Inside, Outside, Upside Down

Wednesday’s G-File (🔒) was classic Jonah Goldberg. It was clearly correct on the merits, and it seemed almost scientifically engineered to antagonize knee-jerk populists.

Those are my favorite Jonah takes, as regular readers know.

Transparency in government is like any other medicine, healthy in the right dose but dangerous when taken to excess. Congress has overdosed, Jonah argued, popping transparency pills like Matt Gaetz (allegedly!) gobbling E.D. meds before a big date. No institution will function ideally with its members constantly under public scrutiny, yet that’s the sort of government accountability that populist political trends and ubiquitous modern media demand.

In the end, Jonah wrote, the legislative sausage needs to get made. Making it would be easier if a little more time were spent in smoke-filled rooms and a little less were spent behaving like a monkey with a pair of cymbals on Fox News. I agree with that, as regular readers also know.

But we live in the darkest timeline, and so on Friday morning news broke that the House Republican race to succeed Kevin McCarthy as speaker would be coming soon to Fox News.

That news was not well received inside the Republican conference, igniting an instant revolt. “It’s the height of idiocy,” one member told Axios. Another claimed that “scores” of lawmakers had taken their complaints about it to Jim Jordan, Steve Scalise, and Kevin Hern, the candidates for speaker. Within hours, the event was canceled.

We’re talking here about a group of people who have spent eight years being conditioned by the leader of their party to excuse and defend the stupidest possible political ploys. Do you understand how stupid an idea needs to be for them to rise up against it in immediate outrage?

Today we found out.

The prospect of a Fox forum helps explain why the speaker race between Scalise and Jordan is an interesting one, though. It gives the Republican rank-and-file a choice between an “inside” operator and an “outside” one.

Having just witnessed a successful “outsider” coup against McCarthy, which will they choose?

Imagine spending the past week watching Matt Gaetz parlay Republican dysfunction into saturation media coverage and thinking that what Republicans need is more media coverage of their dysfunction.

At least one of the candidates for speaker must have thought so or the forum never would have been scheduled. And we can all guess which one it was.

I could spend the rest of this newsletter explaining why a congressional leadership debate doesn’t need to be—and shouldn’t be—televised. For one thing, the viewing audience doesn’t get to vote in the election that will follow it. The debate won’t help them reach a decision; there’s no decision for them to reach.

It would also showcase conflict within the Republican conference at a moment when that conflict is already the top political news story in America. Democrats will spend the next year telling voters that their opponents can’t govern because they can’t agree among themselves. How helpful would it have been to the GOP to have Scalise, Jordan, and Hern proving their point in real time on national television, airing each other’s dirty laundry?

A televised forum on Fox News likewise would have created a “bidding war” of pandering among the candidates aimed at, in Noah Rothman’s words, “the narrowest band of plugged-in partisan Republican voters.” Post-McCarthy, seemingly everyone to the left of Marjorie Taylor Greene agrees that the goblin bloc in the House GOP caucus has too much influence over events. (That consensus might even lead to institutional reforms.) Scalise et al. should be looking to diminish the goblins’ power and expand the party’s appeal. Having to compete to win “the Fox primary” would do the opposite, pressuring the candidates to one-up each other about the lengths to which they’ll go to own the libs. They’d be anchored to outlandish populist promises they couldn’t conceivably keep. The “winner” would turn out to be the next Kevin McCarthy in more ways than one.

And of course, a televised debate for the speakership would confirm in a stark way what everyone already basically knows: that the most dominant figures in the Trump-era GOP dominate because they’re good at media, not at governing. There’s Trump himself, who leveraged being a fake boss on a television show into becoming the actual boss of the U.S. military. There’s Gaetz, who proved that being entertaining in Newsmax interviews is enough to bring down a speaker of the House. There’s Greene, who commands enough of an online following to have made her support a prized asset to McCarthy despite the fact that she’s been in Congress for less than three years.

