared his intention to run. However, three Republican governors, Brian Kemp, Ron DeSantis, and Greg Abbott had very strong showings in their reelection cycles this year and that's going to embolden challengers to Trump in the primary, and this could be a very competitive primary, giving them some alternatives to Trump, given that there's a growing number of Republicans who think he can't win a general election. Now, of course, the challenge will be, can these guys win if Trump decides that he's not going to support them should he lose the primary? But that's a question for another day.
Now, Republicans and Democrats are thankful that they're not going to be spending their holiday seasons relitigating false claims of election fraud the way they did in 2020. President Trump in 2020 claimed that the election was rigged and stolen from him. He refused to concede, and that really dominated the news cycle from Thanksgiving all the way through the January six riots, which were a terrible day for most lawmakers that were present. That's not going to happen this cycle. No one's really questioning the results of these elections. There were some questions about some voting machines malfunctioning in Arizona, but for the most part, this is a pretty clean election, and everyone understands that the legitimate ballots that were cast led to a legitimate outcome, a good day for American democracy. It's something that we should all be thankful for.
DeSantis is more disciplined than Trump, says NPR journalist
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is a rising Republican star. And his resounding victory in the US midterms is all but confirmation of a likely run for the president in 2024.
But he'll go up against former President Donald Trump.
For NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith, they're not the same. DeSantis, she tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World, is younger and far more disciplined than Trump.
And Florida's governor is more focused on policy — which may improve his potential for success.
Watch the GZERO World episode: US democracy after US midterms: polarized voters & Trump's GOP
Back to divided government: Biden's silver lining from a Republican House
The GOP was gearing up for a red wave in the US midterms. But in the end, it was just a ripple, and while the Republicans narrowly won the House Democrats kept the Senate.
Why? Democrats turned out more voters worried about democracy and abortion, NPR's White House correspondent Tamara Keith tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
Divided government with such tight margins, she says, now means two things. First, nothing much is going to get done in Congress for two years.
Second, Republicans will have a hard time overcoming dysfunction in the House.
Watch the GZERO World episode: US democracy after US midterms: polarized voters & Trump's GOP
How Democrats used GOP wins against them
It's going to be a red wave! No, a tsunami!
Nope. In the end, Republicans hoping for a wipeout in the US midterms barely won the House and Democrats kept the Senate.
Why? Turns out voters cared a lot about protecting two things: democracy and abortion, Ian Bremmer explains on GZERO World.
One big exception to the GOP's bad night: Gov. Ron DeSantis’ trouncing victory in Florida.
Watch the GZERO World episode: US democracy after US midterms: polarized voters & Trump's GOP
US democracy after US midterms: polarized voters & Trump's GOP
What happened in the US midterm elections is becoming clear: the red wave-turned-ripple was only enough for Republicans to narrowly win the House, while the Democrats kept the Senate. But 'why' it happened is a harder question to answer.
On GZERO World, NPR White House correspondent Tamara Keith speaks to Ian Bremmer about all things midterms.
Her take on what saved the Dems? Abortion rights and protecting democracy turned out voters.
And what about the GOP? Keith has some thoughts on whether it's still a MAGA party or a Trump personality cult and, looking ahead to 2024, whether Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a viable alternative to the former president.
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- US midterms: What we know and what we don’t ›
- In divided America, anything goes in the name of “protecting democracy" - GZERO Media ›