It took 15 separate votes over a week to elect Kevin McCarthy to the job he would give anything for, the powerful role of Speaker of the House of Representatives. But, eventually elected grudgingly by Republican colleagues on the back of innumerable concessions to hard-right critics, McCarthy may well find that it is no longer the post he wanted or a power he can sustainably wield, emasculated as it will be by those very concessions. He has now effectively agreed to give the extremist wing of his party the means to disrupt the workings of the House – and to hold him hostage to their demands.
The US must prepare itself for a Congress in permanent disarray over the next two years. Promised rule changes to the legislative process will ensure that individual representatives can swamp the business of legislating with amendments to Bills and precipitate repeated challenges to the Speaker himself. This is a prescription for shutdown and gridlock.
The vital role of the House in the tripartite governance of the country – House , Senate, and President – provides each institution with an effective veto on the others. The Republican midterm winning of the House gives the party its chance to do all it can to stymie President Biden’s programme and blight the second half of his term.
Republicans want to couple any increase in the federal debt limit – a process that involved crucial regular votes – with corresponding federal spending cuts. They are talking about a spending freeze or keeping the government running under a “continuing resolution” with automatic cuts if politicians cannot find agreement.
Control of the House will also allow Republicans to open a new front in their attempts to delegitimise the president with an agenda of conspiracy-theory based attacks straight from former president Trump’s playbook.
They are preparing to set up a wide-ranging investigation into law enforcement and national security agencies, notably the FBI, claiming political “weaponisation of the federal government”.
The hard right claims McCarthy, in his deal with them, has committed to giving the subcommittee at least as much funding and staff as the House special committee in the last Congress that investigated the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
The new committee is likely to give succour to the most outlandish of theories about a deep state with working methods akin to the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee under Joseph McCarthy.
There are already signs that the prospect of two years of unending partisan trench warfare in the House will be not be sufficient to rehabilitate either Trump, now increasingly being sidelined by erstwhile allies and likely to face prosecution, or his deeply divided party.