The Rule Of Law Is Key To Capitalism − Eroding It Is Bad News For American Business

Capitalism works only when rules are enforced fairly and predictably. Japatino/Getty Images

BY ROBERT BIRD

PROFESSOR OF BUSINESS LAW &

EVERSOURCE ENERGY CHAIR IN

BUSINESS ETHICS, UNIVERSITY 

OF CONNECTICUT

Something dangerous is happening to the U.S. economy, and it’s not inflation or trade wars. Chaotic deregulation and the selective enforcement of laws have upended markets and investor confidence. At one point, the threat of tariffs and resulting chaos evaporated US$4 trillion in value in the U.S. stock market. This approach isn’t helping the economy, and there are troubling signs it will hurt both the U.S. and the global economy in the short and long term.

The rule of law – the idea that legal rules apply to everyone equally, regardless of wealth or political connections − is essential for a thriving economy. Yet globally the respect for the rule of law is slipping, and the U.S. is slipping with it. According to annual rankings from the World Justice Project, the rule of law has declined in more than half of all countries for seven years in a row. The rule of law in the U.S., the most economically powerful nation in the world, is now weaker than the rule of law in Uruguay, Singapore, Latvia and over 20 other countries.

When regulation is unnecessarily burdensome for business, government should lighten the load. However, arbitrary and frenzied deregulation does not free corporations to earn higher profits. As a business school professor with an MBA who has taught business law for over 25 years, and the author of a recently published book about the importance of legal knowledge to business, I can affirm that the opposite is true. Chaotic deregulation doesn’t drive growth. It only fuels risk.

Chaos undermines investment, talent and trust

Legal uncertainty has become a serious drag on American competitiveness.

A study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that public policy risks — such as unexpected changes in taxes, regulation and enforcement — ranked among the top challenges businesses face, alongside more familiar business threats such as competition or economic volatility. Companies that can’t predict how the law might change are forced to plan for the worst. That means holding back on long-term investment, slowing innovation and raising prices to cover new risks.

When the government enforces rules arbitrarily, it also undermines property rights.

For example, if a country enters into a major trade agreement and then goes ahead and violates it, that threatens the property rights of the companies that relied on the agreement to conduct business. If the government can seize assets without due process, those assets lose their stability and value. And if that treatment depends on whether a company is in the government’s political favor, it’s not just bad economics − it’s a red flag for investors.

When government doesn’t enforce rules fairly, it also threatens people’s freedom to enter into contracts.

Consider presidential orders that threaten the clients of law firms that have challenged the administration with cancellation of their government contracts. The threat alone jeopardizes the value of those agreements.

If businesses can’t trust public contracts to be respected, they’ll be less likely to work with the government in the first place. This deprives the government, and ultimately the American people, of receiving the best value for their tax dollars in critical areas such as transportation, technology and national defense.

Regulatory chaos also allows corruption to spread.

For example, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits businesses from bribing foreign government officials, has leveled the playing field for firms and enabled the best American companies to succeed on their merits. Before the law was enacted in 1977, some American companies felt pressured to pay bribes to compete. “Pausing” enforcement of the law, as the current presidential administration has done, increases the cost of doing business and encourages a wild west economy where chaos thrives.

When corruption grows, stable and democratic governments weaken, opportunities for terrorism increase and corruption-fueled authoritarian regimes, which oppose the interests of the U.S., thrive. Halting the enforcement of an anti-bribery law, even for a limited time, is an issue of national security.

Legal uncertainty fuels brain drain

Chaotic enforcement of the law also corrodes labor markets.

American companies require a strong pool of talented professionals to fuel their financial success. When legal rights are enforced arbitrarily or unjustly, the very best talent that American companies need may leave the country.

The science brain drain is already happening. American scientists have submitted 32% more applications for jobs abroad compared with last year. Nonscientists are leaving too. Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs has witnessed a 50% increase in Americans taking steps to obtain an Irish passport. Employers in the U.K. saw a spike in job applications from the United States.

Business from other countries will gladly accept American talent as they compete against American companies. During the Third Reich, Nazi Germany lost its best and brightest to other countries, including America. Now the reverse is happening, as highly talented Americans leave to work for firms in other nations.

Threats of arbitrary legal actions also drive away democratic allies and their prosperous populations that purchase American-made goods and services. For example, arbitrarily threatening to punish or even annex a closely allied nation does not endear its citizens to that government or the businesses it represents. So it’s no surprise that Canadians are now boycotting American goods and services. This is devastating businesses in American border towns and hurts the economy nationwide.

Similarly, the Canadian government has responded to whipsawing U.S. tariff announcements with counter-tariffs, which will slice the profits of American exporters. Close American allies and trading partners such as Japan, the U.K. and the European Union are also signaling their own willingness to impose retaliatory tariffs, increasing the costs of operations to American business even more.

Modern capitalism depends on smart regulation to thrive. Smart regulation is not an obstacle to capitalism. Smart regulation is what makes American capitalism possible. Smart regulation is what makes American freedom possible.

Clear and consistently applied legal rules allow businesses to aggressively compete, carefully plan, and generate profits. An arbitrary rule of law deprives business of the true power of capitalism – the ability to promote economic growth, spur innovation and improve the overall living standards of a free society. Americans deserve no less, and it is up to government to make that happen for everyone.

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The Hidden Power Of Marathon Senate Speeches: What History Tells Us About Cory Booker’s 25-hour Oration

Sen. Cory Booker speaks on the Senate floor on April 1, 2025. Senate Television/Associated Press

BY CHARLIE HUNT

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL

SCIENCE, BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY

Democratic U.S. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey made history on April 1, 2025, when he stood on the Senate floor and spoke for 25 hours and five minutes, delivering the longest floor speech in the history of the U.S. Senate.

Booker’s speech detailed his concerns about President Donald Trump’s new executive orders, other policies and approach to government in his second term.

“I rise tonight because silence at this moment of national crisis would be a betrayal of some of the greatest heroes of our nation. Because at stake in this moment is nothing less than everything that we brag about, that we talk about, that makes us special,” Booker said.

Although Booker’s speech was not technically a filibuster, meaning a prolonged action at the Senate in order to delay or stop a vote on a legislative action, it was clearly a monumental physical achievement. Booker stood, wearing a black suit, for the entirety of his speech and did not pause to take bathroom or meal breaks.

What does the subject matter of Booker’s speech, as well as his style of giving it, say about its potential effectiveness? Could it succeed where filibusters have failed?

Many other long Senate speeches in history offer a variety of useful historical hints about the political significance of Booker’s record-breaking speech.

Booker’s speech was a wide-ranging protest

One unusual element of Booker’s oration is that it was not focused on just one narrow issue.

