All of the sudden, my newsfeed is full of stories about the disintegration of the Republican party, about how that party has become ungovernable. The immediate emergency is the inability of the majority party in the House to choose a new Speaker, which has, as its proximate cause, the decision by current Speaker John Boehner to quit. And I’m not sure who was happier about him quitting–the ultra-right conservatives in the House and elsewhere, or Boehner himself. Let’s face it; when people hate each other this much, it’s time for a divorce. Irreconcilable differences indeed.

Only once before in its history has the House been in this much turmoil over choosing a new Speaker. That was the Speakership contest that took place from December 5, 1859 to February 1, 1860. Essentially, Republicans wanted John Sherman, of Ohio, and Democrats wanted absolutely anyone except John Sherman, of Ohio. The splendidly named Garusha Grow, R-Pa, was also in the fight, as was a Virginia Democrat, John Bocock. The crucial issue, it turned out, was when, and under what circumstances, various men had read a particular book. A poorly written, poorly researched rant called The Impending Crisis in the South, by one Hinton R. Helper, it had the one dubious virtue of being a book with something in it to offend absolutely everyone. In fact, as Bruce Catton has noted, it’s unclear who Helper despised more: slave-owners, or black people. For two months everyone in the House stood and screamed at each other about it. (Sherman, it seems, had endorsed it, without reading it first).

Eventually, one William Pennington, R-NJ was elected, in part on the theory that he was elderly and in poor health, and probably wouldn’t last all that long. As it turned out, he lived until 1862, at which point the whole nation was on fire, and boys were killing each other in very large numbers indeed. And John Sherman, of Ohio, is known today, if at all, as the brother of one William Tecumseh Sherman, of the burning of Atlanta and March to the Sea fame.

I raise all that history to point out that any time you’re involved in an American political dispute, and the closest parallel anyone can point to is one that led directly to the Civil War, that’s probably not a good thing.

For a political party,or really any organization, to function, someone has to be in charge, and that person has to be able to impose discipline. Who is the current head of the Democratic party, right now, 2015? Easy: it’s Barack Obama, right? Who is the current head of the Republican party? Well, honestly, it should be the Speaker, since Republicans control the House. So is John Boehner in charge? Of anything? No.

Think of the greatest Speakers in American History. Henry Clay, Thomas Brackett Reed, Sam Rayburn, Tip O’Neill. They ruled by persuasion, certainly, by the conferring of favors, and through subtle threats, but they did rule. They wielded power. Reed is probably the name you haven’t heard of, but he was one tough cookie. In his day (1895-1899), the minority could block votes by refusing to answer a quorum call. If there weren’t enough people ‘present’, nothing could be done. So Reed called for a quorum vote, and then when members didn’t answer, he’d call them present anyway. And had the doors locked, so they couldn’t just run off. It turned into an entertaining spectacle, let me tell you. The House continues today to operate under the ‘Reed rules.’

To save the Republican party, John Boehner needs to wield power. The problem is that he has a substantial minority of Tea Party conservatives in his party that have made it clear that they do not want to govern, who believe that they were elected to the House specifically to obstruct the work of the federal government. And he has no effective way to impose party discipline. And he’s quit. And the people who want the job, and there are a lot of them, don’t want to govern either.

I have a plan, a workable plan, that will save the Republican party, save Boehner’s historical legacy, and move the country forward. It does require that Boehner stay in office until January 2017, when the newly elected Congress convenes. He may not be willing to do that. But he’s the only person who can save the Republican party right now.

Here’s the plan. John Boehner needs to expel the Freedom Caucus from the Republican party.

The Freedom Caucus, or HFC, is approximately 40 Tea Party Republicans who vote as a bloc, and who seem determined to disrupt anything approximating regular order in the House. The reason that I say ‘approximately’ is because they’re pretty secretive; nobody knows quite who belongs and who doesn’t.

Here’s what Boehner needs to do. First, announce that he’s not quitting after all. Second, meet with Nancy Pelosi and cut a deal with her. If she’ll promise to provide sufficient votes for him to stay Speaker, then he will agree to allow votes on a certain number of crucial pieces of legislation. My guess is, at a minimum, she’ll ask for a clean budget agreement, a debt ceiling increase, and a highway bill, to rebuild infrastructure. Offer her this too: he’ll call for a vote to rescind the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy, with all revenues targeted towards deficit reduction.

Third, he calls a meeting of the Republican caucus. In that meeting, he says this: I have called a vote to raise the debt ceiling for tomorrow. If you vote for the bill, good, because it’s going to pass.

If you vote against it, though, then we have a problem. Vote against it, and you are expelled from the Republican caucus. You will lose your committee memberships and chairmanships. You will not be allowed to caucus with Republicans, speak on the floor, introduce legislation, introduce amendments. I will send notice to your constituents that you are no longer considered members of the Republican party. And you’ll be assisted in moving from your current offices on Capital Hill, which will be reassigned; currently, your new office spaces are being used for janitorial supplies.

