The Right Played Hardball in Congress. The Left Should Take Notes.
Alongside Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy reacts during a vote to adjourn following a day of votes for the new Speaker of the House at the US Capitol on January 4, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Win McNamee / Getty Images)
By fighting Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become the next Speaker of the House, the right wing of the Republican Party won significant concessions that will make it a powerful player in Congress. The Left should learn to replicate its tactics for egalitarian ends.
by NEAL MEYER
There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in The Sirens of Titan. “The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia.”
Something similar can be said about the American left. Democratic socialists fight for universal health care, an end to the climate catastrophe and mass incarceration, and economic democracy. But if we’re going to triumph over the forces of reaction and win these changes and more, we’re going to need to learn to fight harder and smarter. Today that means taking a page from the American political equivalent of the Mafia: the right wing of the Republican Party.
In the last week, the Republican right fought Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become Speaker of the House and showed everyone how to play political hardball to build power. The Left, with growing socialist caucuses at the state level and a growing bench of progressive representatives in DC, needs to learn some lessons.
What the Right Won
Kevin McCarthy has been at the head of the Republican’s House caucus since 2019. In any other ordinary year, the position of Speaker of the House would have been his almost automatically following the Republicans’ narrow victory in last year’s midterm election. But a small group on the party’s right wing turned a coronation into a multi-round fight.
Twenty congressmembers were at the core of the right-wing rebellion; all but one are connected to the House Freedom Caucus, the ideological home of the party’s rightmost flank. These Republicans are notorious for their support of Donald Trump and the January 6 riots. They deserve every decent person’s scorn. But when it comes to tactics, one has to admit that they know how to play.
Desperate for their support, McCarthy had to give on issue after issue. McCarthy folded early on policy questions. He fought against the 2022 lame-duck spending bill, a core right-wing priority. He called for the resignation or impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, a target of the Right’s ire. McCarthy also agreed to create a new subcommittee in the House Judiciary Committee to investigate the “weaponization” of the federal government by the Biden administration and the FBI and CIA.
More significant in the long term, he also agreed to rules changes and committee assignments that will dramatically strengthen the Right’s hand.
McCarthy agreed to add three members from the Freedom Caucus to the House Rules Committee. That will allow the far right to help shape the issues to be considered by the House. McCarthy’s own PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, agreed not to intervene in open primaries against far-right candidates. McCarthy agreed to bring back the Holman Rule, which allows legislators to propose defunding specific federal programs, to fire specific federal officials, and to slash officials’ pay.
Most significantly, he agreed to bring back the “motion to vacate the chair,” which will allow just one Republican to call for a snap vote to remove the speaker. This is a rule that the right wing previously used to remove John Boehner. Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a leading conspiracy theorist from the Republican fringe, extracted a much sought-after seat on the House Oversight Committee from McCarthy in return for her support.
There will now be an investigation of the House Select Committee on the January 6 riots, another right-wing priority. And McCarthy agreed to hobble the work of the Office of Congressional Ethics and to make it harder for the office to hire investigators, a move the Right hopes will gum up further investigations into what happened on January 6.
Most of these concessions granted to the Right are detestable. A few — like new investigations into the operations of the FBI and CIA, or restraining the ability of the party leadership to campaign in primaries — might be appealing to the Left. But either way, the fact that the Right was able to stack up so many wins reflects its cunning use of hardball tactics to advance its agenda.
How to Build Power as a Minority
Every one of the concessions granted to the Right bolsters the morale of its base and will strengthen its hand in Congress in the months to come. The Freedom Caucus racked up significant policy wins, and its leading cadres will now have coveted committee assignments to use as bully pulpits from which to propagandize.
The Right is also well-positioned to extract further concessions from McCarthy in the next two years. The fact that only one Republican can now call a snap vote to remove the speaker, which at a minimum will embarrass McCarthy and weaken his position inside the party, and — as happened to John Boehner — could succeed in removing him, will mean that McCarthy will constantly have to attend to the demands of the party’s right wing.
A new committee to investigate the Biden administration and the intelligence agencies fulfills another right-wing objective: severely constricting the room for maneuver of Biden and his team, as well as federal authorities investigating the far right. The Holman Rule, which will allow right-wingers to target federal officials, will empower the former to put pressure on the federal bureaucracy to more closely follow the priorities of the Republicans’ House caucus.
Democratic leaders were quick to note how effective the Right’s tactics have been. Massachusetts representative Richard Neal, the party’s leader on the Ways and Means Committee, put it bluntly: “The concessions [McCarthy has] made means that it will be a minority of a minority of the minority, because of the Freedom Caucus, that will get to dictate the outcomes of legislative achievement.”
As the minority in Democratic caucuses in DC and in state legislatures like New York, the Left needs to think creatively about how to best strengthen our position. The Right showed the way here. Not in the demands it made — most of those are specific to its own agenda of taking an ax to the federal government — but in how it made them.
To achieve very different ends, we should be prepared to go to war against Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and others who otherwise have no sympathy for or interest in advancing our agenda. And we need to win powerful bully pulpits from which to propagandize for democratic socialist politics. To date, centrist Democrats have worked hard to keep the Left off of important committees. For example, Democratic leaders denied key committee assignments to progressive left congressmembers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib in 2019 and again going into 2021. By playing hardball, we could change that.
Breaking Up the Party System
Te Right’s attack on the Republican leadership this week may just be the opening round in an ongoing war. According to leading right-wing activist and intellectual Ed Corrigan, the Right has plans to transform the House into a “European-style coalition government” with three factions: “the Democrats, the Republicans, and the Freedom Caucus.” The speaker fight, and the concessions won from McCarthy to strengthen the Freedom Caucus in this new session of Congress, are part of a longer-term strategy to realize this vision.