The game theory of the Republican speakership crisis
natesilver.net
natesilver.net
It's a no brainer, they'd have him McCarty the balls, Matt Gaetz looks like a jackass, and they can use the leverage they have to keep the house doing its job.
Instead, we have pandemonium, no speaker, no plan to ensure the government doesn't shut down in a month, and Gaetz has something to crow about. Do the republicans look like a clown show? Sure. Is that a better overall outcome for the country than having a (barely, semi) functioning House? No (even if you're a democrat).
The whole goddamn lot of the house ought to be ineligible for reelection for failing to govern.
>"In the end, they all voted to remove McCarthy. Many people wondered afterwards why McCarthy did not offer the Democrats a bargain in order to sustain him. The answer is that the logic of the procedural coalition wouldn’t allow it. As with the Speakership vote in January, McCarthy didn’t need one vote, one time. He needed an ongoing procedural coalition. Unless the Democrats were going to form a permanent alliance with him, saving him on the vacate vote wouldn’t have done any good. In fact, it would have simply turned more Republicans against him, as whatever concessions he gave the Democrats would have certainly moved policy to the left."
So it either had to be a fully negotiated, lasting alliance for the rest of this Congress, or nothing. McCarthy did not make any moves towards such a thing, completely contrary to your assertion that they'd "have him by the balls". On the contrary right after the vote for the CR he immediately went on TV Sunday to try to backstab Democrats and (preposterously) say they were at fault.
This presupposes that the Democrats prefer "a better overall outcome for the country" over "the Republicans look like a clown show". It seems like the predominating political theory of the day is that any bad thing is actually good, as long as you can convincingly blame the other party for it.
Besides the factional issues described in the article, they also have several loose cannons in their ranks; George Santos, credibly charged with numerous frauds; Matt Gaetz, who has had his own brushes with the law and is a gleeful consensus-wrecker; and multiple hardline ideologues like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, and Andy Biggs, who are out at the ideological wings of the party but also have an apparently bottomless appetite for publicity, because their antics generate a reliable flow of donations which makes them less dependent on leadership for campaign funding.
In the game between Democrats and Republican leadership, McCarthy promised to work with the Democrats on several issues and then back tracked multiple times. McCarthy then assumed that the Democrats would simply support him since the alternative was the chaos we have now. Democrats intentionally adopted tit-for-tat, and 'went low', which is why McCarthy is now no longer speaker.
By playing hardball, the Democrats have increased the chances that the next speaker will be a moderate willing to have some semblance of bipartisanship.
This is a longer video but here AOC gets into the politics a bit more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahEgoH8UfLU
The reality of it is that parties are not in the United States Constitution, and our enshrinement of them is becoming an increasing problem.
So let’s set the record straight, it was not Republicans that provided 95% of the votes to punish McCarthy. It was democrats. And when they’re looking at President Trump‘s second term in January 2025, this will be on them. There was a moment to showcase good government and defy extremists, and they chose what was electorally better for them but worse for the country. like they did the same when they started giving money to the most insane MAGA clowns, because they would be easier to beat in a general election. When the government is shut down because moderates were purged by the companies and parties reveal their moral and ideological corruption like this it plays into populist hands.
The parties are cancer on America. They will kill the democracy.
What is your proposed alternative?
(also: I think the analogy is flawed. The cancer on America would be the media and other moneyed influence. The democracy has been brain-dead for two decades already, and the parties are the only thing keeping it on artificial life support. Pulling the plug will not magically make the patient better)
This is a failure of government and unity within the Republican party. If there is some moderate that could form a coalition between the parties, great. Wonderful. Let them be speaker. But no Republican has tried (or at least, no one has gotten even a single vote across party lines).
This clown show does not enhance the image of the Republican party, instead lessening it. It only heightens the image of the ultra-conservative because their base is not rational and doesn't recognize that any result will be touted as a win.
That's not wisdom, that's cynicism and selfishness.
Not really. The Democrats take deliberate action to cultivate and perpetuate that dysfunction for partisan advantage. They scream about the danger of "Ultra MAGA" Republicans while supporting those very same people in primaries, and they refuse to take very easy actions to stabilize the system (e.g. not siding with Matt Gaetz's antics). That shows they're not interested in "replac[ing] dysfunction with function" but rather with acquiring power.