There will be an uproar. I suspect that we’ll see an immediate vote of no confidence in Boehner’s leadership, a vote to remove him as Speaker. But with the solid bloc of Democratic votes behind him, he’ll weather that. I suspect that this action will hasten the creation of a third party, the Tea Party. That’s great too; it’s been inevitable for a long time, and a healthy third party will only enhance our national political conversation.

The result, however, will be a new Republican party, smaller perhaps, but more focused on governing, a disciplined party, a party that stands for something positive. It brings back the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower, and yes, even the party of Ronald Reagan.  I think it’s the only way to move forward. And we’ll be able to include John Boehner’s name among the great Speakers of history.

 

The Kevin McCarthy era will be missed. In the week–more or less– since John Boehner skipped to a press conference podium singing “zippity do-dah, zippity eh,” to announce that he’d finally had it, the speculation had been the House Majority leader Kevin McCarthy would be the new guy. He got a nice roll-out, starting, on Monday, with what was touted as a substantive address on foreign policy for the supposedly friendly audience at the John Hay Initiative, a neo-conservative policy center. It went not so good. Rachel Maddow had a lot of fun with it:

If you don’t want to bother with the link, here are some highlights:

Those who return home are being disrespected by the VA that can’t keep the simple promise to all of our heroes to the need when they need it most.

We must engage this war of radical Islam if our life depended on it. Because it does.

This “safe zone” would create a stem a flow of refugees.

Unlike during the surge in Iraq when Petreus and Crocker had an effective politically strategy to match the military strategy.

We have isolated Israel while bolding places like Iran.

The absence of leadership over the past six years has had a horrific consequences all across the globe.

In the past few years alone, I have visited Poland, Hungria, Estonia, Russian and Georgia.

It defies belief that the President would allow the ban on Iranian oil exports to be lifted, and also stands by a Russia blackmails an entire continent–all the while keeping the place of the band on America.

Hungria. Create a stem a flow. The place of the band on America. Stirring words indeed.

So, okay, the presumptive new Speaker of the House, it turned out, can’t speak. That would seem to be a fairly essential requirement of the position. However, the next day, it turns out, talking to Sean Hannity, McCarthy was quite coherent.

Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee, what are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping, why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened.

Everyone knew this, of course, that the House select committee on Benghazi wasn’t interested in Benghazi per se, but mostly in doing as much damage as conceivable to Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign. But you don’t say it.  So, of course: outrage. From the left and right, as it happens, Democrats feigning anger (while secretly delighted) over this revealed unconscionable politicization of the House’s investigative role, and Republicans genuinely furious that the big doofus was dumb enough to spill the beans.

Who knows? He still might have survived. Thursday morning, at an 8:00 caucus meeting, it looked like he might still become Speaker. By noon, he was announcing that he was withdrawing from the Speakership race. What? Why? Well, there are these titillating rumors, see. . . .

The news outlets that broke the possibility of an affair between McCarthy and a fellow House member are not reputable sources. Probably, McCarthy is as pure as the driven snow. After all, both McCarthy and the Congresswoman in question are Family Values Republicans! It does appear, though, that certain scurrilous emails circulating to House Republicans about that oh-so-unlikely affair were a factor in McCarthy’s withdrawal. Especially given that those emails would not have had much impact in the absence of actual hanky-panky. Anyway, Kevin McCarthy’s staying on as Majority Leader, and the search is on for someone, anyone, willing to take on the oh-my-gosh-so-absolutely-thankless job of Speaker of the House.

(Meanwhile Mark Takano, D-Ca, trolled Republicans by running a Craigslist ad for a new Speaker. It was very funny, especially when the fake ad insisted “Babysitting experience STRONGLY PREFERRED”)

Various conservative luminaries have modestly offered their own poor services to a grateful nation in need. One is Darrell Issa, whose last name always sounds, to me, like Jar-Jar Binks trying out a new contraction for ‘I am.’ Issa was on Morning Joe this morning, trying to sound like Michael Corleone giving orders to Luca Brasi: “we need someone who will go to the mattresses.” He also dissed a rival Speaker wannabe, Utah’s own Jason Chaffetz, essentially because, Issa suggested, Chaffetz isn’t conservative enough. Seriously. Chaffetz has, he darkly intimated, treasonously floated, on occasion, the possibility of (gasp) compromising with Democrats. Another Congressman, the splendidly named Florida Congressman Daniel Webster has also thrown his nickle into the fountain, leading a waggish friend of mine to call a potential Chaffetz/Webster showdown ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster.’

