The Shakespearean Tragedy of Kevin McCarthy, Prince of Washington

To be or not to be Speaker of the House. To be it today, or tomorrow night, or next week, or not at all.

That was doubtless the question gnawing at Kevin McCarthy’s mind this week as the Republican Party he worked so hard to woo denied him the speaker’s chair he believed he’d earned again and again and again. For eight terms, he’d waited, dutifully crafting a script that would allow him to seize power over the lower chamber, only for a rebellious band of Republicans to conveniently forget the lines he’d asked them to memorize. The performance turned chaotic, humiliating, positively Elizabethan.

And that was just Act One.

So often in the universe of official Washington’s backroom deals and slippery allegiances, fair is foul, and foul is fair. But the intraparty drama that unfolded here this week was near without precedent in modern history: A speaker election had not stretched on for this many ballots since 1859, when the nation careened into a civil war. To make sense of the nonsensical, Washington’s chattering class — not to mention the thousands of Americans who turned to C-SPAN to follow the tragedy on the Hill — found themselves falling back on William Shakespeare’s timeless works.

“If I were McCarthy,” tweeted Robin Young, the co-host of NPR’s “Here and Now,” “I’d check my tea for hemlock,” a reference to the poisonous herb used to make the witch’s brew that sets in motion Macbeth’s tragic downfall. Added Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post: “Macbeth must kill and keep killing to slake his ambition. McCarthy must concede and concede even more to slake his own.”

Like the Scottish protagonist, McCarthy’s preferred method of consolidating power was to keep the characters in his caucus happy. He did that by bowing to the pressures of its most boisterous members, even if their demands weren’t exactly in the best interest of the party — or the country.

Other Shakespearean parallels abound. Although Young and Marcus opted for Macbeth, it was also hard not to think of Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s recounting of the most famous betrayal of all time.

We watched as the same 20 legislators (later down to six and then just one) stabbed a stoic McCarthy on the House floor, consumed by the belief that a protracted, four-day vote was the only possible way to prevent the 57-year-old GOP leader from becoming a tyrant.

We wondered whether a trusted right-hand man like Steve Scalise would suddenly provide a made-for-theater “et tu, Brute?” moment, announcing his own bid for the speakership. (Jim Jordan of Ohio did sing McCarthy’s praises as he nominated him for speaker on the second ballot, only to become a contender for the gavel when Matt Gaetz nominated him in short order.)

Then there was the comic relief — much like the tension breaker in Julius Caesar — of Democrats bringing out the popcorn machine as the hours and days yawned on. As they lugged popcorn bags through the halls of Congress, they reminded the audience of that play’s punny cobbler, that “mender of bad soles.”

It may be an exercise in futility to attempt to find a one-to-one comparison between real life and the page. No one Shakespearean play can best capture the bedlam of this week. There is a bit of the Bard in all of it.

Shakespeare’s works may be most instructive because of his tragic heroes, figures possessed by naked ambition who, by the final act, have fallen from grace in more ways than one. Is McCarthy King Lear, who trusted the empty words of those who quickly turned their backs on him, eventually leading to his untimely and lonely demise? Is he instead Hamlet, staring into the eyes of a skull at arm’s length, trying to avenge the ghost of Donald Trump? Or do we return to Macbeth, the ambitious and charismatic court insider who couldn’t see the daggers in men’s smiles?

Amid all these theatrics, it’s easy to forget that offstage, the House’s failure to elect a leader has real-life consequences. On it depends the swearing in of all 435 members of the House (without whom there is indeed no House of Representatives), the sharing of intelligence information between the White House and the speaker (who’d become president if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were incapacitated) and the steady flow of casework that Hill staffers manage for everyday constituents. No bills passed by the local D.C. Council can become law. “The rest of the world is looking” to see if we can “get our act together,” Biden told reporters, calling the saga “embarrassing.”

But if Shakespeare’s hard-to-decipher iambic pentameter has endured for more than 400 years, it’s also because his words reckon with the one constant that has bedeviled humanity at every turn of history: power.

And it was power that McCarthy wanted and power that a tenth of the House GOP caucus wanted to wrest from him. The 20 mutineers, who included some members of the Tea Party movement along with obstreperous newcomers, put forth very little discussion of policy issues, homing in on securing procedural maneuvers instead. Among the reported concessions: the rabble-rousers could trigger a no-confidence vote to dethrone McCarthy with the say-so of only one Republican; debt-ceiling hikes would have to be paired with austerity measures; and arch-conservatives would be guaranteed three seats on the powerful House Rules Committee. The compromises mean that McCarthy will begin his term having drunk from a poisoned chalice.

