A Country in Crisis

The situation is more complicated, as there is no clear candidate to fill the seat McCarthy held until Tuesday, let alone address what seems to be the fundamental issue for Americans

The United States faces a political crisis unprecedented in its history.

The ouster of Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy can be seen, on the one hand, as a logical consequence of what happens to a politician who makes contradictory promises he cannot keep.

But it is also as a symptom of a larger problem.

“The U.S. government is designed not to run very well. Given all the checks and balances and divisions of authority, it requires compromise and negotiation. But when one party refuses to compromise or negotiate, the system doesn’t work. In this case, a small group of right-wing extremists refused to accept compromise and shut down the system,” commented political scientist Bill Schneider, who in 2016 published the book “Standoff: How America Became Ungovernable.”*

In the case of the lower chamber of the U.S. Congress, it is the one that authorizes the budget and how it is spent; its stagnation implies that the government is paralyzed. The speaker of the House is also in second place in the event of presidential succession.

The situation is more complicated, as there is no clear candidate to fill the seat Kevin McCarthy held until Tuesday, let alone face what seems to be the fundamental question for Americans: how to deal with a band of extremists from one’s own party, the supposed guardians of ideological purity, while at the same time negotiating with the opposing party?

But with a 221-212 majority he is forced to negotiate to get anything done.

McCarthy found that, despite being a solid conservative, the concessions he made to the far right in order to get elected as speaker were insufficient to placate it.

On the contrary, in the negotiation that ended 15 rounds of internal Republican voting to choose their leader in January this year, he gave them power far beyond their size, including the ability to put his leadership up for referendum. And they used it.

McCarthy also reaped the rewards of the distrust he sowed in his dealings with Democrats throughout the year, culminating in the decision to initiate the process of the constitutional impeachment of President Joe Biden, with no apparent basis other than the suspicion that possible acts of corruption by his son, Hunter, might catch up with him.

The Democrats could have saved McCarthy and avoided the current chaos, but why should they? Distrust in a slim majority that seems hell-bent on political suicide by its actions (and that, moreover, is moving closer to former president and presidential hopeful Donald Trump with increasingly extreme positions) does not encourage dialogue.

What comes next is anyone’s guess. The interim president, Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, a placeholder, has relatively little power and will only stay on until someone is formally elected. But that does not seem close, and his first actions have been to harass the Democrats.

*Editor’s note: This quote, though accurately translated, could not be independently verified.