Bipartisanship is not an end in itself. The key question when making any compromise is: what do we get out of it?honorentheos wrote: ↑Fri Oct 06, 2023 3:19 pmI agree...in that everything about the above says Gaetz and what he represents are clearly a threat to the entire democratic system. The issue is if bipartisan government and compromise is worth supporting. Apparently not.
I agree that support for democracy is the essential issue right now, and all policy priorities have to be secondary. If the Democrats had the option to support a Republican speaker who were determined to defend democracy against Trumpists like Gaetz, they would certainly be obligated to take that option, no matter what policy disagreements they might have with that Republican. It would be a compromise well worth making. But I don't think there's anyone like that left in the House now that Cheney and Kinzinger are gone.
If McCarthy was any better than the likes of Gaetz on that front, it was largely in the realm of rhetoric, in that he expressed qualms after January 6 (that he promptly forgot about), and that he is probably less obsessed with snipe hunts like the impeachment inquiry than those people are. But he willingly submitted to those people in order to become speaker, accepting rules that left him vulnerable to exactly this kind of ouster. And if the Democrats had supported McCarthy, the challenges to his speakership would not have ended there. Gaetz or his ilk could have called another vote like this any time they were irritated with McCarthy, i.e., any time he showed any resistance to one of their snipe hunts or budget-negotiation tantrums. It's not clear that a House with McCarthy as speaker would be any more functional than a House with a more overtly inflammatory Republican in charge, and McCarthy certainly showed no interest in demonstrating that it would.
Res Ipsa's link, if correct, would strengthen my point: McCarthy's deal to keep the government open for 45 days was actually an attempt to cause a shutdown in such a way that the Democrats could be more easily blamed. It seems he was actively trying to be as malicious an actor as the far right wanted him to be, and they kicked him out not because he refused but because he did it badly.