As Henry IV knew, uneasy lies the head that wears a crown — or in this case, the hand that holds the gavel.

Going into Jan. 3, when Congress was supposed to have resumed the business of governing, lengthy profiles of Kevin McCarthy in the national press variously described him as “outgoing and personable,” “affable” and broadcasting a “sunny disposition.” Equally well-liked was Macbeth, one of Shakespeare’s most-reprised protagonists, before he decided to murder King Duncan. These profiles also made the additional point that the 57-year-old former Young Gun would stop at nothing to fulfill his black and deep desires. “Stars,” Macbeth once said as he cowered in shame over his own zealous designs, “hide your fires.” At least that guy was self-aware.

Since McCarthy’s arrival in the House in 2007, his Republican colleagues watched with a certain measure of astonishment as he shape-shifted. He used to be the adult in the room — someone who was willing to bow out of a race for speaker back in 2015 when it became clear that he had no path forward. He’d memorize the names of his colleagues’ children, ever the deft salesman. And he was a deal-maker who enjoyed a healthy flirt with the other side just enough to earn him the praise of some California Democrats.

Then came Trump, and McCarthy opted to travel a less bipartisan road on the way to the speaker’s gavel, courting the more boisterous, reactionary elements within his party instead. Soon enough, Trump was calling him “my Kevin” and presenting him with only the best Starburst candy Air Force One had to offer. After Trump voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021, McCarthy privately wanted him to resign, reportedly telling other Republican leaders, “I’ve had it with this guy.” On Jan. 28, though, he visited Mar-a-Lago to make amends. And he continued that dance last February, too, when he endorsed Harriet Hageman, Liz Cheney’s primary opponent in Wyoming, in a display of fealty to the former president.

The morning of Jan. 3, as the caucus sat in a closed-door meeting that preceded the first ballot, McCarthy grew more and more convinced that he was the rightful heir to the speakership, thundering, “I’ve earned this goddamn job!” But as he led his foot soldiers into battle, akin to many a Shakespearean commander, his once-loyal subjects broke rank. The House Freedom Caucus insurgents knew that as long as they could thrive in the anarchy of a House without rules, they could thwart McCarthy’s prospects.

“I don’t care if we go to plurality and elect Hakeem Jeffries,” Gaetz declared in the meeting, according to McCarthy. They then marched upstairs to the House floor, where another act was about to begin.

One wonders: Isn’t this all a bit reductive, to compare some suits voting from the comfort of their seats to literal soldiers waging war on a monarch? Some seasoned theater critics certainly think so, urging Washington’s commentators to turn the page on the Shakespeare references and quit stretching the metaphors. (In 2017, when Shakespeare in the Park depicted Trump as Caesar the same week that Scalise was shot at a Virginia baseball field, conservative commentators and Donald Trump Jr. groused that the liberal arts had gone too far.)

But reader, lend me your ears. We turn to the whole of Shakespeare’s works so we can understand the themes that rhyme with each other, the blocks on which rulers stumble, and the tides in the affairs of men. (And women.) The Bardologists agree. Aaron Posner, a theater professor at American University, says that the plays occupy such a treasured place in our collective imagination because they hold broader lessons on power: “what will you do to get it, what will you do to hold it, and [how] the only bad thing is the losing of it.”

There’s a bit of Romeo’s fawning balcony monologue in Elise Stefanik’s first nomination speech. “Seasoned legislator, an experienced leader, a friend to so many of us, a proud conservative with a tireless work ethic, Kevin McCarthy has earned the speakership of the People’s House,” she said, echoing his words.

There’s a bit of Julius Caesar in this saga, too, but not in the way you might expect, says Samantha Wyer Bello, the creative director of the D.C.-based Shakespeare Theatre Company. As we spoke, she broke out the script and read from a scene in which Caesar had just left the Senate and Casca and Brutus were each calculating whether the other was safe to conspire with.

It may have been Matt Gaetz, pulling his colleague aside on the House floor, who said, “You pull’d me by the cloak; would you speak with me?”

It may have been Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, standing improbably next to him, who replied, “tell us what hath chanced to-day, that Caesar looks so sad.” (Ocasio-Cortez later revealed that she was reassuring Gaetz that Dem leaders weren’t plotting a side deal to buoy McCarthy.)

