On Oct. 3, the perhaps unsurprising news broke: Rep. Kevin McCarthy had been ousted as Speaker of the House. This unprecedented action naturally sent ripples throughout Washington D.C., as this was the first time a speaker had been removed.
In January, after persisting through 15 ballots of voting for the speakership, McCarthy finally won the position after giving in to the demands of a small group of relatively extreme representatives within his own party. For the entirety of his term in office, McCarthy was stuck in the cross-section of having to meet the demands of the right flank of his party while also having to get legislation passed that the Democrat-controlled Senate and White House could foreseeably approve.
96% of Republican representatives voted to keep McCarthy as Speaker. However, the small but powerful 4% of Republicans who dissented, led by Rep. Matt Gaetz, was influential enough to decide the speakership’s fate. Gaetz made the motion to determine whether McCarthy could keep his job as Speaker after McCarthy had made a deal with Democrats to temporarily keep the government open. Despite this, at the time of calling the vote, there was no clear plan for who could realistically replace McCarthy should he lose.
The bipartisanship that McCarthy had enacted to keep the government open last month is how Congress should work under a divided government: no one gets everything they want. The deal, for example, would not include aid to Ukraine as requested by Republicans but would include additional funding for federal disaster assistance as requested by President Biden. In a situation like this, it is incumbent upon politicians to work across the aisle to maximize the welfare of Americans. If McCarthy had not made a compromise, many federal workers and military personnel could go without pay.
Gaetz’s “take no prisoners” attitude is emblematic of how political polarization has intensified recently. In the age of social media, politics has become a game for politicians to find ways to bring attention to themselves to gain traction and stand out in the headlines. Gaetz has not only created needless disruption of the legislative process by doing shenanigans with the speakership, but he also found a way to fundraise from it.
Congress has strayed farther than ever from its mandate of governing to protect and serve Americans, instead becoming an institution for politicians to pull unprecedented and desultory political stunts at the expense of Americans. The past few decades have been marked by increasing gridlock that makes government even more inefficient, which will only keep worsening at this rate. There is an active incentive in place as a result of social media for politicians to disrupt the entire legislative process with petulant behavior and avoid any bipartisan compromise that could benefit Americans.
Furthermore, like many other politicians, Gaetz’s behavior has been characterized by standing passionately against something but not for something. If we rewind to January when he opposed McCarthy’s speakership, Gaetz did not even hide how he took the speakership race as a joke. At one point, he confidently stood up and voted “Donald John Trump” for Speaker while smirking and making fellow representatives chuckle in the background. Instead of proposing practical alternatives to who could be the Speaker or trying to compromise, Gaetz made a mockery of the entire process to attract attention to himself.
When Americans see that the people they took the time to vote for waste their term in Congress doing antics like this, it naturally makes them disillusioned with government power. The US was once looked up to by many as a bastion of democracy and effective governance, but an institution is only as good as the people who run it. If we do not find a way to end the incentive for politicians to act immaturely and cater to isolated segments of the population via social media, the legitimacy of the US Congress may ultimately be questioned.