Most of the lengthiest filibusters from across Senate history are focused on bills that cover important but specific issues. In 1953, Sen. Wayne Morse of Oregon, for example, set a record for the longest filibuster when he spoke for 22 hours and 26 minutes. Morse protested a bill involving the transfer of land and oil rights between coastal states and the federal government. The bill passed, despite Morse’s filibuster.

Sen. Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina politician who broke Morse’s record just four years later, infamously – and unsuccessfully – protested the Civil Rights Act of 1957 with a 24-hour, 18-minute speech.

Booker’s speech came in the midst of a vote to confirm Matthew Whitaker as the U.S. ambassador to NATO. Whitaker was confirmed shortly after Booker’s speech concluded.

Booker and the procession of Senate colleagues who asked him questions referenced this and other appointments in their remarks. But Booker largely used the speech to build a much bigger case against the Trump administration, most notably that the administration had wrested from Congress much of its constitutionally mandated budgetary authority by extensively cutting federal staff, grants and spending without congressional approval.

“These are not normal times in America,” Booker said toward the beginning of his address, “and they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate.”

The rules and culture of the Senate have always been more lax when it comes to what congressional experts call “germaneness” – in other words, how relevant a Senator’s action is to whatever is being debated.

For example, the Senate often allows nongermane amendments, meaning those that have little or nothing to do with the bill being debated. Booker leveraged that Senate tradition to make a larger point about what he called an ongoing “crisis” in American democracy.

Booker stuck to the issues

Booker may have covered a wide variety of areas in his speech, ranging from proposed Republican cuts to Medicaid to mass firings of federal workers, but there’s no question that he stayed focused on his critique of the Trump administration – a difficult task to stick to for 25 straight hours.

Booker’s predecessors in the pursuit of Thurmond’s record have demonstrated this difficulty in keeping a marathon speech focused.

For example, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas diverted from his argument when he gave a 21-hour, 19-minute speech protesting President Obama’s signature piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act, in 2013.

Cruz, who still serves with Booker in the Senate, took the opportunity to tell his young daughters a bedtime story on the Senate floor, reading aloud from Dr. Seuss’ children’s book “Green Eggs and Ham.”

Louisiana Sen. Huey Long, meanwhile, shared recipes for southern fried oysters during his 1937 protest of the federal appointments process.

Booker, on the other hand, almost uniformly kept his focus on his grievances against the Trump administration and used only notes designed to reinforce his central argument that Trump is not leading in the best interest of the country.

According to an April 1 press release from Booker’s office, the senator drew from over 1,000 pages of prepared material assembled by his Senate aides, including stories from more than 200 Americans who had written to Booker protesting Trump’s actions.

In many instances, Booker also spoke extemporaneously about the administration’s actions. At other times, his fellow senators broke in for a lengthy question, but even these kept the conversation, and Booker’s attention, focused on taking Trump — and occasionally Elon Musk – to task.

In all instances, Booker used his speech to rally the public.

“My voice is inadequate. My efforts today are inadequate to stop what they are trying to do,” he said at one point. “But we the people are powerful, and we are strong.”
Lasting effects

Of course, with few tangible results to show for lengthy Senate speeches, people might be tempted to view these long orations as little more than trivia or political theater.

On some occasions, filibusters have made a legislative impact. Sen. Alfonse D'Amato of New York, for example, filibustered a budget bill in 1986 for nearly 23½ hours to protest an amendment that would have killed funding for a jet trainer plane manufactured in his state. His filibuster didn’t stop the bill entirely, but he did secure a concession that prolonged the project’s life.

For the most part, however, lengthy filibusters throughout history have been largely fruitless efforts legislatively. Even so, the symbolism of these speeches, including Booker’s, can have effects on politics and representation that last beyond the legislation the senator is protesting.

It’s difficult to know yet just how effective Booker’s efforts will be in motivating an anti-Trump coalition to stand up to the administration, either in Congress or among voters.

But politically speaking, Booker’s timing was fortuitous – on April 2, the same evening Booker wrapped up his address, liberals secured a crucial Wisconsin Supreme Court seat in a high-turnout election, when Judge Susan Crawford beat Judge Brad Schimel. Schimel is a Trump supporter and received nearly US$20 million in donations from organizations supported by Musk.

Democratic politicians also outperformed expectations in two special elections to the U.S. House in Florida, though they lost the races.

Taken together with Booker’s herculean effort, these events could serve as a catalyst for Trump’s opponents to strike back in the coming months.

The symbolic significance of Booker’s achievement has also not gone unnoticed. Booker, who is Black and reflected on ancestors who were both enslaved or enslavers in his speech, was himself mindful of the historical relevance.

“To be candid, Strom Thurmond’s record always just really irked me,” Booker said after his speech in an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

“The longest speech on our great Senate floor was someone who was trying to stop people like me from being in the Senate.”

If nothing else, Booker took that record from Thurmond and made it his own.

Senate Rejects Impeachment Articles Against Mayorkas, Ending Trial Against Cabinet Secretary

In this image from video from senate television, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., presiding over the Senate acting as a court of impeachment, announces the results of the vote to adjourn the court of impeachment trial of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on the Senate floor at the U.S. Capitol, Wednesday, April 17, 2024...(Senate Television via AP)

BY MARY CLARE JALONICK AND FARNOUSH AMIRI

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate dismissed all impeachment charges against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Wednesday, ending the House Republican push to remove the Cabinet secretary from office over his handling of the the U.S.-Mexico border and shutting down his trial before arguments even began.

Senators voted to dismiss both articles of impeachment and end the proceedings, with Democrats arguing that the articles were unconstitutional. The first article charged Mayorkas with “willful and systemic refusal to comply” with immigration law and second article charged him with a “breach of trust” for saying the border was secure. The votes were 51-48 and 51-49, both along party lines.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the House Republicans’ charges failed to meet “the high standard of high crimes and misdemeanors” and could set a dangerous precedent.

“For the sake of the Senate’s integrity and to protect impeachment for those rare cases we truly need it, senators should dismiss today’s charges,” said Schumer, D-N.Y., as he opened Wednesday’s session.

Senate Republicans had argued for a full impeachment trial after the House narrowly voted in February to impeach Mayorkas for his handling of the border, stating in the two articles that he “willfully and systematically” refused to enforce immigration laws.

An outright dismissal of House Republicans’ prosecution of Mayorkas, with no chance to argue the case, is an embarrassing defeat for House Republicans and embattled House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who made the impeachment a priority. And it is likely to resonate politically for both Republicans and Democrats in a presidential election year when border security has been a top issue.

Republicans argue that President Joe Biden has been weak on the border as arrests for illegal crossings skyrocketed to more than 2 million people during the last two years of his term, though they have fallen from a record high of 250,000 in December amid heightened enforcement in Mexico. Democrats say that instead of impeaching Mayorkas, Republicans should have accepted a bipartisan Senate compromise aimed at reducing the number of migrants who come into the U.S. illegally.