Or are we really talking about Othello? Lauren Boebert’s behavior showed a dash of Iago, the thorn in Othello’s side. “I rise to cast my vote for a member not of the Freedom Caucus, but for Kevin,” she taunted during one of the votes on Thursday. Two members to her left shot incredulous looks.

“… Kevin Hern of Oklahoma,” she finished, as the House exploded into sound and fury and points of order.

Friday became Saturday, past the stroke of midnight, and all the House seemed a stage. Its players found their places, as Gaetz went along with a personal plea from McCarthy, in the well, to please, please stick to the script. At 12:37 a.m., after 15 intermissions and 1,482 minutes of acting and at least one moment of physical restraint to prevent possible fisticuffs, McCarthy became the 55th speaker of the House.

But if one outcome is certain in Shakespeare’s tragedies, it’s that the tragic hero always meets his demise. Indeed, some insiders worry that McCarthy will be a “weaker speaker,” having relinquished so much procedural power — and his political principles — for a title.

At the Shakespeare Theatre, Wyer Bello suggests one possible comparison in Richard III, whereupon the king, finding himself in the battlefield surrounded by a throng of enemies, bemoans his impending doom.

“My House, my House, my kingdom for the House!”

Nothing may be enough to undo the fact that, in cajoling so many of his opponents — and so many losses — McCarthy may have indeed gulped from that tainted chalice, each gavel, on a Friday evening, a death knell.

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DeSantis activates National Guard as hundreds of Cuban migrants arrive in Florida

TALLAHSSEE, Fla. — Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday activated the Florida National Guard to respond to an influx of hundreds of mostly Cuban migrants arriving by boat to southern Florida, increasing long-running tensions between the GOP governor and Biden administration over immigration.

The decision comes at a moment complicated by broader, border-focused immigration fights that DeSantis, a likely 2024 presidential candidate, has long-used to attack the Biden administration. But the governor’s hardline immigration message in this case is complicated because the migrants landing in and near the Florida Keys are mostly Cubans, who are a politically powerful bloc of voters in South Florida that have overwhelmingly supported him.

“As the negative impacts of Biden’s lawless immigration policies continue unabated, the burden of the Biden administration’s failure falls on local law enforcement who lack the resources to deal with the crisis,” DeSantis said in a Friday afternoon statement. “When Biden continues to ignore his legal responsibilities, we will step into support our communities.”

Hundreds of Cuban migrants fleeing the island nation have come ashore in the Florida Key over the past few days, a continuation of the uptick in those making the perilous 100-mile voyage. Since Oct. 1, authorities have stopped 4,153 Cuban migrants at sea, a huge uptick from the 838 who were intercepted in fiscal year 2021, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

The Keys have been inundated with more than 500 Cuban immigrants over the past two days, something DeSantis says has been “particularly burdensome” on local officials. A spokeswoman for Monroe County, which includes the Florida Keys, did not return a request seeking comment.

Haitians fleeing economic instability and violence have also arrived by boat to Southern Florida in recent days, including more than 100 landing in Key Largo on Tuesday.

The spike in migrants in Florida closely resembles the surge in asylum seekers at the southern border in Texas, where thousands of central and south Americans have attempted to cross into America in recent weeks. Many have tried to enter the U.S. ahead of the sunsetting of Title 42, a Trump administration-era policy that allows the U.S. to expel migrants to stop the spread of Covid-19. The Supreme Court recently blocked the policy from expiring.

On Thursday, Biden announced a new policy allowing 30,000 immigrants a month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to enter the country. It was part of a border strategy that incorporates an expanded use of Title 42 expulsions.

Neither White House officials or those with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol returned requests seeking comment.

DeSantis has long used immigration policy as his go-to criticism of the Biden administration, even though the state he leads is hundreds of miles from the southern border. In mid-September, the DeSantis administration funded flights sending mostly Venezuelan asylum seekers from the southern border to Martha’s Vineyard, a Massachusetts enclave associated with generally wealthy liberal-leaning residents.

Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott has also bussed thousands of migrants to blue strongholds like NYC, Chicago and Washington, D.C., including to Vice President Kamala Harris’ residence at the Naval Observatory.

DeSantis’ administration, records show, went out of its way to hide that planning process, including his public safety czar Larry Keefe using an email address to plan the flight that made it seem like emails were coming from “Clarice Starling,” the protagonist from “Silence of the Lambs.”

