Why the GOP Can’t Unite

There’s a reason why House Republicans can’t settle on a speaker.

It’s the same reason there are effectively parallel GOP presidential primaries. One is between a series of candidates embarked on all the usual rituals vying for support from about half the party’s voters, while the other half has long ago made up its mind about who its preferred nominee is. His name may ring a bell.

There is no longer a cohesive Republican Party. There’s a pre-Trump GOP and a post-Trump GOP, living together uneasily. They may be roommates but they’re not married.

Which is why it was unintentionally unironic for Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), after watching 20 Republicans oppose his candidacy for speaker, to lament what could come next in the House. “No one in our conference wants to see any type of coalition government with Democrat,” Jordan told reporters after the first vote Tuesday.

Yet that’s precisely what his own conference has become — a would-be coalition government, if under the same banner. The fitful and still fruitless negotiations that have taken place since Kevin McCarthy’s ouster two weeks ago are closer to a European-style coalition-led parliament struggling to be born than a factional dispute within an American party.

But don’t take my word for it.

At about the same time as Jordan was making those comments, I was sitting down with perhaps the purest archetype of the pre-Trump GOP, the man who was seen as the future of the party 11 years ago this fall.

“It’s basically a bifurcated coalition government,” former House Speaker Paul Ryan said of the Republican conference he once led.

Former President Donald Trump’s takeover of the GOP has accelerated the remake of Congress, where Republicans in his image have been arriving since 2018 while those anchored in the Ryan-era party have either followed the former speaker’s path to the exits or accommodated the party’s transition.

“This is a political-leaning conference right now, not a policy-leaning conference,” Ryan told me. Which makes sense, he added, because “our party is a populist-leaning party right now, not a policy-leaning party.”

In this sense, there’s some logic to Jordan ascending to lead Republicans in the House, the body which best reflects the sentiments of the GOP’s Trumpified rank-and-file.

“He’s a very articulate fighter on TV, with the gavel,” Ryan said. “He is the star of the conservative media industrial complex, he is their darling.”

Yet as we spoke, Jordan had just seen 20 of his GOP colleagues oppose his candidacy on the House floor, a day before the tally would rise to 22.

“He is where the center of gravity is,” Ryan added of Jordan, “but I think, we’ll see what happens here, there’s just enough institutionalists around still that…”

I interrupted: “He can’t get quite get there.”

Which was a nicer way of saying what I was thinking: There are still enough antibodies resisting the virus.

However, if we’re being honest, in the House, and the GOP writ large, increasingly it’s Jordan who’s the body and the pre-Trump Republicans the virus.

The Senate, of course, is the holdout. Blessed with six-year terms and safe seats — and the courage both infuse — Senate Republicans overall still reflect the pre-Trump party. That’s evident in their presidential preference (anybody but Trump), in their support for Ukraine aid and in their willingness to stand with a leader who disdains Trump as much as he supports Kyiv.

Perhaps it’s because he’s unlikely to run again when his term is up in 2026, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell picked a side in his party’s fight. Rep. Kevin McCarthy tried to avoid it.

For, well, a full gestation period, McCarthy attempted to be half-pregnant. On Trump, on Ukraine and anything that required him to choose which side he was on, he sought to do whatever necessary to avoid fatally antagonizing either bloc. But after nine months, even a pleaser like McCarthy discovered that was not sustainable.

Those who are not lawmakers, or intimately familiar with their lives, can scarcely appreciate how petrified congressional Republicans have become as they attempt to survive in what’s becoming, well, a party in name only. Even what were once uncontroversial votes on such matters as passing a continuing resolution to fund the government until a spending deal can be reached are perceived as the political equivalent of life-or-death questions.

Last month, I’m told, a group of House Republicans was so nervous about voting a so-called “clean CR” to keep the government open at the same funding levels as the last fiscal year that they huddled around a speaker phone to seek assurances from a key party leader that the vote would not imperil them within the party.

That leader wasn’t their speaker. And it wasn’t Jordan. It wasn’t even a House member. It was Sen. Ron Johnson, the bomb-throwing Wisconsin Republican, who told the House lawmakers that he planned to vote for the continuing resolution. If even a Senate hardliner like Johnson is voting for it, the House members thought, it would make its way to their chamber and be safe for them to at least consider supporting.

The irony of this difficulty to even do the basics in Congress is that it could normalize norm-breaking, prompting another revolt but this time from the pre-Trump party.

You want to vote against the rule on the floor, as far-right House Republicans did when McCarthy attempted to pass spending bills, and then throw him out of the speakership when he dares keep the government open? Okay, but that will only embolden the institutionalists, much as what happened when they rose to block Jordan this week.

If the next speaker is scared of calling the vote on a Ukraine aid bill — even if it’s dressed up with money for Israel, Taiwan the U.S.-Mexico border and called the Confront Xi Jinping Act of 2023 — well then enough hawkish Republicans may sign a discharge petition with most every House Democrat to bring the bill to the floor. After all, they’ll say, they didn’t start this tactical arms race. They’re just playing by the new rules.

Look, also, beyond the Capitol, to the GOP presidential primary.

Much like McCarthy, the once-promising Trump alternative, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, sought to blur the lines between the pre- and post-Trump party. DeSantis was, he said all but explicitly, the way out of the party having to decide.

He could deliver all the Magalicious pugnacity and enough of the populism to Trump’s legions. But the 40-something father of three young children would do it in a package that wouldn’t send the voters of the Lululemon belt — from Buckhead to Bala Cynwyd — back to Joe Biden’s column.

So much for that. He’s now down to $5 million left in his campaign account just under three months before Iowa.

DeSantis, even more than McCarthy, has alienated both groups of Republican voters. He drew Trump’s wrath for daring to challenge the man who was his political patron. And DeSantis has left the old guard cold as he attempts to match or outbid Trump on policy while continuing to frame himself as an anti-establishment figure. (It was very much noted in the chalet last week that the governor turned down an invitation to Sen. Mitt Romney’s (R-Utah) annual Park City donor conclave.)

The more optimistic Republicans believe leadership can cure what ails them.

“I’ve always ran on this notion of having weak parties and strong leaders,” said Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.), a former fighter pilot who picked up a stray speaker vote from another former Naval aviator. “We’ve realized the weak party stuff, right. Now we just need strong leaders.”

There is, though, a strong leader atop the party. At least for now. However, he has little appetite for dictating events in the House.

And the broader issue, of course, is that a significant portion of the GOP doesn’t want him to be their standard bearer again.

As is often the course with political parties, their realignments result, at least initially, in hybrid coalitions. The party doesn’t immediately choose its identity.

That’s the path the former speaker believes his party will take.

“We’ll have a fusion on immigration and trade policy with blue collar and traditional conservatives,” Ryan told me. “And it will work. We can be majoritarian if we have appealing political leaders who can broadly appeal and sit atop this fusion conservative movement.”

As long as Trump looms, though, this reckoning will be delayed, I said to Ryan. The future of the GOP is on hold as long as it’s in the hands of a strongman whose persona, and every whim, shapes the party he’s remade.

Ryan didn’t disagree.

“He puts his thumb on the scale, he’s like the Don Corleone,” he said.

Benjamin Johansen contributed to this column.