JMM Is So Close To Figuring It Out

JMM sez:

I had a conversation this evening that allowed me to clarify some of my own thinking about these developments. After Scalise won the caucus Speakership vote you had a slow trickle of members saying ‘I’m still for Jim Jordan.’ Then later you had news reports asking, ‘Can Steve Scalise get to 217?’ 

There’s a category, conceptual breakdown here that is kind of hiding in plain view. What do these members mean they’re still for Jim Jordan? He lost. It’s over. Scalise is the Republican Speaker candidate. End of story.

Yes, but the category breakdown isn’t in the analysis or the caucus. It’s more fundamental than that. It’s in the definition.

Hopefully it’s clear that I’m not making a case for Steve Scalise. I’m certainly not making a case for Jim Jordan. But there’s an elemental breakdown here that transcends the individuals involved. Participating in a majority organizational vote means, if sometimes only implicitly, abiding by its results. The caucus vote wasn’t a straw poll or an advisory opinion. It’s binding. It’s over. And yet it was treated as basically a given, in the GOP caucus and in the press coverage, that Scalise, having won the vote, then had to build from the 113 he got in the caucus vote to 217. 

You’re probably saying: We know this Josh. They’re a mess. But we know this.

What “we” don’t seem to know is that the “category error” is in not in the sub-category of “caucus.”

But I think that’s only a measure of how much this has been normalized when it’s actually completely abnormal. The literal definition of a caucus in American political usage is a defined group that collectively decides on actions by majority vote and then acts in unison in a parliamentary context.

But what if it is a “parliamentary context” in name only?

From one perspective this is no more than a replay of what happened in January. A group of holdouts refused to vote for the caucus’s candidate. But there’s something a bit different. That was the rump of the ‘Freedom Caucus’, an at least somewhat ideologically coherent trouble-making group that, as I’ve explained in a few posts, has been playing this game going back more than a decade. But the holdouts for Scalise were more various – right, left, a heavy load of attention-seekers who didn’t bother to put forward any kind of reason that made any sense. It’s like the virus had escaped the lab. It wasn’t just Freedom Caucus weirdos anymore. It’s now treated as a given that caucus elections are purely advisory or essentially meaningless. 

Couldn’t happen to a nicer caucus of course. But we should note that there’s a clear thread connecting this to 2020 rigged electionism and, perhaps more tightly, the dramas of debt ceiling hostage taking and government shutdowns. The premise of all those dramas is that they’re what you do when you don’t have the votes to do what you want. If you’ve got the votes in the Congress and a President who will sign your bills, you just do it. Threatening to shut down the government is what you do when you don’t. Do what I say even though I don’t have the votes or I start breaking things. That’s the bottom line behind every one of these gambits. 

It’s all cut from the same cloth. 

The best and perhaps only path for Scalise was to force the matter. What do you mean: Do I have the votes? The election already happened. I won. It’s over. If you weren’t going to honor the results you shouldn’t have shown up to vote. If people don’t want to honor the commitment they made then lets put everyone on the record. That is kind of what McCarthy did. Of course, he also negotiated. Clearly Scalise didn’t think that was possible. As I said, couldn’t happen to a nicer caucus. The pathogen they developed to break the republic ended up infecting them too. It’s of a piece with election denialism and parliamentary terrorism. All fruit of the same poison tree.

The poison tree is actually a dead tree. Which, in turn, is a metaphor for the Republican Party, which is no longer a political party. JMM is right about what a caucus is; his category error is in thinking that because the meeting and vote of the GOP  was labeled a “caucus,” it functioned like one. It functioned in the context of a political party, but that context no longer exists. A political party is a group of generally like-minded people who accept a set of usually parliamentary rules and abides by them and the results they produce.

That agreement began to unravel when LBJ beat Barry Goldwater like a rented mule. The wealthy backers of Goldwater couldn’t accept the Great Society LBJ ushered in, or the electoral failure of their effort to stop it. Their descendants even today want to (and almost do) control the Supreme Court, and are behind the effort to destroy public schools nationwide. They despair of Trump, but persist in their desire to control government at every level.

What need have you of a party, when the goal is control? But as is now crystal clear (apparently it wasn’t before?), whose control is the “right” control?

But that’s moving ahead of the game. The point here is: the GOP is neither. Neither grand, nor old, nor a political party. Consider the example of a church, v. a corporation.

The latter exists to function as a business . It has employees, shareholders, recognized ownership. A church is owned by the members; but who are they? I’ve been in churches where the membership rolls included people who hadn’t been there in decades, and often didn’t live in the state anymore. Membership was largely who was acknowledged to be a “member,” but the records of membership barely existed, and hadn’t been kept up for years. The members kept the church open, but were they the owners? And if what? A building? I know a church that dwindled to a rump contingent, and then turned the place over, lock, stock, and name, to a congregation paying rent to worship there. I’ve often wondered how “officially” that was done, and who asserted authority to do it. Who owns the building now? Who has authority convey it? Because the building stands and the name outside is the same it’s ever been, but that’s the only connection that “family church” has to the families who built it, and claimed it, for over 150 years.

The Republican Party owns ballot access in all 50 states for Presidential candidates and state and local candidates. But who owns the Republican Party?  And what other function does it serve, other than that ballot access?

Ask RFK, Jr. after he tries to get his “independent candidacy” onto the ballot in all 50 states. Joe Biden won’t have that problem; and it’s not because he’s the POTUS.

The GOP organizes “debates” for candidates for its nomination; but those are a sad joke, a reflection of of the condition of a political party that isn’t. It holds a convention that didn’t even produce a platform for the past 8 years. Conventions and platforms both became empty gestures soon after primaries replaced the smoke-filled rooms of conventions. But we regard them as at least vestigial evidence of political party activity. In that we are wrong.

 

The GOP is not a political party because it no longer functions as a political party. After all, is a political party a name? Or is it a function of:

a defined group that collectively decides on actions by majority vote and then acts in unison in a parliamentary context[?]