Last October, the House of Representatives voted 216 to 210 to remove Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-CA. McCarthy’s removal was initiated by Congressman Matt Gaetz, R-FL, who introduced a “motion to vacate” McCarthy after he dared to work with his colleagues on the other side of the aisle in an effort to avoid a government shutdown.
Even prior to McCarthy’s removal, it was no secret that Kevin McCarthy and Matt Gaetz were not exactly political allies. For instance, Gaetz had publicly accused McCarthy of making a secret side deal with President Joe Biden on Ukraine funding. Another illustrative example was Gaetz asking McCarthy whether he was involved in a campaign of conservative influencers posting negative content about him on social media. In other words, Gaetz’s introduction of the motion to vacate was not surprising. However, this diminishes neither the historic nature nor the political significance of this event.
The House floor has not seen a motion to vacate since before the Titanic sank. In 1910, it was Republican Speaker Joseph Cannon who was facing potential removal. But unlike his 2023 counterpart, Kevin McCarthy, Cannon survived the motion to vacate. Indeed, McCarthy’s ouster from power, essentially at the bidding of Gaetz, his political enemy, exposes the weakness of American democracy. For Republican politicians in today’s Washington, playing the game of bipartisan political compromise is now a very risky gamble. It turns out that if you dare to take the risk of working in the interest of the American people, as opposed to working in the interest of your party, it can quite literally take you down.
Today’s Americans may take it for granted that their politicians are so intensely divided along partisan lines, but it was never supposed to be this way. In fact, the framers of the Constitution entirely omitted political parties from the document. They regarded parties as “corrupt relics of the monarchical British system that they wanted to discard in favor of a truly democratic government.” In 1787, James Madison, writing in “The Federalist Papers,” argued that one of the advantages of a well-constructed Union is “its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”
The violence Madison had in mind most likely related to the English Civil Wars, which took place between 1642 and 1651, in which approximately 200,000 English soldiers and civilians were killed. In our modern era, violence stemming from faction has played out in both the tangible sense — former President Donald Trump’s failure to stop his supporters from attacking the United States Capitol, for example — and in the intangible sense via the weakening of American democracy. Kevin McCarthy’s ouster at the bidding of Matt Gaetz, stemming from faction, is a form of violence against the strength of American democracy.
The fact that Congress, as of this January, is currently functioning with Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House, does not diminish the unacceptable situation our democracy faced last October. A central tenet of American democracy is that politicians are elected with the expectation that they will work in the interests of their constituents. In the days following McCarthy’s ouster, members of Congress were rendered unable to work in their constituents’ interests. For much of last October, American democracy ceased to exist. This temporary collapse of a key government institution, largely driven by Matt Gaetz working in the pursuit of narrow partisan interests, serves as an example of a form of factional violence working against the strength of American democracy.
I would remind those who question the merits of this argument that a primary reason for McCarthy’s removal was his willingness to compromise with the Democrats to avoid a government shutdown. The prospect of a government shutdown should never be taken lightly. For example, in the event of a shutdown, the 7 million women and children relying on the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) would be deprived of vital assistance and 10,000 low-income children would be at risk of losing access to Head Start programs.
The factional violence committed by Gaetz — the ouster of McCarthy and the subsequent temporary collapse of American democracy — exposes his blatant disregard of the dire consequences of a shutdown, and in turn, the interests of the American people. Politicians who neglect the interests of the people, and indeed, actively work against those interests, only serve to attack and weaken American democracy. Furthermore, now that the House Republicans have witnessed the consequences of working across the aisle and taking actions that hardliners within their party view as disloyal, why would they want to take the risk of political compromise? Or work in their constituents’ interests in an environment where their party’s interests are prioritized at all costs?
McCarthy’s ouster, in addition to serving as an example of a form of factional violence against the strength of American democracy, has set the stage for the rise of Mike Johnson, a GOP extremist with little regard for working in the interests of the American people. This article does not intend to assert that McCarthy was the perfect example of a pro-democracy politician. Indeed, McCarthy was one of 147 House Republicans who voted to reject Biden’s 2020 victory. Mike Johnson has also demonstrated his rejection of the lawful results of the 2020 election, specifically when he led an amicus brief in support of a Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate Biden’s 2020 electoral wins in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. One essential difference between McCarthy and Johnson is that the latter voted against the stopgap bill that the former had proposed in an effort to prevent an October shutdown. And although Johnson has asserted that he will stand by the bipartisan spending deal he made with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, he did not articulate a plan for rising above GOP opposition to prevent a January government shutdown.
The kind of opposition, and indeed, factional violence, we are seeing now— for example, conservative hardliners disrupting the consideration of GOP bills as they protested Johnson’s spending bill, a compromise with the Democrats — is what led to the ouster of McCarthy, and in turn, the temporary and unacceptable collapse of American democracy. The fact that Johnson has not articulated a plan to rise above GOP opposition and prevent another collapse of American democracy shows that even with a nominally functioning Congress, the strength of American democracy is hanging by a thread.
McCarthy’s ouster from power, essentially at the bidding of Gaetz, his political enemy, was a major blow to the strength of American democracy. McCarthy’s ouster, driven largely by Gaetz working in pursuit of narrow partisan interests, has exposed his blatant disregard for the interests of the American people. In addition, McCarthy’s ouster has set the stage for Mike Johnson, who has failed to articulate a plan to rise above the GOP opposition and factional violence to prevent a government shutdown and subsequent collapse of American democracy, to rise to power as Speaker of the House. The aforementioned consequences of McCarthy’s ouster have contributed to the weakening of American democracy, making it clear that some of today’s House Republicans cannot be trusted to work in the interests of the country when doing so conflicts with the interests of their party. There does appear to be one thing that the American people can trust them to do, however, and that is to carry out the violence of faction.