And there’s Jim Jordan, potential speaker-to-be, a man who spends a lot of time on Fox News. I emphasize: a lot.

Jordan has been a member of the House for nearly 17 years, spending slightly more than half his time in the majority. He’s wielded considerable influence in the GOP conference for nearly a decade, first becoming chairman of the House Freedom Caucus in 2015 and later the top Republican on the House Oversight and House Judiciary Committees. Yet if I asked you what you think of when you think of Jim Jordan, you’d be stumped to come up with any legislative achievements.

Instead, you’d picture him standing in the Capitol rotunda, doing a live hit on Fox News with Sean Hannity about how he and his allies are this close to exposing some Democratic chicanery. The nearest thing Jordan has to a meaningful accomplishment in Washington is abetting a coup attempt—which, for him, was also substantially but not entirely a media project, as Joe Perticone reminds us:

In the months and weeks leading up to the 2020 election, Jordan regularly posted on social media and appeared on TV warning that Democrats would “rig” and “steal” the election. He spoke at the “Stop the Steal” rally in Pennsylvania two days after the election. In the weeks following the election, Jordan appeared many times on Fox and Newsmax, where he made outlandish false claims like “6,000 votes in Michigan went for Biden but they were actually supposed to go for President Trump.” He made similar claims about Georgia as well.

Prior to January 6, 2021, Jordan strategized with the Trump legal team on contesting the election. Right before the attack on the Capitol started, Jordan objected to the certification of Arizona’s votes on the House floor. After the rioters had finally broken their way into the House chamber and Jordan was off hiding with other lawmakers, staff, and journalists, his official House account posted, “Stop the violence. Support Capitol Police.”

On Thursday, Liz Cheney warned that if Jordan were to become speaker, “There would no longer be any possible way to argue that a group of elected Republicans could be counted on to defend the Constitution.” Assuredly for that very reason, Donald Trump endorsed Jordan for the speakership hours later.

Since the populists became the GOP’s dominant faction more than a decade ago, first as the Tea Party movement and later as Trumpists, the party has somehow managed to avoid being led in the House by someone whose chief credential is being good at pandering to consumers of the right’s most lowbrow media. We’re now perilously close to that happening.

Can you guess, then, which speaker candidates were most and least eager to see the terrible Fox forum happen?

According to Axios, Jordan and Hern signed on to the event early. Hern may have felt he needed the national exposure to have any chance of overcoming two much better-known rivals, but for Jordan it would have been tantamount to playing a playoff game at home. Scalise initially declined to participate, no doubt for just that reason, before yielding under pressure lest the Fox News audience detect a snub.

Jim Jordan is the “outside” candidate so he preferred the outside forum. Scalise is the “inside” candidate so he did not. Which one would you rather be right now, facing a vote of the Republican conference?

The inside/outside framework comes from Politico’s Playbook, which astutely sizes up Scalise and Jordan as a contrast in styles. Scalise is no one’s idea of a master legislator—or even a skilled ideologue—but he’s built many relationships across the conference during his years in leadership, including with Matt Gaetz. (Although not so much with, er, Kevin McCarthy.) He’s the insider in the race, the smoke-filled-room candidate.

Scalise is running the way successful speakers always have: by focusing assiduously on the inside game of member-to-member lobbying. In Scalise world, the way to win next week’s secret ballot election is to break down the conference into granular Scalise-friendly factions that he can cobble together into a majority.

Scalise is the second-most-prolific GOP fundraiser after Kevin McCarthy, and his team is making sure the recipients of his largesse remember that. He’s a former whip in a chamber where serving on a whip team is a bonding experience. He’s a southerner in a party that is dominated by that region of the country. He’s targeting colleagues who sit with him on the Energy and Commerce Committee. He’s counting on committee chairmen who are close to leadership and wary of Jordan’s Freedom Caucus roots. And despite the fact that he once led the Republican Study Committee, the jovial Scalise is wooing moderates freaked out by the idea of making Jordan the face of their party.