House impeachment managers delivered the charges to the Senate on Tuesday, standing in the well of the Senate and reading them aloud to a captive audience. But they did not get a chance to present the case before the Senate dismissed it.

The historic nature of the trial — the first time in nearly 150 years that a Cabinet secretary was impeached — contrasted with the almost routine feel of the proceedings after senators have sat through two previous impeachment trials against former President Donald Trump in 2020 and 2021. And with a quick dismissal almost inevitable, the Senate never even set up the chamber for the occasion, which usually includes tables on each side for the impeachment managers and defense lawyers.

Still, there was a bit of the traditional pomp. As the trial began, senators approached the front of the Senate in groups of four to sign an oath book that is stored in the National Archives.

Schumer called for the votes to dismiss the two charges after Republicans rejected a proposed agreement for Senate debate time and several votes on GOP objections. Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt stood in the chamber and said Republicans wouldn’t accept Schumer’s offer because Democrats were “bulldozing 200 years of precedent” on impeachments by trying to dismiss the trial.

Angry Republicans called for several votes to delay the inevitable final outcome, but none of them passed as Democrats and three Independents held together.

Frustrated, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said “history will not judge this moment well.”

“This process must not be abused,” McConnell said. “It must not be short-circuited.”

At the same time, Republicans similarly moved to dismiss former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial in 2021, weeks after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. All but five GOP senators — including McConnell — voted to end the trial, arguing it was unconstitutional because Trump had already left office.

After Democrats dismissed the charges, Johnson and members of his House GOP leadership team said in a joint statement that “by voting unanimously to bypass their constitutional responsibility, every single Senate Democrat has issued their full endorsement of the Biden Administration’s dangerous open border policies.”

Even if the Senate had held a trial, Republicans would not have been able to win the support of the two-thirds of the Senate that is needed to convict and remove Mayorkas from office — Democrats control the Senate, 51-49, and they remained united against the impeachment effort. Not one House Democrat supported it, either.

Even some Republicans questioned the impeachment effort from the start. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney had said for weeks that he was considering voting with Democrats to dismiss the charges but ultimately voted with his own party. After the votes, he said he does not believe the charges rise to high crimes but he did not want to dismiss them because “it was important to engage in some level of debate.”

Mayorkas, who was in New York on Wednesday to launch a campaign for children’s online safety, reiterated that he’s focused on the work of his department. “The Senate is going to do what the Senate considers to be appropriate as that proceeds,” he said. “I am here in New York City on Wednesday morning fighting online sexual exploitation and abuse. I’m focused on our mission.”

Department spokeswoman Mia Ehrenberg said after the votes that the Senate’s decision to end the trial “proves definitively that there was no evidence or Constitutional grounds to justify impeachment.”

Johnson delayed sending the articles to the Senate for weeks while both chambers finished work on government funding legislation and took a two-week recess. Johnson had said he would send them to the Senate last week, but he punted again after Senate Republicans said they wanted more time to prepare.

At a hearing with Mayorkas on Tuesday about President Joe Biden’s budget request for the department, some of the House impeachment managers previewed the arguments they would have made.

Tennessee Rep. Mark Green, the chairman of the House Homeland Security panel, told the secretary he has a duty under the law to control and guard U.S. borders, and “during your three years as secretary, you have failed to fulfill this oath. You have refused to comply with the laws passed by Congress, and you have breached the public trust.”

Mayorkas defended the department’s efforts but said the nation’s immigration system is “fundamentally broken, and only Congress can fix it.”

The impeachment trial was the third in five years. Democrats impeached Trump twice, once over his dealings with Ukraine and the second time in the days after the Capitol attack. Trump was acquitted by the Senate both times.

Schumer said the charges against Mayorkas did not compare to those against Trump and were engineered to help the former president as he runs again this year. He said the Republican charges were policy disputes, not high crimes, and it was important to set a precedent.

“Secretary Mayorkas has not been accused of treason or accepting bribes or unlawfully attacking our elections or anything of the sort,” Schumer said. “He did not blackmail a foreign power to dig dirt on a political opponent. Nor did he incite a violent mob to wage an insurrection against the peaceful transfer of power.”

He called the Republican case “an illegitimate and profane abuse of the U.S. Constitution.”

Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat, acknowledged that dismissing the trial was “a different Senate process,” but said the “risk of normalizing what the House did is bigger than the risk of establishing a new precedent in the Senate.”

Associated Press writer Elliot Spagat in San Diego, California contributed to this report.

Senate Border Security Talks Grind On As Trump Invokes Nazi-Era ‘Blood’ Rhetoric Against Immigrants

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, center, arriv es for closed-door negotiations on a border security deal at the Capitol, Sunday, Dec. 17, 2023 in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

BY LISA MASCARO AND STEPHEN GROVES

WASHINGTON (AP) — Time slipping, White House and Senate negotiators struggled Sunday to reach a U.S. border security deal that would unlock President Joe Biden’s request for billions of dollars worth of military aid for Ukraine and other national security needs before senators leave town for the holiday recess.

The Biden administration, which is becoming more deeply involved in the talks, is facing pressure from all sides over any deal. Negotiators insist they are making progress, but a hoped-for framework did not emerge. Republican leaders signaled that without bill text, an upcoming procedural would likely fail.

The talks come as Donald Trump, the Republican presidential front-runner in 2024, delivered alarming anti-immigrant remarks about “blood” purity over the weekend, echoing Nazi slogans of World War II at a political rally.

“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said about the record numbers of immigrants coming to the U.S. without immediate legal status.

Speaking in the early-voting state of New Hampshire, Trump, drew on words similar to Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kempf” as the former U.S. president berated Biden’s team over the flow of migrants. “All over the world they’re pouring into our country,” Trump said.

Throughout the weekend, senators and top Biden officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, have been working intently behind closed doors at the Capitol to strike a border deal, which Republicans in Congress are demanding in exchange for any help for Ukraine, Israel and other national security needs. Mayorkas arrived for more talks late Sunday afternoon.

“Everyday we get closer, not farther away,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., as talks wrapped up in the evening.

Their holiday recess postponed, Murphy and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona independent, acknowledged the difficulty of drafting, and securing support, for deeply complicated legislation on an issue that has vexed Congress for years. Ahead of more talks Monday, it is becoming apparent any action is unlikely before year’s end.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said senators don’t want to be “jammed” by a last-minute compromise reached by negotiators.

“We’re not anywhere close to a deal,” Graham, whose staff has joined the talks, said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Graham predicted the deliberations will go into next year. He was among 15 Republican senators who wrote to GOP leadership urging them to wait until the House returns Jan. 8 to discuss the issue.

