Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan’s bid for speaker ended suddenly Friday when the Republican conference dropped him like a hot rock. All the bullying, threats and bluster failed to persuade a critical faction of “moderates.” Nine Republicans have since emerged to vie for the job. Of those, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer is the most prominent.

These nine represent the third time the Republicans have gone through this since the historic Oct. 3 tossing of Kevin McCarthy. The House has been paralyzed since. A government shutdown looms. Wars in Ukraine and Israel need attention. Yet the Republican majority can’t do the most basic thing of any majority – pick a leader. Anything could happen, but it looks like a new speaker any time soon is a long shot.

While it’s natural to associate the chaos with Donald Trump, the roots of the Republican disorder are deeper. Thomas Mann, a traditional liberal, and Norman Ornstein, a traditional conservative, wrote what I have come to think of as the Ur-text all the way back in April 2012. In "Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem,” they write that:

“We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.”

“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics,” they added. “It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Who’s to blame? Before Trump, there was Grover Norquist, the anti-tax evangelist who made it verboten for any Republican to talk about budgets in any responsible way. They could talk about cuts, but never revenues. And before Norquist, there was Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who went to war with the institution itself.

Together, Gingrich and Norquist created conditions in which it’s not a matter of both sides, Mann and Ornstein said. “When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.”

Mann and Ornstein’s piece was prescient. The Republicans were the problem before Trump, Russian sabotage, the impeachments, the insurrection, the pandemic – and before the “insurgent outliers” narrowly won the House only to succumb a year later to the chaos and disorder that brought them there. Recently, I asked Ornstein if his assessment has changed. No, he suggested, except it’s gotten worse.

 
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