I generally agree with Jim’s political analysis of the speakership race. McCarthy would be “imperfect but fine,” as he says. (I’d prefer Steve Scalise, but he’s not running right now, so that doesn’t matter.) I also think he’s right to say, “This feels like a lot of horse-trading over rank and ego, with little consequences for what actually gets done in the House this cycle.”
But I also have no problem with the infighting. In fact, I think Congress doesn’t have enough infighting right now, and it should have more. Conservatives often complain about Congress being too leadership-driven, with members of the majority party often expected to instantly fall in line behind the speaker on legislation. If that’s the case, then members should care a lot about who the speaker is, and the election of the speaker should not just automatically go to whomever is next in line if an insufficient number of members think he or she deserves it.
More fundamentally, Congress should not be so leadership-driven, and members should get more used to acting on their own. In this particular case, I don’t think the complaints of McCarthy detractors carry much water, and they haven’t succeeded in offering a plausible alternative that House Republicans would support. But Congress is not a parliament, and members should be expected to act independently.
We’ve had too much of Congress pretending to be a parliament in recent years, with the executive handing down orders and his party expected to enact them into law, or the speaker acting like a prime minister and demanding total conformity to the party line. In this country, the executive is part of a different branch of government and is supposed to have an adversarial relationship with the legislature, and the speaker is simply an elected officer of the chamber. It’s not the end of the world if a legislative chamber takes a few days, or weeks or months if needed, to elect an officer.