Jordan has his allies in the conference too, naturally, but his one neat trick as a politician is skillful pandering to power bases outside the House like Donald Trump and devotees of populist media. So his interest in a Fox News forum made eminent sense: If he could outpander Scalise in front of the cameras, which wouldn’t be hard, grassroots viewers might angrily phone their representatives in the House and threaten to oust them if they didn’t get behind Jordan.

There may be more Republicans in Congress who prefer Scalise on the merits, just as there are surely more who prefer Ron DeSantis to Trump as nominee, but Republican lawmakers are an easily intimidated bunch. If they were willing to do something as grave as overturning a presidential election for the sake of keeping their seats, and most were (including all three speaker candidates!), one would think they’d be willing to hand legislative power in the House to Jim Jordan for the same reason.

That’s what I’d expect them to do—except for one thing.

Before the full House votes on a new speaker, the Republican conference will hold a vote of its own to formally nominate a candidate. That vote is by secret ballot.

Jonah wondered in his G-File whether the floor vote to oust Kevin McCarthy might have gone a different way if it too had been conducted by secret ballot. Had Gaetz’s bloc not been able to use their votes for grandstanding purposes, would any of them have changed their minds? (How about it, Nancy?) Had House Democrats been able to defy their leadership by supporting McCarthy without fear of retribution, would any have done so? 

Institutional Republican politics would have been much different over the past eight years if members of Congress were less publicly accountable for their votes. I don’t say that forlornly:  Representative who are free to vote as they wish without fear of electoral repercussions aren’t “representing” anyone but themselves. There can’t be democracy without accountability and there can’t be accountability without transparency.

But if votes during, say, Senate impeachment trials were a matter of secret ballot, the Trump era would have ended years ago and the current presidential primary would be turned upside down. The “insiders” in Congress have spent eight years biting their tongues about, and periodically enabling, pernicious “outsiders” because the populist voters whom they represent have lost their civic bearings. A secret ballot is a rare opportunity for them to do the civic-minded thing without being punished for it.

It’s why I didn’t take the rumblings this week about Trump seeking the speakership very seriously even though, allegedly, he’s been semi-serious about it in the past. To gain the nomination of the GOP conference, he would have had to prevail in a secret vote that deprived him of his usual power to intimidate his enemies. For once, his antagonists would have been less accountable in a political dispute than he is.

I take a dim view of Republican officeholders but even I think they’d muster the basic good sense to recognize that “Speaker Trump” would be a bad idea for the country and for the party, especially at this particular stage of the latter’s decline.

After all, having again tasted the bitter fruits of Fox-ification last week with McCarthy’s ouster, it would make sense for House Republicans to want to steer a (somewhat) different course with the next speaker. The moment is ripe for a pivot back toward institutional authority now that the party has overcorrected in a populist direction. The conference has been turned upside down; even Gaetz, sensing the desire to restore order, suddenly sounds open to raising the threshold to bring a motion to vacate the speakership going forward.

Maybe he quietly agrees with the point I made a few days ago about the fact that there are two parties operating under the Republican Party.

The MAGA Party, a party of “outsiders” both real and imagined, dominates the GOP but can’t win on its own. It has an insuperable image problem: Everything it touches turns upside down, a feature not typically coveted by voters seeking a party that will govern responsibly. The Conservative Party, a party of “insiders,” solves that image problem. No matter how scary you find grassroots Republicans, you can feel safe-ish voting for the GOP knowing that old hands like John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and of course Mitch McConnell are in charge legislatively.

If House Republicans make Jim Jordan speaker, the facade of leadership by a responsible-ish Conservative Party that can be trusted with power will collapse. The MAGA Party is all that’ll be left. Nothing should surprise any of us anymore, including the possibility of populist idiots going all-in on Trump and Jordan as the faces of the party in 2024, but if I had to bet, I’d bet on them doing the safe thing and electing Speaker Scalise instead.