The Patriot Post® · A Squeaker in the House

Wonders never cease. In an American election of great importance — and with only one viable candidate on the slate — it took 15 tries and four days to choose the winner.

In the end, Kevin McCarthy, the candidate preferred by about 90% of GOP House members and the only Republican who’d realistically expressed interest in the position, was elected speaker of the House. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democrat minority leader, received unanimous support from his own party, but it was never in the cards (absent monumental blunder by the GOP) for a Democrat to lead the Republican majority. After extracting multiple concessions, the 20 conservative GOP holdouts stepped back to let the more moderate McCarthy get the job.

GOP, let’s not pretend it was pretty. It was not. Republicans stumbled badly out of the gate and should have recognized and resolved the concerns of their conservative faction long ago. But it’s over, the political stalemate averted. And far more important than the four-day turmoil are the implications for the new congressional session.

• The prevalent media spin — that Democrats are solidly together while the GOP is collapsing in disarray — is nonsense. The political differences between conservative and moderate factions within the GOP are very real, but hardly unique — they mirror the split on the other side between moderate and hard-left Democrats.

• The 14-round holdout was a convincing demonstration of the inherent power of a stubborn minority within a razor-thin majority, not unlike Joe Manchin’s and Kyrsten Sinema’s ability to leverage Democrat decision-making in a 50/50 senate. It was also a stark reminder of political necessity for the kind of iron-fisted control exercised by Speaker Nancy Pelosi over her slim majority in the last Congress.

The underlying problem, of course, is that in our democratic republic, elected representatives should be acting in accordance with their constituents’ interest, not dancing to the tune of their party boss. McCarthy’s challenge will be to make sure that his majority’s legislative objectives remain in line with the true public interest.

• Democrats are undeserved beneficiaries of the congressional rule changes conceded by McCarthy to the holdout GOP conservatives. The whole Congress will play by those new rules, meaning that the minority Democrats will be able to influence which bills come to the floor for a vote and to propose amendments to bills they don’t like — important legislative opportunities never made available by Pelosi to the minority Republicans. Deserved or not, it’s the right thing to do.

• There’s no way of knowing whether last month’s egregious omnibus bill was the primary motivator for the conservatives’ opposition or just their excuse, but either way, its newfound visibility is a good thing.

That bill was pure legislative malpractice — an impenetrable 4,000-plus-page spending package crammed with pork, carveouts for special interests, policy dictates that deserve careful consideration, and a price tag of nearly $2 trillion. It was rammed through with a demand for an up-or-down vote with no time for debate and no opportunity for amendment.

The bill was passed by the House and Senate and then airlifted to St. Croix for the president’s approval (barely disturbing his holiday in the sun). It became law of the land via a process convenient for legislators that ignored all the guardrails intended by our Constitution, and every American citizen — the ones who will pay for it and live with it — should know that.

If followed, the new rules triggered by the four-day conservative GOP uprising will prevent a recurrence of that travesty.

• Finally, it was great to watch our U.S. House of Representatives in action, with all hands on deck, actively debating, cheering, pushing, cajoling, and voting. Good riddance to proxy legislation, the batty COVID accommodation approved by previous House leadership which somehow felt that even though supermarket cashiers work in person during a pandemic, it’s OK for the nation’s elected legislators to work from home.

In all, although the four-day disruption will be soon forgotten, the new Republican House leadership — with its razor-thin majority — will have a rocky road ahead. But the serious conservatives now have the speaker’s full attention; and if the GOP team can pull together and avoid the urge for self-destructive grandstanding, the American voters’ 2022 election choices will be validated by sound, responsible legislation.

And if circumstances conspire for moderates on both sides of the aisle to collaborate in a sensible way on matters of great importance (what better candidate than immigration policy?), that could be a win for all.