There Is No Republican Party

Texas' Chip Roy emerges as key GOP agitator in House speaker fight https://t.co/VrjjlvE1st

— Raw Story (@RawStory) January 4, 2023

If Chip Roy can’t have his way, nobody can:

Before Tuesday's vote, McCarthy scrambled for weeks to secure the support of the remaining holdouts, meeting with Roy and other Freedom Caucus members to go over their complaints with how Congress is run. McCarthy offered rule changes over the weekend meant to address several of the conservative demands, including lowering the threshold of members needed to force a no-confidence vote of the speaker to just five members. Roy and the rest of the Freedom Caucus had been pushing to allow just one member to force a vote that could oust the speaker. 

“The debate is just some simple one: Should a member of the body be able to make a motion and then have the body execute on the motion?” Roy said last month. “That’s the question.”

Why shouldn’t he have complete authority with no responsibility?

Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry, R-Pennsylvania, said in a statement Tuesday morning that McCarthy rebuffed the group’s request for promised votes on a border security plan created by Texas Republican members, balancing the budget, a phase-out of funding for the IRS and term limits for Congress.

As I said: why shouldn’t the Freedom Caucus have complete authority? Isn’t governing about absolute power? And doesn’t absolute power corrupt absolutely?

'The GOP is irretrievably broken': Critics react as House adjourns after McCarthy fails to win Speakership https://t.co/F4KKxzTCrE

— Raw Story (@RawStory) January 4, 2023

QED.

McCarthy has etched his career around keeping Republicans united -- by being a friend to his colleagues who would lead by finding the sweet spots of consensus. But it may be that his conference doesn't want leadership at all -- and that no one, not even Trump, is truly in control.

Doesn’t that mean there is no GOP? Just a handful of rabble wandering a post-apocalyptic hellscape fighting futilely for control of nothing in the midst of a wasteland?

That’s not how I see it, but it sure seems to be the picture Chip Roy and the House Freedom Caucus paint. Otherwise why won’t they govern rather than seek raw, unlimited power?

A political party always recognizes the limits of what it can accomplish.

Let me come in late and underline my point. A political party functions as a matter of relationships. The Freedom Caucus only wants their relationships to matter:

One reason Scalise and others don’t want to mix it up w/ McCarthy, I’m told, is that McC was chief recruiter for 2010 wave. He is leader now. Remains main recruiter. To go at McCarthy, it’s not about toppling him but untangling a decade+ of cultivated relationships with House Rs.

— Robert Costa (@costareports) November 9, 2022

Exhibit B:

Republican congressmen are writing to the Capitol Architect to accuse their current party Leader of staging an illegal occupation of the Speaker’s office.

This is ~Day One~ of the Republican House Majority. https://t.co/sviG4ISfcl

— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) January 4, 2023

Burn, baby, burn.