Top GOP negotiator Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell also signaled in their own letter Sunday that talks still had a ways to go. Lankford said later that the January timeline was “realistic.”

The Biden administration faces an increasingly difficult political situation as global migration is on a historic rise, and many migrants are fleeing persecution or leaving war-torn countries for the United States, with smugglers capitalizing on the situation.

The president is being berated daily by Republicans, led by Trump, as border crossings have risen to levels that make even some in Biden’s own Democratic Party concerned.

But the Biden administration, in considering revival of Trump-like policies, is drawing outrage from Democrats and immigrant advocates who say the ideas would gut the U.S. asylum system and spark fears of deportations from immigrants already living in the U.S.

The White House’s failure to fully engage Latino lawmakers in the talks until recently, or ensure a seat at the negotiating table, has led to a near revolt from leaders of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

“It’s unacceptable,” said Rep. Nanette Barragan, D-Calif., chair of the Hispanic Caucus, on social media. “We represent border districts & immigrant communities that will be severely impacted by extreme changes to border policy.”

Progressives in Congress are also warning the Biden administration off any severe policies that would bar immigrants a legal path to enter the country. “No backroom deal on the border without the involvement of the House, the House Hispanic Caucus, Latino senators is going to pass,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., on Fox News.

White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, along with Mayorkas, heard from leading Latino lawmakers during a conference call with the Hispanic Caucus on Saturday afternoon.

The senators and the White House appear to be focused on ways to limit the numbers of migrants who are eligible for asylum at the border, primarily by toughening the requirements to qualify for their cases to go forward.

The talks have also focused removing some migrants who have already been living in the U.S. without full legal status, and on ways to temporarily close the U.S.-Mexico border to some crossings if they hit a certain metric, or threshold. Arrests of migrants have topped 10,000 on some days.

There has also been discussion about limiting existing programs that have allowed groups of arrivals from certain countries to temporarily enter the U.S. while they await proceedings about their claims. Decades ago, those programs welcomed Vietnamese arrivals and others, and have since been opened to Ukrainians, Afghans and a group that includes Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans and Haitians.

Meanwhile, Biden’s massive $110 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and other security needs is hanging in the balance.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a dramatic, if disappointing, visit to Washington last week to plead with Congress and the White House for access to U.S. weaponry as his country fights against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

Many, but not all, Republicans have soured on helping Ukraine fight Russia, taking their cues from Trump. The former president praised Putin, quoting the Russian leader during Saturday’s rally while slamming the multiple investigations against him as politically motivated — including the federal indictment against Trump for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election that resulted in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters.

Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States said Sunday she believes in “Christmas miracles” and won’t give up hope.

Of Biden’s package, some $61 billion would go toward Ukraine, about half of the money for the U.S. Defense Department to buy and replenish tanks, artillery and other weaponry sent to the war effort.

“All the eyes are on Congress now,” the envoy, Oksana Markarova, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

“We can just only pray and hope that there will be resolve there, and that the deal that they will be able to reach will allow the fast decisions also on the support to Ukraine,” she said.

The House already left for the holiday recess, but Republican Speaker Mike Johnson is being kept aware of the negotiations in the Senate.

Before He Was House Speaker, Mike Johnson Represented A Creationist Museum In Court. Here’s What That Episode Reveals About His Politics

Mike Johnson (Wikipedia)

BY WILLIAM TROLLINGER

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY

UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has been the subject of considerable media attention following his elevation to the post on Oct. 25, 2023. Since his appointment, news reports have highlighted the fact that he was one of the House leaders against certifying the 2020 election of Joe Biden to the presidency, and that he is known to be stridently anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+.

Comparing himself to Moses, in a speech at a gala on Dec. 5, 2023, Johnson suggested that God cleared the way for him to be speaker of the House.

In the words of Public Religion Research Institute President Robert Jones, Johnson is “a near-textbook example of white Christian nationalism – the belief that God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians.”

As historian John Fea has noted, Johnson is “a culture warrior with deep connections to the Christian Right.”

While it might not seem obvious, one of those connections includes his legal work on behalf of Ark Encounter, the massive tourist site in Kentucky run by Answers in Genesis, or AiG, and its CEO, Ken Ham. Ark Encounter and its companion site, the Creation Museum, propagate Young Earth Creationism, or YEC, which is the notion that the Earth is but 6,000 years old and that the geological formations seen today were formed by a global flood that took place around 4,000 years ago.

The state of Kentucky offers tax incentives for large tourist sites. In 2014, two years before Ark Encounter opened, the state determined that the tourist site was ineligible for these tax rebates. A primary reason for rejection was that all Ark Encounter employees are required to affirm a lengthy faith statement, which, according to Tourism Secretary Bob Stewart, “violates the separation of church and state provisions of the Constitution.”

As an attorney for Freedom Guard, a conservative religious legal advocacy law group, Johnson sued on behalf of Ark Encounter, arguing that in denying the tax rebates, the state was discriminating on the basis of religion. Johnson and the Ark prevailed, and Ark Encounter received the state’s tax incentives.

As a scholar of American evangelicalism, I argue that Johnson’s association with Ark Encounter makes much sense, given the very strong connection between Young Earth Creationism and Christian Right politics. And this connection is old.

Answers in Genesis and the Christian Right

In his 2021 book, “Red Dynamite,” historian Carl Weinberg established that for the past century, Young Earth creationists have made the case that evolutionary science makes people behave in “an immoral, ‘beastly’ or ‘animalistic’ way,” especially when it comes to sex and violence.

More than this, Weinberg argues that, for Young Earth creationists, evolution has been understood as the “backbone” of a communist philosophy, a “socialist, Marxist philosophy” that promotes a “spirit of rebellion” in America today.

As rhetorical scholar Susan L. Trollinger and I document in our 2016 book, “Righting America at the Creation Museum,” AiG continues this Christian Right tradition through its extensive online presence, its museum and now Ark Encounter.

According to Ham and AiG, “public schools are churches of secular humanism and … most of the teachers are … imposing an anti-God worldview on generations of students.” Sexual immorality, LGBTQ+ activism and the rejection of patriarchy are, according to AiG, signs of the resultant cultural corruption. Ham claims that a once-Christian America – with Bible-believing founders who had no intention of separating church and state – has, since the 1960s, been dragged downward. In his 2012 book, “The Lie,” Ham asserts that this will eventually “result in the outlawing of Christianity.”

In the past few years, AiG has doubled down on its culture war commitments. For example, in March 2021 the AiG Statement of Faith – signed by all employees and volunteers – was expanded from 29 provisions to 46 provisions. This includes article 29, which requires signers to affirm that “‘social justice’ … as defined in modern terminology” is “anti-biblical and destructive to human flourishing.” Then there is article 32, which says that “gender and biological sex are equivalent and cannot be separated.”

