Democrats were the adults in the room when they agreed to vote for a CR without Ukraine funding. Saving McCarthy was a bridge too far.
Greg Sargent on this irritating notion among much of the punditocracy that the Democrats are at fault for the mess in the House because they failed to step up and save Kevin McCarthy from the monster he helped create:
Because Republicans are such firm believers in benevolence toward political foes, they are furious with Democrats for failing to save Kevin McCarthy. After Democrats voted en masse this week to remove the California Republican as House speaker, his fellow Republicans responded by revoking some of Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol office privileges. They are reportedly planning more acts of retaliation.
But Democrats were right not to save McCarthy. With the forces unleashed by former president Donald Trump and the MAGA movement damaging the House GOP caucus, Democrats absolutely shouldn’t have stepped in, because so doing would help Republicans erase their own culpability for nourishing those forces for so long.
Republicans believe Democrats should have joined most of them to vote against the motion to vacate the speakership that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) brought against McCarthy, which would have enabled him to survive despite eight GOP insurgents voting to remove him. As Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman reports, Republicans intend to “exact revenge for a long while.” McCarthy himself was reportedly behind the retaliation against Pelosi.
All of that is absurd, but it’s also revealing. In a sense, what Republicans really wanted from Democrats is help in solving a problem that’s grown intractable for them: At critical moments such as these, there’s nothing holding the House GOP majority together.
If the shoe were on the other foot, I think we all know what the Republicans would have done.
The adults stepped up to keep the government open and they did it with great regret that these monsters had put them in that position. But they did it to spare the American people of the suffering the Republicans were prepared to inflict if they didn’t get their way. 91 Republicans voted against it anyway. There was no good reason at that point to do anything to help the GOP caucus resolve their internal differences.
This is part of a much bigger dynamic. Every time the Republicans get in office they blow up the budget, start wars, slash important programs and otherwise fuck everything up. Then the Democrats are called in to clean up their messes, they clean them up and then the Republicans come in and ride their success until they fuck everything up again. It’s happened over and over again.
A president has only limited control over the economy. And yet there has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century. The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.
It’s true about almost any major indicator: gross domestic product, employment, incomes, productivity, even stock prices. It’s true if you examine only the precise period when a president is in office, or instead assume that a president’s policies affect the economy only after a lag and don’t start his economic clock until months after he takes office. The gap “holds almost regardless of how you define success,” two economics professors at Princeton, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, write. They describe it as “startlingly large.”
Annual GDP rate:
What, then, are the most plausible theories?
First, it’s worth rejecting a few unlikely possibilities. Congressional control is not the answer. The pattern holds regardless of which party is running Congress. Deficit spending also doesn’t explain the gap: It is not the case that Democrats juice the economy by spending money and then leave Republicans to clean up the mess. Over the last four decades, in fact, Republican presidents have run up larger deficits than Democrats.
That leaves one broad possibility with a good amount of supporting evidence: Democrats have been more willing to heed economic and historical lessons about what policies actually strengthen the economy, while Republicans have often clung to theories that they want to believe — like the supposedly magical power of tax cuts and deregulation. Democrats, in short, have been more pragmatic.
And yet for decades the Republicans have been seen as “the grownups” largely because of outdated hippie bashing left over from the 1960s. They have never been “grown-ups” at least not since Eisenhower’s time. They’ve been increasingly radical know-nothings dependent on grotesque grievances and racism to keep their voters happy and it’s been depressingly successful. But the news media’s insistence that because they insist on a formal dress code or pretend they go to church they are the mature adults has contributed largely to their ability to win elections.
If there is one bright spot in all this mess it’s that this myth may have finally been dispelled. No one can claim that the party of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz is the party of mature adults. They are nihilistic anarchists.
