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McCarthy’s successor, Johnson, was elected after three other nominees failed to get a majority. He also must operate under the shadow of a “motion to vacate.” That creates more pressure to put partisan points on the board, such as by impeaching Mayorkas, and shrinks the political space available to negotiate on matters such as Ukraine aid.
The House’s rambunctious and populist spirit creates some distorting incentives. Under the chamber’s current rules, the GOP base might rationally favor a narrow Republican majority to a comfortable majority. If Republicans had romped in the 2022 elections as many expected, McCarthy would have had a wide enough margin to remain speaker. He probably would not have driven as hard a bargain as Johnson is trying — possibly fruitlessly — to strike on Ukraine aid.
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That brings us to the Senate. If Johnson is a prisoner of the populists, McConnell, who leads a 49-seat Republican minority in the upper chamber, has the opposite problem: He’s perceived as detached from the party base.
At least, that was the knock on the Ukraine-border compromise released last week that he helped engineer. The elected GOP chewed up the deal and spat it out almost immediately on the grounds that the Ukraine aid was too lavish or the border provisions too soft.
Put aside whether any of that was true; McConnell’s profile makes charges of political aloofness easy to level. The 81-year-old first won his seat in 1984 and has helmed the Republican Conference since 2006. House speakerships are vulnerable to collapse amid the slightest political turbulence, but the hierarchical Senate GOP has retained McConnell even as age and health problems have taken a toll on his effectiveness in the last year.
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Behind all the invective about the GOP “establishment” is some policy truth. Senior Senate Republicans represent the internationalist pole of Republican foreign-policy opinion in a party that increasingly favors retrenchment, at least in Europe. That was evident when McConnell said last February that “defeating the Russians in Ukraine is the single most important event going on in the world” — a sentiment that, whatever its validity, did not predict the priorities of the Republican electorate. A Quinnipiac poll of Republicans published in November found, in The Post’s summary, that “60 percent thought the United States was doing too much, and 11 percent thought it is doing too little to help Ukraine.”
The Senate is designed to protect members’ independent judgment from the whims of the electorate. But sometimes the conceptual gap between the two is too large to sustain. On the other side, the House is meant to reflect voter sentiment — but if reflected too directly, that sentiment can lead to chaos and incoherence.
Congressional Republican leaders are navigating both problems. Finding the right balance between deliberative judgment and popular opinion is the central challenge of constitutional democracy. As long as the personalistic Donald Trump show is center stage, the party is unlikely to reach a sustainable equilibrium. But as long as it proceeds in such a shambolic disequilibrium, it will remain vulnerable to opportunistic figures like him.
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Between the implosion of the Senate GOP’s immigration-for-foreign-aid compromise and the House GOP’s failed attempt to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Republican congressional leaders are not wowing Washington with their savvy and effectiveness.
Even before those missteps, a Gallup poll found that “Democrats’ level of support for their own party’s leaders is substantially higher than Republicans’ is for theirs.” But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) are struggling for very different reasons. There’s a lesson here about the GOP’s political bind and democracy itself.
The Constitution’s framers intended for the Senate to be a rarefied body — synchronized with elite sentiment, focused on the country’s long-term interests and insulated from the whims of ordinary people by its members’ six-year terms. The House, elected every two years, would be the more democratic body, acutely responsive to popular passions. Those 18th-century ideals still describe the Senate and House Republican conferences remarkably well, but they also point to the roots of the GOP’s challenges in each narrowly divided chamber.
Start with the House. The GOP in the lower chamber is now so small-d “democratic” that any one member can force a new election for speaker at any time. When Republicans took control of the House by a nine-seat margin after the 2022 midterms, populist members forced 14 speaker votes before electing Kevin McCarthy on the 15th in exchange for procedural concessions. They removed him in a floor vote roughly nine months later. No one can say the House lacks opportunities for dissent, debate and leadership churn.
McCarthy’s successor, Johnson, was elected after three other nominees failed to get a majority. He also must operate under the shadow of a “motion to vacate.” That creates more pressure to put partisan points on the board, such as by impeaching Mayorkas, and shrinks the political space available to negotiate on matters such as Ukraine aid.
The House’s rambunctious and populist spirit creates some distorting incentives. Under the chamber’s current rules, the GOP base might rationally favor a narrow Republican majority to a comfortable majority. If Republicans had romped in the 2022 elections as many expected, McCarthy would have had a wide enough margin to remain speaker. He probably would not have driven as hard a bargain as Johnson is trying — possibly fruitlessly — to strike on Ukraine aid.
That brings us to the Senate. If Johnson is a prisoner of the populists, McConnell, who leads a 49-seat Republican minority in the upper chamber, has the opposite problem: He’s perceived as detached from the party base.
At least, that was the knock on the Ukraine-border compromise released last week that he helped engineer. The elected GOP chewed up the deal and spat it out almost immediately on the grounds that the Ukraine aid was too lavish or the border provisions too soft.
Put aside whether any of that was true; McConnell’s profile makes charges of political aloofness easy to level. The 81-year-old first won his seat in 1984 and has helmed the Republican Conference since 2006. House speakerships are vulnerable to collapse amid the slightest political turbulence, but the hierarchical Senate GOP has retained McConnell even as age and health problems have taken a toll on his effectiveness in the last year.
Behind all the invective about the GOP “establishment” is some policy truth. Senior Senate Republicans represent the internationalist pole of Republican foreign-policy opinion in a party that increasingly favors retrenchment, at least in Europe. That was evident when McConnell said last February that “defeating the Russians in Ukraine is the single most important event going on in the world” — a sentiment that, whatever its validity, did not predict the priorities of the Republican electorate. A Quinnipiac poll of Republicans published in November found, in The Post’s summary, that “60 percent thought the United States was doing too much, and 11 percent thought it is doing too little to help Ukraine.”
The Senate is designed to protect members’ independent judgment from the whims of the electorate. But sometimes the conceptual gap between the two is too large to sustain. On the other side, the House is meant to reflect voter sentiment — but if reflected too directly, that sentiment can lead to chaos and incoherence.
Congressional Republican leaders are navigating both problems. Finding the right balance between deliberative judgment and popular opinion is the central challenge of constitutional democracy. As long as the personalistic Donald Trump show is center stage, the party is unlikely to reach a sustainable equilibrium. But as long as it proceeds in such a shambolic disequilibrium, it will remain vulnerable to opportunistic figures like him.
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