Rejecting the dangers of global warming and the notion that governments should intervene to reverse this trend, AiG’s Ham has asserted that “zealous climate activism is a false religion with false prophets.” According to him, climate activists are misled because they begin with human reason and not the Bible, and because they hold to evolution and an ancient Earth.

In a similar vein, an AiG spokesperson blasted mainstream scientists and others who focused on the dangers of COVID-19, arguing that they were simply generating hysteria “about a virus that doesn’t kill very many people at all.” AiG’s CEO lamented on his social media post that “the COVID-19 situation has been weaponized in many places to use against Christians.”

Mike Johnson and AiG beliefs

Johnson has effusively praised Ark Encounter as “a strategic and really creative … way to bring people to this recognition of the truth that what we read in the Bible are actual historical events.”

Johnson also shares with AiG’s Ham that government should not intervene when it comes to global warming, particularly given that, like Ham, he does not believe “that the climate is changing because we drive SUVs.”

He also shares with the folks at AiG the conviction that belief in evolution results in immoral behavior. For example, Johnson has blamed school shootings on the fact that “we have taught a whole generation … of Americans that there is no right and wrong. It’s all about survival of the fittest, and you evolve from primordial slime,” and so “why is that life of any sacred value?”

In this, Johnson is echoing AiG authors and speakers. For example, in response to the 2007 shooting in a high school in Jokela, Finland, which left nine dead, including the shooter, Bodie Hodge, an AiG researcher and author, asserted: “So long as evolutionism is forced onto children (no God, people are animals, no right and wrong, etc.) and so long as they believe it and reject accountability to their Creator, then we can expect more of these types of gross and inappropriate actions.”

In short, Johnson’s political commitments fit neatly into the politics of AiG and the Young Earth Creationism ecosystem. This matters politically, particularly given that a significant subset of American evangelicals adheres to Young Earth Creationism.

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Trump’s Violent Rhetoric Echoes The Fascist Commitment To A Destructive And Bloody Rebirth Of Society

BY MARK R, REIFF

RESEARCH AFFILIATE IN LEGAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS

Former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric has regularly bordered on the incitement of violence. Lately, however, it has become even more violent. Yet both the press and the public have largely just shrugged their shoulders.

As a political philosopher who studies extremism, I believe people should be more worried about this.

Mark Milley, the outgoing chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, is guilty of “treason,” Trump said in September 2023, just for reassuring the Chinese that the U.S. had no plans to attack in the waning days of the Trump administration. And for this, Trump says, Milley deserves death.

And back in April, Trump said that his indictment by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg would result in “death and destruction.” Then, in early October, Trump urged people to “go after” Letitia James, the New York attorney general who filed suit against him for business fraud.

Trump’s prior rhetoric is also now on record as having inspired many of those convicted to engage in insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But it is not just government officials whom Trump suggests be targeted for extrajudicial killings. Mere shoplifters should be killed too. “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving,” Trump said to cheers at the California Republican Party convention in September.
More than crazy bluster

This rhetoric may seem like crazy bluster, which is no doubt why many people appear prepared to ignore it. But put in its historical context, what Trump is doing is echoing views that are part of a long tradition of illiberal and outright fascist thought. For fascists have always seen the use of violence as a virtue, not a vice.

First, this is the natural result of the way that fascist communities define themselves. According to Carl Schmitt, a prominent Nazi and for a time the official legal theorist of the party under Adolf Hitler, one builds and maintains a community by identifying and vilifying its enemies. And in this kind of highly polarized environment, the threat of violence always hangs in the air.

Second, among fascists, machismo is much admired. Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, whose own outrageous rhetoric has also encouraged violent behavior by his supporters, simply “beamed” when Russian President Vladimir Putin praised him for his masculinity.

Trump often acts as a sycophant for Putin too, and machismo also is a big part of Trump’s own public persona.

Third, fascists are obsessed with purity. They long for a world where they can live among their own racial, ethnic, religious and ideological kind on land they view as exclusively theirs.

But in the real world, people are too intermixed for this to occur naturally. True purity of community is an aspiration that can be made real only through violence and subjugation. Hence the Holocaust,genocide and ethnic cleansing, and other more limited attacks on minority and immigrant populations.
Violence as noble and intoxicating

Fascists, then, see violence as noble and intoxicating. For example, Julius Evola, a far-right intellectual active in Italy from 1920 to 1970 and the author, among other things, of “Fascism Viewed from the Right” and “A Handbook for Right-Wing Youth,” writes that violence “offers man the opportunity to awaken the hero that sleeps within him.”

Today, Evola is a favorite of the alt-right, and he suggests that a hero’s death is preferable to a life built on liberal compromise. “The moment the individual succeeds in living as a hero,” Evola writes, “even if it is the final moment of his earthly life, weighs infinitely more on the scale of values than a protracted existence consuming monotonously among the trivialities of cities.”

The ultraconservative Catholic authoritarian and opponent of the French Revolution Joseph de Maistre, who is recognized as one of the intellectual forefathers of fascism, goes even further.

“The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death,” Maistre writes. Indeed, without an executioner, the man who kills other men, Maistre claims society could not exist. For violence is necessary to satisfy “men’s natural desire to be destructive,” he writes; it leaves them feeling “exalted and fulfilled.”
Social disruption and destruction

These comments make clear that fascists see violence as something to be used for more than just personal retribution and intimidation. It is to be used to create wider social disruption and destruction. Not only are individuals to be subject to attack, but institutions and norms as well.

Consider “The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy,” a work by two amateur historians popular on the far right.

The book is actually a restatement of Evola’s theory of historical regression, set forth in his “Revolt against the Modern World.”

The idea is that history moves in cycles, the first one being the best and each one thereafter representing a further decline. The fourth cycle is the worst, and it ends only when all existing social institutions are destroyed. This, in turn, is an application of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea that “one can build only in a space which has been previously razed to the ground.”

Then history will reset and cycle once again.

Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon admires these ideas so much he made a movie about them.

Trump appears to embrace these ideas too. “When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell, and everything is a disaster, then you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be, when we were great,” he says.

Viewed in this context, not taking Trump’s violent rhetoric more seriously seems dangerous indeed.

3 Reasons The House GOP Is Not Any More Dysfunctional Than The Democrats − Even After The Prolonged Speaker Chaos

BY DAVID R JONES

For many observers, a key takeaway from the recent leadership struggle in the U.S. House is that Democrats skillfully manage their caucus while Republicans are uniquely dysfunctional.

This claim is based in large part on a comparison between Republicans’ perceived disloyalty in removing their speaker, Kevin McCarthy, during the current Congress and Democrats’ apparent loyalty toward their speaker, Nancy Pelosi, in previous Congresses.

At first glance, this seems to be a fair comparison. Both parties have dissident – or anti-establishment – factions that sometimes chafe at the compromises made by their leaders. They include “the Squad” for Democrats and the Freedom Caucus for Republicans.