The politics change, however, when the immigrants are Cuban. DeSantis won the 2022 midterm Hispanic vote by 15-points, a huge portion of whom are Cubans, a historically conservative-leaning slice of the electorate. In addition, the annual Cuba Poll run by Florida International University had Republicans, including DeSantis, with near record support from Cuban voters.

“It seems the train of the Republican Party is still picking up passengers on Calle Ocho,” said Guillermo Grenier, a professor of sociology and lead pollster on the annual effort. Calle Ocho refers to a historic Cuban section of Little Havana in Miami. “They remain loyal to the Republican Party and the Trump version of it.”

Members of the Florida Legislature who represent South Florida say the state has been monitoring the situation.

“At this time, the Florida Division of Emergency Management in law-enforcement agencies continue to monitor the situation in the keys,” said Florida Sen. Ana Maria Rodriguez (R-Miami). “State law enforcement agencies are sending additional resources to help local resources. Most additional resources will be in place by early next week.”

But state Rep. Fentrice Driskell (D-Tampa), the Democratic leader in the House, on Friday criticized DeSantis for criticizing Biden, saying that much of the blame for the current immigration dilemma is GOP congressional hardliners.

“While this influx of migrants into South Florida certainly needs to be addressed, DeSantis is making the issue about President Biden in a blatant attempt to raise his own national profile,” Driskell said in a statement.

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Newsom opens second term with Jan. 6 rebuke of conservatives seeking to 'take the nation backward'

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Gov. Gavin Newsom opened his second term Friday by contrasting his progressive vision with that of conservative foes, delivering his speech on Jan. 6 as an explicit rebuke to election deniers who sought to overturn the 2020 presidential contest.

“They’re promoting grievance and victimhood, in an attempt to erase so much of the progress you and I have witnessed in our lifetime,” Newsom said. “They make it harder to vote and easier to buy illegal guns. They silence speech, fire teachers, kidnap migrants, subjugate women, attack the Special Olympics, and even demonize Mickey Mouse.”

The Democratic governor scheduled his inauguration to coincide with the second anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — marking the event with a march across a bridge over the Sacramento River. He was joined by his family and other Democrats, including Sen. Alex Padilla. His speech drew a wide array of prominent California elected officials, including newly elected Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

In a wide-ranging denunciation of "red state politicians" and their media enablers, Newsom assailed some prominent Republican rivals without explicitly naming them.

He compared a controversial Florida law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis that bars teaching LGBTQ topics — the so-called Don't Say Gay law — with a failed 1978 California ballot initiative that sought to prohibit gay teachers. Unlike other states, Newsom said, California safeguards freedoms like "the freedom for teachers to teach, freedom from litmus tests about their political party or the person they love."

It's hardly the first time Newsom has condemned national Republican figures, often using them as foils to tout his record. After crushing a 2021 recall attempt and decisively winning reelection in 2022, the governor enters his second term with an enlarged national profile as a presidential contender should President Joe Biden not run for reelection.

Much of Newsom’s first term was defined by sparring with a hostile Trump administration. But even with a Democrat in the White House, he used his speech to forcefully push back on Republicans.

Newsom will need to contend with the economic storm clouds massing on the horizon. A projected deficit would reverse years of booming surpluses that enabled ambitious policies, such as extending health care to undocumented immigrants.

POLITICO's Lara Korte contributed to this report.

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Trump Politicized the Military. Was That the Real Problem With the Jan. 6 Response?

Steven Sund, the ex-chief of the U.S. Capitol police who was forced out after the Jan. 6 insurrection, says that the public is failing to comprehend one of the most important legacies of the recent era of partisan discord: how the intense politicization of federal law enforcement is jeopardizing the safety of Washingtonians. The next time a violent threat breaks out or a protest gets dangerously out of control in the capital of the United States, what will be the process for calling out the National Guard?

The question flummoxed Washington two years ago. And today the answer remains elusive, and the politics of security devilishly complicated across the American political spectrum. That uncertainty alone leaves Washington at greater risk of an out-of-control domestic disturbance, and Washingtonians at a greater risk of bodily harm.

That’s not to say that no one has been talking about the subject. In fact, it’s everywhere. The problem is that Washington is treating it as a process problem when it’s actually a political one.