And the idea that the Democrats are the only party "capable of governing," is just propaganda or marketing. If you think about it carefully, "governing" is subtly redefined as being in relative harmony with Democratic party priorities.
We're going in circles here. "[The Democrats] acquiring power" in this case, IMO, is replacing function with dysfunction. And the Democrats were trying to stabilize the system. After Gaetz made the motion to vacate, there were active discussions happening between moderates from both sides to pass rule changes to go along with saving McCarthy's skin. McCarthy decided to blow that up by not waiting for that to play out before holding the vote. One of the very few things that I'm in wholehearted agreement with Matt Gaetz is that a clear majority of the House did not trust McCarthy's word, and rightfully so. The Democrats have no obligation to save someone that they don't trust on the assumption that the Republicans would be unable to agree amongst themselves on a replacement.
> And the idea that the Democrats are the only party "capable of governing," is just propaganda or marketing. If you think about it carefully, "governing" is subtly redefined as being in relative harmony with Democratic party priorities.
Thank you for reminding me to think about it carefully. Ok, I've thought about it carefully. When I speak of the capability of governing, I'm speaking pretty close to literally. When the Democrats are in power there is no risk of the government shutting down and there is no risk that making our debt payments will be used as a hostage to achieve policy goals.
> Thank you for reminding me to think about it carefully. Ok, I've thought about it carefully. When I speak of the capability of governing, I'm speaking pretty close to literally. When the Democrats are in power there is no risk of the government shutting down and there is no risk that making our debt payments will be used as a hostage to achieve policy goals.
You're not thinking that carefully. There's no risk of those things happening when Republicans are in power either. Shutdowns happen when the government is split and Republicans and Democrats refuse to compromise.
And your comment is a good example of the kind of propaganda rhetoric I was talking about: two sides won't come to an agreement, but half that equation is forgotten to take shots at the enemy. It's pure myside bias.
Well sure, if you don’t have a particularly good understanding of how the House works, then one might be tempted to lazily both-sides these fiascos. In reality, the House is a body dominated by the party in the majority. They have absolute control over the agenda. In the latest near shutdown drama, the Republicans were only trying to solve the issue themselves. There was no compromise for the Democrats to agree to. Once it was clear that he couldn’t avert the shutdown this way, McCarthy sought a compromise solution to get Democrats on board, and they quickly agreed. So stop with the gaslighting. As for the debt ceiling nonsense that only happens when Republicans control the House and there’s not a Republican President, no, you don’t reward hostage-taking.
And here's the real test if Democrats are serious about being the responsible party: help deal with pricks like Gaetz instead of complaining while simultaneously chanting "not my responsibility."
Selecting a speaker is the job of the whole house, and there's nothing stopping Democrats from voting for a moderate Republican (and maybe they should stop trying to get those guys primaryed).
If they're not willing to do that, they should drop all the rhetoric about responsibility and dysfunction and say what they really want: a government that's as dysfunctional as possible whenever they're not in control.
It might seem unfair of me to say that Republicans would just be complete hypocrites like this, but consider the phenomenon of politicians taking credit for public works projects or similar even when they voted against the law that appropriated the funding for them.
I don’t know how anyone can lead a house GOP with a faction that opposes any compromise, demands the ability to remove the speaker at a whim, and seems to have little interest in governance generally.
Seems like an impossible position.
The obvious path of forming a coalition with the other party seems like the only functional way forward.
By leading the House, not the House GOP. Perhaps we're seeing seismic activity in our two-party system's alignment.
Unfortunately it's become embedded in American life as to become a thought-terminating cliche (though not as used here!): mentioning it typically produced a murmur of recognitional agreement, which then serves to drain the energy out of discussing problematic or perverse electoral and legislative outcomes. This has been exploited by politicians of all stripes to evade any sort of electoral accountability and shut down any new entrants into political markets.
Although that will break the illusion of team red vs. team blue that has maintained power for 30+ years.