And both parties have lately held narrow majorities when in power, which gives potential leverage to these factions.

So why do Republicans seem to be having a harder time with these similar circumstances than do Democrats? Is it the relative skill of their respective leaders? Are Republicans simply more dysfunctional?

I am a scholar of Congress, political parties and elections. And I would argue that, other than possible differences in leadership skill or caucus dysfunction, there are three important factors that can help explain the observed differences in outcomes for the two parties:

1. The motion-to-vacate rule

When she regained the speakership in 2019, Pelosi perceived that she might face the same sort of internal party threats to remove her as McCarthy eventually did four years later.

This is why she changed the House rules to increase the threshold of support that was required to bring a formal motion to vacate the speakership, which stood then at a single lawmaker. The revised rule required the support of a majority of either party’s caucus in order to force a vote. This rule helped Pelosi keep her speakership secure even in the face of internal party divisions similar to those on the other side of the aisle.

That rule would have saved McCarthy. However, he negotiated it away during his effort to become speaker, so that once again it took only one lawmaker to force a vote that could end up bringing down the speaker.

You could argue that reverting to the single-lawmaker rule is simply another example of inferior strategic thinking by GOP leadership. But I believe it is possible that no Republican candidate could have avoided making this concession. After all, McCarthy first tried offering only a partial change – agreeing to lower the threshold down to five – but still could not secure the votes he needed until finally agreeing to a threshold of one.

2. Which party is in the White House

During the previous Congress, the House majority – Democrats – was from the same party as the sitting president, Joe Biden. The members of the president’s party in the House knew that if the chamber got sidetracked with a speakership fight, their president’s agenda would also be sidetracked.

In turn, this could diminish the president’s public approval ratings.

Since Biden is the public face of the Democratic party, when his approval dips, this harms the relative electoral prospects of all candidates running for reelection under his party’s label. So, Democrats had an incentive to cooperate, for fear of losing their own seats and their party’s majority in Congress.

In contrast, during the current Congress, the Republican majority faces a president from the opposite party. This circumstance can create an incentive for the majority party to prevent the president from achieving legislative successes. Poor ratings for Biden could help Republicans running for reelection. In this context, a speakership fight that sidetracks legislation makes more sense from the party’s perspective: It could even help the party in the next election.

3. Ideology

Finally, dissidents in the Republican Party have greater leverage than their Democratic counterparts based on their ideas about policy and governing.

Democrats generally agree that a functioning government is needed to help solve societal problems. So, dissident factions in the Democratic Party are typically unwilling to shut down government operations indefinitely in order to extract concessions from their leadership.

In contrast, Republicans are more likely to believe, as President Reagan famously stated, that “government IS the problem.” This means that dissident factions in the Republican Party can much more credibly threaten to indefinitely halt government operations – doing so does not conflict as much with their policy goals. In turn, the fact that they have less incentive to drop their obstruction gives them more leverage over their party’s leadership.

It’s more complicated than you think

Would Republicans have moved to vacate the speakership if Donald Trump were in the White House and eager to pass his conservative legislative agenda? Would Pelosi have survived without changing the rules?

You can never know the answers to these questions for certain. But thinking about these hypothetical situations helps illustrate that political context matters. How members of a party will behave in a given situation is affected by many factors, including congressional rules, election pressures and policy preferences. Sometimes, these factors simply align in a way that makes it hard to be the speaker.

READ RIGINAL ESSAY HERE

Ouster of Speaker McCarthy Highlights House Republican Fractures In An Increasingly Polarized America

House of Representatives

BY CHARLES R. HUNT

The House of Representatives on Oct. 3, 2023, did something that had never been done before in the nation’s history: It ousted the speaker of the House. Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, lost his job in a vote of 216 to 210. To look deeper than the surface machinations, The Conversation U.S. spoke with political scientist Charles R. Hunt at Boise State University.

He offers a sense of what this historic development might mean for the government at the moment, as well as for American democracy over the longer term.

What does the ouster say about the House’s ability to function, such as to pass a new budget in the next 45 days?

It’s important to remember what the purpose of the speaker of the House is: to literally speak for the entire House, to guide legislation through. It’s an unruly chamber of 435 members.

So what you need, ideally, is someone who has the trust of the chamber – particularly of their own party, since the majority party at least traditionally has unilateral control over the business of the House. So both trust and party discipline are conducive to a smoothly functioning legislative process.

When Americans think of a functioning democracy, they might think of bills getting passed on time, of Congress getting things done. But voters of all party affiliations are frustrated by the gridlock here, particularly over the past decade or two.

The interesting thing about this situation with the speakership is that gridlock has traditionally been between the two parties. Right now, it’s within one party.

Do House members want to do what the public wants them to do – get things done?

Americans say they don’t want to be focusing on these fights. But there are members of Congress for whom these fights are really important to how they represent — like Florida Republican Matt Gaetz — who hail from very Republican districts and have staked their reputations on fighting establishment figures in their own party like Kevin McCarthy. Likewise, many Democrats back in 2019 or 2020, when they held the majority in the House, felt they had a responsibility to their mostly Democratic constituents to bring the fight to President Donald Trump.

For some in the GOP, there is also this ideology of smaller government, less spending, lowering the national debt – the more typical conservative Republican priorities. They are not new, but there is now this sense that being anti-establishment, and trying to wield power to its greatest possible extent, is a goal in itself.

Some voters have looked at how the House has operated over the past couple of decades and thought, “we don’t want any more of that.” So they are willing to put their trust in the hands of some of these people who want to, figuratively at least, burn the place down – even if there is no clear exit strategy for what happens next. The lack of a plan after McCarthy’s ouster seems to show that obstruction is kind of the point.

How can people understand these events in the context of America’s system of representative democracy?

Gaetz has been saying he doesn’t like the process, that he wants to go back to “regular order,” in which budget proposals are voted on separately, instead of in huge omnibus spending bills. He and others just see that the way the House is conducting its business is not working. In Congress, those concerns are mainly coming from the far left and far right. They relate to the increasing polarization in this country, and Congress mirrors that growing division.

Democrats are getting more progressive, and Republicans in particular are getting more conservative over time. This is in part because districts are becoming more and more safe for one party or the other. So the average district is less likely to produce a moderate member of Congress. That increases the influence of party primaries. The voters who participate in these elections tend to be pretty ideologically extreme Republicans and Democrats who don’t want to see their representatives working with the other side.

And the more polarized the country gets, the more you see this element of negative partisanship, where a representative’s voters are more driven by how much their candidate is willing to fight against the other side, rather than how much they’re getting done for their own side.

Why isn’t this kind of drama happening in the Senate?