To rewind a bit: The lack of a National Guard response on Jan. 6 is one of the major subjects of lingering finger-pointing two years after the insurrection. Was this Trump administration malfeasance? Poor law enforcement planning? Opinions vary, but the issue is front and center again with this week’s publication of Sund’s memoir, Courage Under Fire.

In the book, Sund is sharply critical of numerous figures he says were responsible for the failure to deploy federal resources to back up the outnumbered police as they battled the mob. He recounts meetings with congressional staffers in the days before the insurrection in which he was told that then-speaker Nancy Pelosi was “never going to go” for deploying the Guard, and meetings in the midst of the crisis when Pentagon brass said they didn’t want to take responsibility for the unprecedented spectacle of the military rushing the citadel of democracy.

“It was sickening,” Sund told me this week. “I’m sitting here watching my men and women fighting, you know, defend every inch of ground. … I get on the call with the Pentagon to find that they’re really [more] concerned about the look of having the National Guard up at the Capitol than they are about my men and women and their asses handed to them. That’s sickening.”

In the book, Sund ruefully notes that on Jan. 6, it took less time for the New Jersey State Police to deploy from the Garden State than it took for the guard to show up from an armory less than two miles down East Capitol Street.

Sund is one of the more controversial Jan. 6 law enforcement figures, the first person ousted over the day’s security failures, and someone who has come under vocal criticism from fellow cops like the injured Metropolitan Police Department Officer Michael Fanone, whose book beat Sund’s to market by three months. When I interviewed him last fall, Fanone scoffed at the idea of Sund writing a book at all. “The reality is that the United States Capitol Police as an agency was an absolute and utter fucking failure,” he said.

But John Falcicchio, the D.C. deputy mayor who sat in on the day’s panicked law enforcement conversations from the city police command center, says that Sund’s depiction of the unheeded calls for federal backup rings true.

“[D.C. Police] Chief [Robert] Contee kind of says, Hey, listen, guys. Let’s just get right down to it. Chief Sund, are you inviting the National Guard to come support the U.S. Capitol Police on the grounds of the Capitol? And there’s like a silent moment. Then he says yes. And literally, the Pentagon is the next voice heard. And they’re literally like, we’re not going to be able to fulfill that request.” The room deflated. “The Pentagon, in fairness, was saying: Listen, that visual of the National Guard charging up to the Capitol is one we don’t know that it’s the best one to portray.”

Whatever his intentions — and I’m not competent to litigate whether he was a goat or a scapegoat — Sund’s book draws an interesting connection, one that is worth pondering as the country looks forward: In his telling, there’s a direct connection between the decision making on Jan. 6 and something that had happened just a half-year earlier, when the Trump administration flooded the city with federalized law enforcement to counter the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd.

If the consensus about Jan. 6 is that there was an unconscionably weak federal response, the general opinion about the summer of 2020 is that there was a disgracefully excessive military presence when Donald Trump took his infamous walk across a freshly-cleared Lafayette Square in the company of the uniformed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

From the aforementioned general — Mark H. Milley, who soon gave a full-throated apology for an appearance that “created the perception of the military involved in domestic politics” — on down, the photo-op was panned as a dangerous break from American traditions.

“When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” retired General and former Trump administration defense secretary James Mattis wrote in a statement at the time. “Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens — much less to provide a bizarre photo-op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.”

It’s less well remembered now, but the summer of protests was full of smaller-scale versions of this disagreement. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser remade her previously conflict-averse political reputation by clapping back at Trump’s threats to sic Secret Service dogs on protesters. As late as Jan. 5, Bowser was writing Trump’s acting attorney general to note that the city’s requests for assistance the next day did not mean there was any interest in a repeat of 2020, when “unidentifiable personnel — in many cases armed — caused confusion among residents and visitors.”

And of course, the New York Times’ decision on June 3, 2020, to run an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton headlined “Send In the Troops” famously led to a staff revolt and the ouster of the paper’s editorial page editor as the organization disavowed the column’s publication.

Sund’s book got advance attention ahead of its publication because of the former chief’s warning that the failures ahead of Jan. 6 could easily be repeated — in his view, the system that failed to pass along intelligence about far-right insurrectionists’ plans has not really changed. When we spoke this week, he went into wonky detail about the system for calling out the guard and other reinforcements, a cumbersome process that involved sign-offs from Pentagon brass as well as from the congressional leadership to whom the Capitol Police report. He thinks a single person should be put in charge of Capitol security.

