The Tribune

With CHARLIE HARPER

Maybe you heard.

Something happened in Washington on Tuesday evening that had never before occurred in the legislative history of the United States. The American House of Representatives overthrew its leader (called the “Speaker”) by a simple majority vote of 216-210, with every Democrat present joining eight rebellious right-wing Republicans to unhorse Kevin McCarthy after only eight months in the job.

 Even in his short tenure, McCarthy had shown in many ways that he was not the man for the job. For Democrats with whom he had only a couple of weeks earlier collaborated on a deal to avoid shutting down the US government for lack of appropriated funding, McCarthy had proven to be clumsily partisan and ultimately untrustworthy.

He also had the misfortune to follow in office as the leader of America’s tax-writing “house of the people” one of the chamber’s most effective – if controversial – leaders in the long history of this talismanic democratic institution.

McCarthy, whose eyes even on television and still photography revealed a kind of haunted, craven ambition that ill suits anyone in elected public office, was never going to match the record or standing of Nancy Pelosi, whose status as an elected representative from the state of California was virtually the only thing these two career politicians shared in common.

Pelosi, the daughter of a Baltimore mayor who grew up in a completely political family full of partisan idealistic ambition and achievement, became a toweringly effective leader in the House, much to the chagrin of Republicans whose venal aspirations she routinely frustrated with skillful leadership, simple hard work and brilliant organizational skills.

Kevin McCarthy would never measure up. His eyes gave away the sad reality that he recognised this.

Maybe it was significant that the match that lit the torch that burned down McCarthy’s House leadership was the vaguely weird-looking second-generation politician from far western Florida and alleged sex trafficker Matt Gaetz. Gaetz is a product of the age of Donald Trump. Learning well from the tawdry, dangerous example of his messiah, Gaetz pays no greater heed than Trump to the truth in his pursuit of power.

Reportedly plotting to succeed term-limited Ron DeSantis in the Florida governor’s office in a couple of years, Gaetz has nimbly so far stayed a few steps of local and federal prosecutors who are pursuing various morals offences charges against him. But Gaetz seems to be fundamentally sleazy at his core.

As such, he is clearly and unusually repellent to a wide range of legislators in Washington, both Democratic and Republican. Readers may recall his public dressing-down by outgoing and patrician Utah senator Mitt Romney at President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech in February.

 Gaetz and McCarthy have been similarly photographed in a public stance of intense mutual disregard that makes it look like one of them is about to throw a punch at the other. “This was personal,” McCarthy admitted at one point in this week’s saga, in describing his animosity toward the brash Floridian.

So what happens now? The first thing to know is that arcane House rules kick in at this point. The Speaker pro tempore (for the time being) is a bespectacled, bow tie-wearing, unprepossessing-looking Republican congressman from North Carolina named Patrick McHenry. House rules prescribed that McCarthy, when he was elected in January as speaker after 15 tortuous ballots, provide a secret list of members to succeed him as temporary speaker should the office be vacated as it was with Tuesday’s vote. It was revealed following the vote to oust McCarthy that McHenry was at the top of this secret list.

The list was presumably secret for security reasons.

McHenry, a former media consultant and political staffer, was first elected to the House to represent North Carolina’s 10th Congressional District in 2004. This congressional district, which lies just north and west of Charlotte in reliably red territory, is notable for providing the first national legislative perch for Sam Ervin, a larger-than-life “country boy from the hills of North Carolina” who as a member of the US Senate from 1954-1974 played an important role in the downfall of both Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy and President Richard Nixon.

Until Donald Trump came along still less than ten years ago, McCarthy and Nixon had represented two of the greatest threats to the continued democratic system of government in the United States in the past 100 years.

A loyal acolyte of the ambitious, fast-rising Kevin McCarthy, McHenry was selected as the House Republican chief deputy whip in 2015 and served in the role until 2019. He was selected as chair of the House Financial Services Committee in January.

So many Irishmen

Now, this morning, Washington is buzzing with speculation about who will compete to succeed McCarthy. A vote is expected in the middle of next week.

A big question surrounding this contest is the view of the rumoured contestants on American financial and military assistance to Ukraine. An ominously growing crowd of Republicans in Washington is now voicing opposition to keeping open the American spigot of aid to Ukraine in its fight against Vladimir Putin’s invading Russian forces.

This is not unprecedented. While the GOP prides itself and is widely credited in the US for being strong and hawkish on defense and military might, the Republicans sometimes blink in the face of a real menace overseas. Perhaps the best example of this is the determined Republican resistance to aiding Europe as Adolph Hitler’s menacing Nazi war machine advanced in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Students of history will recall that Republicans in the US Senate fought president Franklin Roosevelt’s attempts to support Britain and the Western allies for years as Hitler advanced. It was only the brazen and ultimately fateful Japanese sneak attack on the American naval base in Honolulu that brought the US into World War and led to Hitler’s eventual defeat.

Some have compared Republican queasiness in the face of Putin’s aggressions in Crimea, Caucasian Georgia, Chechnya and Ukraine to that similar GOP shortsightedness in the last century. There is thus much speculation about the views of potential McCarthy successors on continuing the stupendous levels of American assistance to Ukraine.

Meantime, the New York Times and other national liberal publications have been issuing discouraging reports from the distant battlefields along Ukraine’s eastern frontier with Russia. According to these assessments, Ukraine’s summer-long counteroffensive has yielded almost no territorial gains.

Generally speaking, the Russians seem intent on solidifying their territorial gains in the south and east of Ukraine from the beginning of this dismal war. Tank traps, mines and other defensive measures are stalling the Ukrainians even as Biden and the West agree to supply ever more sophisticated weapons systems to Kyiv.

As the coming winter brings with it a relative freeze in military operations along this broad war front, it is fair to inquire how effective American assistance has actually been in rolling back the Russian invaders.

A glance at a map of Ukraine shows significant Russian consolidation of its ten-year-old position in Crimea as Moscow’s control of Ukraine’s Black Sea coast creeps menacingly toward the key port city of Odessa.

We seem to be headizg for a military standoff similar to what has existed in Korea for over 70 years. The Kremlin may simply now bide time to see how deeply Republican resistance can erode Western support for Ukraine, as Russia gradually replenishes its own military stocks and manpower for a later strike on Ukraine.

In such a discouraging context, it won’t be surprising to see American resolve to support Ukraine slacken. And the Europeans are watching, closely. If the US will not sustain its support of Kyiv, Europeans will naturally look to their own self-interest.

This could mean a shift toward separate energy and other deals with Moscow. There are signs already that public opinion in Europe may be shifting away from the resolute anti-Russian stance that has so comprehensively revived the NATO alliance.

By Christmas, we could be staring at a Russo-Ukraine war that has come to a virtual stalemate pending the results of the 2024 American election and possible further political shifts in Western Europe.

A lot of what happens will depend on the foreign policy views of whomever is eventually chosen as the new speaker of the American House of Representatives.