A majority is a terrible thing to waste, but House Republicans aren’t letting that stop them.
They currently have one vote to spare amid toxic divisions that make the place nearly ungovernable. About six months after Matt Gaetz filed his motion to vacate against House Speaker Kevin McCarthy for working with Democrats to pass a budget bill, Marjorie Taylor Greene filed a motion to vacate against Speaker Mike Johnson for working with Democrats to pass a budget bill.
For now, the Greene motion is just to make a threat, but it’s easy to imagine a move against Johnson, especially if he ever brings a Ukraine-aid bill to the floor.
The root of the problem is that Republicans underperformed in the 2022 midterms, in large part because they nominated MAGA candidates who didn’t accept the outcome of the 2020 election. The resulting slender GOP majority in the House served to empower a small faction of clownish MAGA acolytes, as Montana Republican Matt Rosendale — a card-carrying member of this faction — acknowledged when he said he had been praying for a small majority.
This created the predicate for McCarthy’s struggles winning the speakership, during which he agreed to a rule change to return to one member being able to offer a motion to vacate. That, in turn, allowed Matt Gaetz to torpedo McCarthy’s speakership with the help of a handful of Republicans, largely out of personal pique. This took out a master fundraiser and adept tactician and led to the rise of Mike Johnson, an inexperienced leader trying to manage in unforgiving circumstances.
The outsized influence of the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and their willingness to actively support primaries against their Republican colleagues, the vitriol from MAGA world directed at anyone who doesn’t toe the line, the weakness of the House leadership, and the fact that little is getting done have led to a spate of retirements and resignations, most recently of the promising Mike Gallagher and the rock-ribbed Ken Buck (who, it should be noted, voted to vacate McCarthy).
Basically, what we’re witnessing is a political version of Gresham’s law, with the bad politicians forcing out the good.
It would help if more Republicans acknowledged the limits of their power at a time when they (barely) control just one chamber of Congress, and if Speaker Johnson showed more decisiveness and willingness to push back against the most destructive members of his own caucus. But the likes of Greene and Gaetz aren’t going away, and the numbers are what they are.
Reversing Rosendale’s logic, the only answer is to grow the majority in November. The spectacle of House Republicans consuming themselves with unremitting internal warfare is, needless to say, not helpful to that cause.