The cultures of the two institutions are really different, even today. George Washington is said to have described the House as a cup of hot tea that was going to overflow with the passions of the “common people,” and the Senate would be the saucer that would catch that overflow.

This session, both institutions are living up to those reputations.

The first reason is that House districts are smaller. They can be drawn in very specific ways and gerrymandered and are more subject to geographic sorting, so you end up with really extreme districts, politically.

Whereas in the Senate, they represent whole states. They typically have to represent a lot more people than a House district, a much broader constituency. That can lead to adopting a more consensus-driven tone.

The rules of the Senate are also much more consensus-driven. Rules like the filibuster and Unanimous Consent Agreements can force more moderate senators to work together to reach a kind of consensus.

Plus, because it’s a smaller body, there is generally more collegiality. These senators know each other better, and so even between the parties you get people teaming up on legislative proposals a lot more often.

Finally, Senate leadership is less powerful. Mitch McConnell, when he was the majority leader, wielded a great amount of procedural power, and Chuck Schumer does now, but much less than the speaker does in the House. This creates a lot of the friction in the House between leadership and rank and file that you don’t typically see in the Senate.

What are the key differences that help explain how these different House members are behaving?

This is the big question Americans ask: Why on Earth does Congress do any of the things it does?

It may not seem like it, but members of Congress have incentives for doing what they do. There are the incentives of Congress as a whole. There are the incentives of the two parties, which is why they meet in their conferences and caucuses to strategize.

But individual members also face very different pressures in their different districts, even if they’re in the same party. Consider Gaetz, whose district Trump won by almost 40 points. He faces no serious challenge in a general election against a Democrat because it’s mostly Republicans in the district. The only race that really matters in this district is the primary.

By contrast, think of a moderate Republican from New York in a district that Joe Biden won by four or five points. This person understands that to get reelected, they need some critical mass of independents and maybe even some Democrats to support them.

Ultimately, the only constituency that any member of Congress must be responsive to is the one in their district. In political science, we call it dyadic representation. It’s a pairing, a dialogue, between a member and their constituents. And that is ultimately what they are thinking about, or, at least, they should be thinking about if they want to get reelected. This is how you get these divergent approaches to governing.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

House Speaker Chaos Stuns Lawmakers, Frays Relationships And Roils Washington

Night falls on the dome of the Capitol, hours after Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., was ousted as Speaker of the House of Representatives. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

BY STEPHEN GROVES

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawmakers who had been sitting in stunned silence gasped at the declaration: The office of speaker “is hereby declared vacant.”

For the first time ever, a House speaker had been voted out of the position, plunging Congress into a new degree of turmoil. “Now what?” someone in the chamber yelled out.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican who has survived decades of upheaval in Congress, had projected a sense of cool as he strolled out of his office just hours earlier, still speaker. But when he exited the House chamber, no longer with the gavel, he walked in silence.

He left a House roiling. Lawmakers fled the chamber after the vote, some speechless at what they had witnessed. An essential body of American democracy no longer has an elected leader, the latest moment of testing for an institution grappling with aftermath of the Capitol siege on Jan. 6th, 2021, a Republican Party in upheaval and the United States’ contested role in global leadership.

Where the House goes from here, no one can say.

Tempers are red hot in Washington and across-the-political-aisle relationships — endangered but crucial in times of crisis — have all but collapsed.

The House faces pressing questions of how to avert a government shutdown, whether to continue to fund Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion and whether to proceed with an impeachment inquiry — unprecedented in many respects — into President Joe Biden. Meanwhile, procedural weapons Congress once reserved for the most dire offenses — censure, expulsion, impeachment and now the motion to vacate the speaker’s chair — have become common.

Many Republicans were left in a state of total exasperation, having begged their colleagues not to follow through.

“If we vacate the chair, the government will shut down. Our credit rating will go down; interest rates will go up,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican known for working with Democrats, warned hours before the vote to oust McCarthy. “Ukraine will be victimized and lose that war to Russia. That is what is at stake here. Not to mention the institutional erosion that will occur.”

McCarthy, who had managed to hold his conference together for nine months by taking a defiant stance toward the rest of Washington, insisted on fighting to hold on to his speakership to the end. He told Republicans at a morning meeting that he wanted to get on with the motion to vacate vote and insisted he would not give Democrats any concessions to save his job.

Bring it on, was McCarthy’s message.

He seemed to have a chance of surviving: Most Republicans rallied around McCarthy as they met in the Capitol’s basement, giving him several rounds of applause.

But Democrats, at their own meeting in the Capitol’s sub-levels, played through what they see as the black marks of McCarthy’s record: how he had continued to support former President Donald Trump even after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol and how he had catered to his party’s right wing during his nine months as speaker.

In the end, they united around Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and decided to wash their hands of what they cast as a Republican problem.

“Kevin McCarthy brought this madness upon himself,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, citing how McCarthy had agreed to allow any one member to bring the motion to vacate as part of a deal with right-wing lawmakers to win the speaker’s gavel in January.

“There seems to be a major political party now addicted to insurrection, rebellion, overthrow and not to governance.”

As the House gathered for votes in the afternoon, Rep. Matt Gaetz, the bombastic Republican who initiated McCarthy’s ouster, sat in the chamber’s front row, ready to make his case. McCarthy stood just feet behind him, nodding and smiling to his fellow Republicans, but refusing to acknowledge Gaetz’s presence.

After it became clear from a first procedural vote that Democrats would not save him, McCarthy settled into his seat for the hourlong debate over his future. He glanced at his phone; he ran his hands over the wooden arms of his chair. But he declined to speak in his own defense, instead dispatching his closest allies to defend his record.

“Chaos is Speaker McCarthy,” Gaetz said on the floor, suggesting a series of reforms could make Washington work better. But insults and personal slights — bottled up for months and years among Republicans — soon exploded onto the House floor.

The normally raucous chamber — filled with hundreds of lawmakers — grew somber and hushed as the roll call vote began. One by one, for nearly 45 minutes, lawmakers rose and stated their vote. Republicans hung their heads as eight of their colleagues and every Democrat voted to remove McCarthy. He was out.

McCarthy smiled as the House clerks tallied the vote. A few moments later, he was no longer speaker and one of his closest House allies, Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, became caretaker of the speaker’s gavel.

“Shocking … just the finality of it,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who chairs the House Foreign Relations Committee. “We don’t have a speaker, we don’t have a leader and that’s the message that’s sending to our adversaries.”

Republicans and Democrats dispersed, reeling and grasping for their next moves. Republicans will try to coalesce around a new leader after McCarthy ruled out another bid to become speaker. They face a leadership vacuum and deep divisions, with many Republicans seething at Gaetz and those who joined with him.

McCarthy, for his part, took a chance to settle political scores. At a quickly assembled news conference after nightfall, he began by citing Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, but soon indulged himself with unflattering stories about his political rivals — both Republicans and Democrats — and suggested he would use his fundraising and political clout to target them.