In contrast, here's how the old Venetians elected the Doge, in a process so complex that it was presumably impossible to game to anyone's advantage:
"First, thirty members of the Great Council were chosen at random. Then nine of those thirty were chosen, again randomly. Those nine members picked the next set: forty people from the Great Council. And those forty? Twelve, randomly picked from their number, moved on to the next step. Those twelve chose twenty-five; those twenty-five were randomly pared down to just nine. Having fun yet? This set of nine members chose forty-five more; eleven were picked – again at random – from those forty-five. The eleven chose forty-one members. Those forty-one (finally!) voted for the doge. There were some additional checks against skulduggery. Each noble family couldn’t have more than one member in each group, and members couldn’t vote for their own relatives. Every time a set of members voted for the next group, more than a simple majority was required: around three quarters of the voting group had to agree. (For the final election, just 25 of the 41 had to agree.)"
https://generalist.academy/2020/11/06/the-election-of-the-do...
Americans have a deep reverence for their personal brand, but it's worth considering they don't install their government model on countries they conquer. Japan, Iraq, Germany, etc are all Parliamentary.
We can’t fix ours in-place—technically, yes, but practically, no, largely for game-theoretical reasons—so we’re stuck with, effectively, an obsolete constitution. Fortunately, those who’ve set up new states in our name haven’t been forced to install that same known-bad model, so they’ve done better.
It's also a different context. The problem with presidential systems is they become despots. That historically hasn't been a problem in America, because it's a big country with multiple power centers.
Not relevant. The House behaves like a parliament. It's currently hung.
True. Would not help us before November 17th, though.
Also, parliamentary democracies do fall into the trap of back-to-back snap elections. Given the current situation is likely to change within thirteen months, I'm not seeing a fundamental advantage to a parliamentary system with respect to this dynamic.
This is more a post-War (or post-New Deal) problem. If the federal government shuts down, towns and states still function.
The problem is so much more, today, is interstate and global. As a result, the tendency towards gridlock absent consensus, previously more a feature than a nuisance, is now careening towards something existential.
It's not particularly complex. The numbers may seem arbitrary (there's actually a deep logic to them, although they may have been found by trial and error) but you don't need to understand the numbers to understand the process: each jury elects a set of people for its successor, and then a random subset of the elected people are picked to actually form the next jury, and there are several rounds of this until the final jury elects the Doge himself.
It's not immune to negotiation and horse-trading, but it makes it harder; probabilistic systems aren't vulnerable to Arrow's theorem, so tactical voting is much rarer. In practice it diffused power from any individual or jury, and acted to preserve a stable oligopoly; it ensured there were enough noble families to fill out a jury, but not much more than that (and getting functioning government from them absolutely relied on politeness and good faith and all that). Whether that's better or worse than a two-party system is open to debate.
Whether they’ve chosen their moment to have this split correctly, however, is up for debate.
There hasn't been any proper budgeting since Bush43. Among the unmet demands leading to McCarthy's ouster was lack of regular budgeting order.
The House has had copious resources to do investigations out the wazoo, but it's actual, Constitutional job? No' so much.
MODEST PROPOSAL: if a Congress fails to do its basic job, then none of the jackwagons sworn into that Congress (either chamber) get to run for their existing seat when next up for election. Do you Monkey Fighting job, or get some people who will.
Interesting and probably accurate. But I think it underlines a more important point. The freedom caucus is basically an enemy faction to the mainline GOP. At some point they’re going to need to be disowned if they don’t fall in line. Probably quite soon if the orange loses the presidential run.
They're still being elected by their voters. In many cases, with high approval ratings. You aren't going to mute them without addressing their districts' problems.
They are not really the problem. The problem is that your institutions offer no mechanism for a majority that agrees on a particular course of action to actually make it happen. Silly partisanship trumps running the country.
Perhaps you need to consider secret ballots in your legislature. That would eliminate partisanship in a trice.
Yes, it does.
What it also does, sometimes, is create incentives for that consensus on some important issues not to form for electoral tactical reasons that go beyond thr immediate issue, even where there would otherwise be consensus on the immediate issue. (Conversely, it sometimes creates a tactical incentive for majority consensus despite disagreement on the merits of the immediate issue.)
> Perhaps you need to consider secret ballots in your legislature. That would eliminate partisanship in a trice.
It wouldn't eliminate partisanship, but it would eliminate individual accountability of legislators to the electorate, making the system less democratic but equally problematically partisan.
They can't be disowned, practically, unless the rump GOP has a strategy for securing a majority without them (not just without those members, but also the people in the electorate and activist base thar share their views and are a significant share of the support for other GOP members.)