The complicated reporting structure remains, he said, though the 2021 recommendations of a panel of security experts to make it easier for the chief to call in the Guard were instituted later that year. Still, Sund said, the chief’s call for backup can be overridden, and depends on there already being an emergency — something that wouldn’t make it any easier to pre-deploy in response to intelligence.

“It’s a no-win situation for a chief,” he told me.

In Washington’s local government, meanwhile, the issue connects to a perpetual sore point: D.C.’s lack of statehood. Anywhere else in the country, a governor could simply call out the Guard. But in the capital, it requires sign-off from the executive branch, which on Jan. 6 was occupied by the administration whose admirers were behind the disturbance. In pushing for statehood, the locals would like to change that arrangement.

All of this process stuff makes sense as far as it goes. But as with so much else about permanent Washington’s perennial hope of a return to normal after the chaos of 2020, it doesn’t factor in the reality of what America is in 2023: a country where the kinds of crises that lead to calls for the National Guard are likely to have a partisan overlay.

That’s an enormous change. Beyond hurricanes and other natural disasters, there’s a long history of federal backup being brought in to deal with things that were in some sense enormously political: civil disturbances like the 1968 riots that burned swathes of D.C., standoffs like the eviction of the Bonus Army of jobless World War I veterans that marched on the capital in 1932. Further afield, federalized Guard units enforced desegregation rulings during civil rights-era standoffs like the one in Little Rock.

But in none of those cases was it about the results of an election pitting one party against another, as on Jan. 6, or even about an issue that tracked as closely with party as did the protests in the summer of 2020, by which point opinions on the civil rights issues of the day had — unlike in the era of Little Rock — sundered along partisan lines. Especially after the spectacle of Lafayette Square, can you blame the brass for not wanting to get involved on their own?

It’s healthy, in a free country, to feel uncomfortable about having armed forces sort out partisan battles. But it’s dangerous to not police political lawlessness because the authorities are afraid they’ll be dragged by the insurrectionists’ elected admirers.

Which is why Sund’s preferred solution, that deployment decisions somehow be yanked away from politics, isn’t going to cut it. All the procedural improvements in the world won’t change the fact that political timidity will hamper any fight against insurrection. Ending the partisan divide over insurrectionism would be the best way out of danger. But if that’s not possible, ending the timidity about fighting it would help, too.

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Gingrich and Pelosi Agree: The GOP Is Rudderless

On Jan. 6 two years ago, Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), a sober-minded military man, looked on his television screen with horror as he saw his then-colleague, former Rep. Mo Brooks, urge a group of soon-to-be rioters gathered at the Ellipse to “start taking down names and kicking ass.” Womack was so appalled at House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy’s refusal to punish Brooks for his conduct that the Arkansan resigned in disgust from the powerful Steering Committee, as Alex Burns and I reported last year in our book, “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future.”

Now, on the two-year anniversary of the attack on the Capitol, Womack is scarcely less disturbed about the images from Washington again being broadcast to the world. Yet this time, he’s less angry than he is embarrassed about people seeing the first, rotten fruits of the House Republican majority in the party’s speakership battle.

“People are watching this with a certain amount of disbelief,” Womack told me about the week-long C-SPAN bacchanalia, which his wife, who he said hates politics, had told him was absorbing everybody. “This is the Congress of the United States of America, man, the greatest country in the world.”

It’s also the Republican Party of 2023, man, which is still suffering from what plagued it on that day of infamy two years ago: a lack of serious leadership.

But at least then the party had more of an identity, even if it was Donald Trump’s cult of personality. Now it’s both leaderless and lacking any widely shared anchorage, outside of hostility toward the left.

“To characterize the party today as messy, somewhat dysfunctional and lacking a true identity is an accurate depiction of where we are and it is a challenge we must fix and fix quickly because the ’24 election cycle is underway,” said Womack, likening House Republicans’ performance this week to a Kentucky Derby gone horribly wrong. “The gate opened and we threw our jockey,” he said.

If you’re not persuaded by Womack, or me, perhaps two former House speakers with very different politics will convince you that Republicans are confronting a more fundamental challenge beyond McCarthy agonistes.

Nancy Pelosi was never shy about her skillset — she often called herself “a master legislator” — yet when I caught up with her this week in the Capitol she downplayed her talents to make a point about the structural differences between the two parties.

“People always give me credit, ‘Oh you keep them together,’” she recalled of her days leading House Democrats, though still using the present-tense. “I said I really don’t, our values keep us together. We’re committed to America’s working families. If you don’t have that, what’s your why?

