Democracy Takes A Shared Understanding

The failure of the new Republican majority to elect a speaker of the House with majority support is a good reminder and wakeup call.

While we usually think of politics as a partisan contest between two competing world views, this isn't necessarily so. There is no guarantee that the people we elected can find majority support to do even the bare minimum of adopting budgets and appointing enough people to senior government posts to allow the status quo for the government to continue to function.

Usually, there is a lowest common denominator agenda which can be passed, but there is no guarantee of that. 

If a majority in the House, a majority in the Senate, and the President can't agree right down to every word and comma in appropriations bills, every year or so, much of the government shuts down, the U.S. becomes at risk of defaulting on its debt for the first time in U.S. history, and we have a crisis. During times when the House, the Senate, and the Presidency are not all controlled by the same political party, which has not been uncommon in recent history, moreover, the bare minimum agenda needs bipartisan support.

If the House can't choose a speaker, the majority vote needed in the House never even happens.

But there is no guarantee that there is any possible budget that can secure the necessary approval from the House, Senate and President. There doesn't have to be a lowest common denominator. And, if there isn't, our democratic system of government is at risk. Sooner or later, a strongman will intervene and cast it aside out of dire necessity. To some extent, that is what the twenty Republicans standing in the way of Kevin McCarthy's election to be speaker of the House want.

The problem with having insurrectionists within your own caucus is that they care nothing for the party, much less the country. They looked at the last three losing elections and now feel liberated to do their worst. All the anti-McCarthy members come from deep-red districts that voted for Trump by double digits. They have nothing personally to lose by acting out their darkest political fantasies. They didn't come to Congress to do anything but wreck the place and if that means taking their own party down with it, they couldn't care less.