Behind Johnson’s Rise is a GOP consumed by the far right

The roots of this fall’s Republican crackdown, which paralyzed the House of Representatives, fueled the unexpected rise of Speaker Mike Johnson and now threatens to force a government crisis early next year, lie in a fateful choice the party made more than a decade ago made and it came back. to pursue its leaders.

In early 2009, Republicans in Congress were looking at a long exile in the political wilderness. Barack Obama was about to assume the presidency, and Democrats were within reach of a filibuster-proof 60-vote supermajority in the Senate and the largest majority in the House of Representatives in more than two decades following the economic crisis of 2008.

But Republicans saw a glimmer of hope in the energetic far-right populist movement that emerged from a response to Mr. Obama — the first black president — and his party’s aggressive economic and social agenda, which included a federal health care plan. Republicans seized on the Tea Party and associated groups, with their nativist tendencies and fiercely anti-establishment impulses, as their ticket back to power.

“We have benefited from the anger generated against the one-way legislation of the Obama years,” said Eric Cantor, the former Virginia House leader who became the second Republican after the 2010 midterm elections reinstated the party. had catapulted the majority. . “It was my way or the highway.”

Mr. Cantor and his fairly conventional leadership team of anti-tax, pro-business Republicans sought to harness that anger to advance their party’s longstanding goals. But instead, the movement consumed them.

Within four years, Cantor was knocked out in a shocking primary by a Tea Party-backed candidate who had campaigned as an anti-immigration hardliner bent on toppling the political establishment. It was a sign of what was to come for more mainstream Republicans.

“We decided the anger would be about budget discipline and transforming Medicare into a defined contribution program,” Mr. Cantor said recently. “But it actually turned out to be just anger — anger toward Washington — and it wasn’t that policy-based.”

The forces that toppled Mr. Cantor — and three successive Republican speakers — reached their inexorable conclusion last month with the election of Mr. Johnson as chairman, cementing a far-right takeover that began in the early months after Mr. Obama took office. power came.

Mr. Johnson, who identifies as an archconservative, is the natural heir to the political tumult that began with the Tea Party before evolving into Trumpism. It is now embodied in its purest form by the Freedom Caucus, the uncompromising group of conservatives who have tied the House of Representatives with their demands for sharp budget cuts. And the situation won’t get any easier when Congress returns from its Thanksgiving getaway to confront its uncertain spending issues and what to do about aid to Israel and Ukraine.

The ranks of more traditional Republicans have thinned significantly after the far right turned against them in successive election cycles. They have been driven out of Congress in frustration or eliminated during the primaries, which have become the decisive contests in the country’s heavily gerrymandered House districts.

“They thought they could keep it under control,” Michael Podhorzer, the former AFL-CIO political director who has studied the House of Representatives’ far-right progression, said of Republican leaders. “But if you basically agree that Democrats are satanic, there is no room left in the party for anyone to say we have to compromise with Democrats to get what we need done.”

The result, Mr. Podhorzer said, is a Republican majority that his research shows across several data points to be more extreme, more evangelically Christian and less experienced at governing than in the past. These characteristics have become apparent as Republicans in the House of Representatives have spent much of the year in chaos.

“It’s not like they’re really smart in the way they crash the institute,” Mr. Podhorzer said. “They just don’t know how to drive.”

From the start, members more rooted in the traditional Republican Party, which had managed to regain the majority in the House of Representatives in 1994 after forty years in office, struggled to join the Tea Party movement, which was driven to overthrow the status quo. Many Republicans had voted in favor of the 2008 bank bailout, a disqualifying capital crime in the eyes of far-right activists.

Leading Republicans in Congress were wary of the Tea Party’s thinly veiled racism, exemplified by insulting references to Mr. Obama and questioning of his birthplace, though they said they saw the activists as motivated primarily by an anti-tax – and anti-government sentiment.

Traditional Republicans showed up at Tea Party rallies where they were barely tolerated, while far-right Reps. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Steve King of Iowa, outliers in the party at the time, were the stars. They tried to mollify activists with tough talk about taxes and pushing back on the Obama agenda, but saw mixed results.

The Republican National Committee also tried to align itself with the Tea Party, encouraging angry voters to send virtual tea bags to Congress during a Tax Day protest in 2009. Tea Party activists blasted the national party, saying it had not earned the right to the tea bag message.

But the Tea Party paid huge electoral dividends to the Republican Party in the House of Representatives in 2010, as it swept away the Democrats and brought in dozens of relatively unknown far-right conservatives, some of whom despised their own leaders as much as the Democrats. The steady march toward the modern House Republican Conference had begun.

“It was really bottom-up,” said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist who was spokesman for the RNC at the time. “How do you have control over that? “When you have a big win like that, you’re going to have people who are just not on your radar screen, but if they were, you would have tried to prevent them from winning their primaries.”

In the Senate, the Tea Party had a different effect. Far-right conservatives such as Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware won the primaries but lost in the general election. That cost Senate Republicans a chance to gain a majority in that chamber. Since then, the far right has had less influence in the Senate than in the House of Representatives.

The consequences of the far-right agreement for Republicans in Congress quickly became clear. Mr. Cantor was defeated in 2014, and Chairman John A. Boehner, pursued by hardline conservatives he called “knuckleheads,” resigned in 2015. In 2018, Chairman Paul D. Ryan, Mr. Boehner’s successor and the party’s vice presidential candidate, resigned. nominee in 2012, had enough of clashes with President Donald J. Trump – who aligned himself with the Tea Party in the early days – and chose not to run for re-election.

Then Representative Kevin McCarthy — the last of a trio called the “Young Guns,” with Mr. Cantor and Mr. Ryan, that once seemed to be the future of the party — fell from the speakership in October. This ended the reign of the Republican speakers in the House of Representatives, who had tried unsuccessfully to arm the ultraconservatives in their ranks while keeping them at bay.

Mr. McCarthy’s ouster paved the way for Mr. Johnson, who was elected only after Republicans in the House of Representatives rejected the more established leaders, Representatives Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who had served in the previous era would have taken off easily.

Despite his unquestioned Conservative allegiance, Mr Johnson is already facing difficulties in dealing with the most extreme elements within his ranks.

Last week, members of the Freedom Caucus blocked a spending measure to protest Mr. Johnson’s decision to join Democrats in pushing through an emergency funding bill to prevent a government shutdown.

The move underlined the far right’s aversion to compromise and the dominance it now enjoys in the House of Representatives, and raised the prospect that Mr Johnson could face another uprising if he strays again.