On Monday, House Speaker of the Month Mike Johnson (R-LA) helped pass—with the help of 209 Democrats—a clean stopgap spending measure that will fund the federal government until February, committing exactly the same sin as deposed leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), an outcome that the embarrassing, three-week-long saga of a leaderless House was supposed to avert. It was a turnabout so swift and thorough that it induced whiplash among the chamber's triumphant radicals and indignant anger from McCarthy's allies who think Johnson is being held to a different standard.
Johnson and his fellow radicals are like the political equivalent of pre-parenthood adults who look on in horror at the compromises and concessions that parents make to their small kids to get through the day. To the Freedom Caucus, McCarthy caving again and again on budgets was like watching bone-tired parents defrost macaroni and cheese for dinner and still have to bribe their way through a brutalizing experience. "Please just eat two more bites of cheese-soaked, processed starch," the desperate parent begs, "and then you can have ice cream."
People without children have difficulty comprehending why the child's will cannot be bent. "If I ever have kids," they will say to each other in private, "they'll eat what we eat at dinner. I'm not sous cheffing for a toddler." I know this because I once thought the same thing. And then three years later you visit those same people at their homes (you might even say, my home) as they microwave dinosaur nuggets for an angry 2-year-old, having long ago forsaken any hope of successfully implementing all of the well-meaning parenting advice they earnestly read, hoping only to grit through the next two hours so that they can finally sit down in front of the television with grown-up food and briefly experience joy.
All of which is a way of saying: It's been highly entertaining watching Republican ideologues come to terms with reality, like someone who keeps ordering Muppet sandwiches at a restaurant and harrumphing when told it's not possible. Then they get a job as a chef at the same establishment and can't get any wholesalers to send Muppet meat to the kitchen because—and this is the critical part—Muppet meat doesn't exist.
The grand delusion of the House radicals is that the only thing standing between them and implementing policy via extended tantrums and extortion is the wrong leadership. They just needed to find the right leader with the correct mix of policy extremism and interpersonal obstinance and then et voila, the tiny Republican majority in the House could impose dramatic spending cuts on the Democratic-led Senate and President Biden. Anyone who disagreed with that assessment was a cuck, a squish, a RINO, a deep stater, a globalist, a member of the hated uniparty or any number of other derogatory terms that the far right has concocted to describe anyone who is remotely serious about governing the country. They have been completely incapable of accepting that the built-in structure of American constitutional democracy makes it impossible for one loud minority faction in one branch of government to dictate terms to the others.
Could it be that there is a realization dawning on large numbers of extremist Republicans who desperately want to hold the country hostage so that they can sneak unpopular policies through the backdoor that, in fact, it doesn't really matter who their speaker is? That they simply cannot impose their will on their adversaries with angry tweets and brinkmanship? That they do not have the power and there is no such thing as Muppet meat?
Because while they made a show of voting against the bill, there has been a notable absence of calls for a revolution against their own revolutionary. Having finally installed one of their own in the big chair after years of dreaming about what it might be like to have an archconservative running the House, they are reluctant to stage another rebellion so soon after the last one. An angry Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), the chair of the Freedom Caucus, said that "We want to see good, righteous policy, but we're not going to be part of the failure theater anymore" but stopped short of calling for Johnson's head.
"I've been at the job less than three weeks, right?" said Johnson. "I can't turn an aircraft carrier overnight." Leave aside for a minute the fact that you can turn an aircraft carrier in like three minutes by pressing a couple of buttons, the bigger question is whether Johnson still thinks he can turn the aircraft carrier at all when the ship's captain and first officer want to keep sailing straight ahead and he doesn't have the numbers for a mutiny.
We'll find out soon enough. Johnson has pledged not to support another temporary spending measure, and so when this one expires he will either have to make good on Freedom Caucus dogma about waving magic wands and getting your way, or he will be tossed aside to see if yet another hardliner who talks a good game from the back bench will change political reality or be changed by it. And perhaps the Freedom Caucusers will finally be forced to wonder if perhaps they themselves are the top-billed players in the House's "failure theater."
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