He concluded the extended banter with reporters with a barbed farewell: “I’m sure I won’t miss you.”

Associated Press writers Mary Claire Jalonick, Farnoush Amiri, Lisa Mascaro and Kevin Freking contributed to this report.

McCarthy Becomes The First Speaker Ever To Be Ousted From The Job In A House Vote

Rep. Kevin McCarthy , R-Calif. leaves the House floor after being ousted as Speaker of the House in Capitol Hill, Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2023. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

BY LISA MASCARO AND FARNOUSH AMIRI

WASHINGTON (AP) — Speaker Kevin McCarthy was voted out of the job Tuesday in an extraordinary showdown — a first in U.S. history, forced by a contingent of hard-right conservatives and throwing the House and its Republican leadership into chaos.

It’s the end of the political line for McCarthy, who has said repeatedly that he never gives up, but found himself with almost no options remaining. Neither the right-flank Republicans who engineered his ouster nor the Democrats who piled on seem open to negotiating.

McCarthy told lawmakers in the evening he would not run again for speaker, putting the gavel up for grabs. Next steps are highly uncertain as there is no obvious successor to lead the House Republican majority. Action is halted in the House until next week, when Republicans try to elect a new speaker.

“I may have lost this vote today, but as I walk out of this chamber I feel fortunate to have served,” McCarthy said at a press conference at the Capitol. “I wouldn’t change a thing.”

McCarthy’s chief rival, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, orchestrated the rare vote on the obscure “motion to vacate,” and pushed ahead swiftly into a dramatic afternoon roll call.

While McCarthy enjoyed support from most Republicans in his slim majority, eight Republican detractors — many of the same hard-right holdouts who tried to stop him from becoming speaker in January — essentially forced him out.

Stillness fell as the presiding officer gaveled the vote closed, 216-210, saying the office of the speaker “is hereby declared vacant.”

Moments later, a top McCarthy ally, Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., took the gavel and, according to House rules, was named speaker pro tempore, to serve in the office until a new speaker is chosen.

The House then briskly recessed as lawmakers prepared to meet privately and discuss the path forward.

It was a stunning moment for McCarthy, a punishment fueled by growing grievances but sparked by his weekend decision to work with Democrats to keep the federal government open rather than risk a shutdown.

But in many ways, McCarthy’s ouster was set in motion when, in deal-making with hard-right holdouts at the start of the year, he agreed to a series of demands — including a rules change that allowed any single lawmaker to file the motion to vacate.

As the House fell silent, Gaetz, a top ally of Donald Trump, rose to offer his motion.

Leaders tried to turn it back, but the vote was 218-208, with 11 Republicans against tabling the motion, a sign of trouble to come.

The House then opened a floor debate, unseen in modern times, and Republicans argued publicly among themselves for more than an hour.

“It’s a sad day,” Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma said as debate got underway, urging his colleagues not to plunge the House Republican majority “into chaos.”

But Gaetz shot back during the debate, “Chaos is Speaker McCarthy.”

As the fiery debate dragged on, many of the complaints against the speaker revolved around his truthfulness and his ability to keep the promises he has made.

Almost alone, Gaetz led his side of the floor debate, criticizing the debt deal McCarthy made with President Joe Biden and the vote to prevent a government shutdown, which conservatives opposed as they demanded steeper spending cuts.

But a long line of McCarthy supporters stood up for him, including Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a leader of the conservative Freedom Caucus, who said, “He has kept his word.” Rep. Garret Graves, R-La., waved his cellphone, saying it was “disgusting” that hard-right colleagues were fundraising off the move in text messages seeking donations.

McCarthy, of California, insisted he would not cut a deal with Democrats to remain in power — not that he could have relied on their help even if he had asked.

Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a letter to colleagues that he wants to work with Republicans, but he was unwilling to provide the votes needed to save McCarthy.

“It is now the responsibility of the GOP members to end the House Republican Civil War,” Jeffries said, announcing the Democratic leadership would vote for the motion to oust the speaker.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden “hopes the House will quickly elect a Speaker.” Once that happens, she said, “he looks forward to working together with them.”

At the Capitol, both Republicans and Democrats met privately ahead of the historic afternoon vote.

Behind closed doors, McCarthy told fellow Republicans: Let’s get on with it.

McCarthy invoked Republican Speaker Joseph Cannon, who more than 100 years ago confronted his critics head-on by calling their bluff and setting the vote himself on his ouster. Cannon survived that takedown attempt, which was the first time the House had actually voted to consider removing its speaker. A more recent threat, in 2015, didn’t make it to a vote.

Gaetz was in attendance, but he did not address the room.

Across the way in the Capitol, Democrats lined up for a long discussion and unified around one common point: McCarthy cannot be trusted, several lawmakers in the room said.

“I think it’s safe to say there’s not a lot of good will in that room for Kevin McCarthy,” said Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass.

“At the end of the day, the country needs a speaker that can be relied upon,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. “We don’t trust him. Their members don’t trust him. And you need a certain degree of trust to be the speaker.”

Removing the speaker launches the House Republicans into chaos. Typically, top leaders would be next in line for the job, but Majority Leader Steve Scalise is battling cancer and Majority Whip Tom Emmer, like any potential candidate, may have trouble securing the vote. Another leading Republican, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, is also a Trump ally.

“No matter who is going to be the speaker, the challenges still remain,” Scalise said. “But I think the opportunity is there to continue moving forward.”

Asked if he was physically up to the job, Scalise said, “I feel great.”

It took McCarthy himself 15 rounds in January over multiple days of voting before he secured the support from his colleagues to gain the gavel.

Trump, the former president who is the Republican front-runner in the 2024 race to challenge Biden, complained about the chaos. “Why is it that Republicans are always fighting among themselves,” he asked on social media.

Asked about McCarthy’s ouster as he exited court in New York, where he is on trial for business fraud, Trump did not respond.

One key McCarthy ally, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who is also close with Trump, took to social media urging support for “our speaker.”

Republicans left the chamber in a daze, totally uncertain about next steps. “I honestly don’t know,” said Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz. “This is a total disaster.”

Many had lined up to hug McCarthy, some to shake his hand.

Democrats, who have bristled at McCarthy’s leadership — cajoling them one minute, walking away from deals the next — said they were just holding back, waiting for Republicans to figure out how to run the House.

Rep, Don Bacon, R-Neb., the leader of a centrist group, said the only option was to leave the eight hardliners behind and try to work across the aisle. “We’re going to stay with Kevin,” he said. “He told us earlier he’ll never quit.”

But McCarthy made it clear Tuesday night that he would not try to win back the job.

Associated Press writers Kevin Freking, Stephen Groves, Mary Clare Jalonick and Will Weissert contributed to this report.