(Full Disclosure: Jason Chaffetz is my Congressman. I live in his district. If elected Speaker, he would certainly be the best kicker ever to serve in the role; he handled field goals and PATs for BYU football team in days gone by. Personal aside: I have never voted for the man, and wouldn’t if the alternative meant facing a firing squad.)

So what happens now? Rachel Maddow laid out the four possibilities. And there really are only four.

1) Paul Ryan. It doesn’t have to be Paul Ryan, but someone like him; a respected national figure serving in the House who could bring the tattered shreds of the House Republican caucus together. Basically, realistically, that means Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s running mate, smart, young, a policy wonk. Who really, seriously, desperately does NOT want the job. And I don’t blame him. Ryan’s ambitious; he wants to be President. The House is in such disarray, serving as an interim Speaker would almost certainly damage those aspirations.

2) Mitt Romney. While Speaker is a Constitutional office, there’s no requirement that the Speaker actually be a House member. They could pick someone who is not in Congress to serve on an interim basis. Mitt Romney is not very liked by hard-core conservatives, but he is, again, a respected national figure. Vox.com made a strong case for him.  Personally, in the unlikely event that Romney’s offered the job, I would hope he doesn’t take it; I like the man personally, and would spare him that misery. Other, similar choices include Newt Gingrich (boo!), and Senator Ted Cruz. He’d have to quit running for President (yay), and he’d have to leave the Senate (yay). Otherwise boooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

3) Nobody. It’s certainly possible that the House is so dysfunctional that they never, ever, are able to elect a Speaker. If they can’t, then the House shuts down. The Constitution is clear enough; without a Speaker, they can’t vote on bills, they can’t hold committee meetings, they can’t debate. They can’t do anything. It would shut down the government. For some Republicans, that may not be such a bad outcome.

4) John Boehner. Rachel Maddow thought this was by far the most likely outcome; that Boehner will not be allowed to quit. That his own patriotism would prevent option 3, and that he would end up being forced to finish the next 18 months as Speaker. Let the new Congress pick one, in 2017, after the election. Boehner was joking recently with reporters about a nightmare he’d had in which precisely this is what happened.

The fact is, the next eighteen months are going to be horrible for whoever is in that job. There’s a budget that has to pass. There is a debt ceiling that absolutely, positively has to be raised, a task that the Tea Party Right, amazingly, opposes. The Highway Trust fund is broke, and desperately needs more funding. Collapsing bridges and undriveable highways beckon. And those are only three of the really tough calls.

And the simple fact is, there are members of the House who are–and I say this with the deepest respect–crazy. By crazy, I mean that they have focused all their attention on a few frankly tangential issues to the exclusion of essentially everything else.

First, they are obsessed with the supposed leadership failures of Barack Obama, and describe the current state of America in the most apocalyptic terms. And the fact that the country is doing pretty well right now hasn’t really penetrated their consciousness. Any cooperation with this President is tantamount to treason. That’s why they hate Boehner; he hasn’t obstructed Obama at absolutely every turn. Just most.

Second, they are obsessed with the national deficit and debt. They are convinced that a financial cataclysm is right around the corner, with hyperinflation, the collapse of financial institutions and resultant violent anarchy. That’s why they so oppose any budgetary process that doesn’t radically cut discretionary spending, and why they are so violently against raising the debt ceiling (an absolutely routine bookkeeping task, something most countries don’t even bother with, that’s also completely necessary). In fact, of course, no such economic collapse beckons, though the debt is certainly something we’re going to need to deal with at some point, as a reasonably low priority. Doing so probably involving a tax hike (which the Tea Party also opposes) and cuts in defense spending (ditto).

Third, though, is something trickier. To some people on the Right, the country has seriously gone off track. The wrong people seem to be in charge, and a bad culture is emerging. That’s why Donald Trump’s ridiculous call to deport 11 million undocumented workers has resonance, or why Ben Carson’s comments on why Muslims shouldn’t be eligible for the Presidency struck a chord. It’s just a discomfort with . . . I don’t know what to call it. Post-racial post-modernity? The way things are? To call it racism is perhaps too strong; most Republicans aren’t cross-burners. But they’ve been made to feel . . . unwelcome. It’s hard to combat, because it’s more a feeling than anything else. But as the Republican base gets older and whiter, it also gets crankier. And the House Speakership fight is only a minor skirmish in a larger war.

Look at McCarthy’s speech above, quoted with such glee by Rachel Maddow. Yes, it’s certainly incoherent. But it’s not entirely gibberish. Unpack it carefully (keeping snarkiness to a minimum), and what he’s saying is something Yeats said much more eloquently.

Turning, turning in the widening gyre; the falcon cannot hear the falconer. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. . . and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? (W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming)

Obama? All the while, keeping the place of the band? On America?  No wonder the Speaker fight is being so fiercely waged.