Republicans, Pelosi said, lack that why. “They don’t have any value system,” she said. (And if you’re wondering about her own plans, and the prospect of a scion in a San Francisco succession special, Pelosi insisted she had not talked to her daughter, Christine, about running and was “not leaving” at least “through the term.”)

Anyways, I would argue that, in recent years, Democrats have been just as unified by their antipathy to Trump than their shared commitment to working families. Negative partisanship is the most powerful current in this age of polarization, and you need not look any further than the former speaker herself. The Pelosi memes aren’t of her shepherding Covid legislation or delivering her caucus on Build Back Better — they’re of her ripping up Trump’s State of the Union speech, standing up to him at a White House meeting and putting on shades as she left his West Wing.

That said, her point remains about Democrats benefiting from shared values.

As one of her GOP predecessors explained to me, in characteristically longer fashion, Republicans at this moment lack any such unity of purpose.

Newt Gingrich said his party is contending with a band of “deranged disrupters” in the House, a cadre of “Biden Republicans” enabling the president in the Senate and “a grassroots base that wants anger.”

Stuck in the middle, Gingrich said, is the sunny son of 1970s Bakersfield.

“Kevin is a good California guy who isn’t angry because he grew up at a time when the surf was up, the Beach Boys were playing and California girls were worth singing about,” said the former speaker (before you ask, he teed up that line off the cuff in a telephone interview).

Yes, it’s Newt.

I can see some of you rolling your eyes about Gingrich. But he has his finger on the conservative pulse today just as he did when, speaking of C-SPAN, he was a younger rebel with a cause, chastising Tip O’Neill by way of the new cameras in the House chamber.

More significantly, Gingrich remains in touch with many of the party’s key players, most notably McCarthy, whom he joined on a barnstorming tour ahead of last year’s midterms. The two have been in touch this week. Gingrich’s advice to him, as related to me: “Smile, feel inevitable, be enormously patient, have other people do the negotiating.” (McCarthy’s mood, Gingrich said, could be described as “be nice if it was over” but he was “not despondent”).

Of late, Gingrich, ever the historian, has been likening this moment in the GOP to the lead-up to the cataclysmic 1964 primary between Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller, which split the party and led to the Democratic landslide that year. Yet as I reminded the former speaker, two years later a new tide of Republicans swept into office, including a Californian by the name of Reagan, and two years after that Republicans reclaimed the White House.

Which is to say that the pendulum swings in American politics. As another grand old man of the GOP, Haley Barbour, likes to say: “In politics, things are never as good or bad as they seem.”

And to be fair to today’s Republicans, it’s hardly unique for the party out of the White House to find itself in the wilderness, lacking leadership and identity.

Yet what makes this moment different is the long shadow of Trump.

Until the party determines whether it’s going to embrace Trump for a third consecutive nomination or move on, it won’t fully resolve its identity crisis.

Gingrich said the proposition was very simple: “If Trump focuses his anger and gets serious he will be the nominee or he doesn’t focus and doesn’t get serious, in which case you’ll get probably DeSantis.”

This week was illustrative of the difficulties of a party in transition, no longer fully embracing of Trump but also not yet totally past him two years after he incited the insurrection.

He doesn’t want to relinquish control, so he got pulled into the speaker’s race just enough to make some calls and weigh in with a good-if-not-great public endorsement of McCarthy. But Trump isn’t interested enough in the contest, or seizing power generally, to pull himself away from the fairways long enough to understand the key issues and figures shaping the race.

And because of that, and due to his overall waning since the midterms, he’s not been able to steer the race toward McCarthy or an even Trumpier alternative.

Trump moved no votes after reiterating his support for the man he called “My Kevin” and Rep. Matt Gaetz’s gambit to put Trump’s name in nomination for the speakership resulted in one vote (Mr. Gaetz of Florida).

“If they’re giving him the back of the hand, it says a lot,” Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) argued about the hardliners dismissing Trump’s appeal. “Trump has a strong following in this party but he’s now one of many, I don’t believe he’s the only voice taking the oxygen out of the room.” (As for her own 2024 preferences, Wagner cited her former House colleague from Kansas: “I’m a Pompeo kind of girl at this point.”)

What was striking from spending the week talking to House Republicans in the Capitol, though, was that in conversations about the party the name of a different former Republican president came up. It was the same one who DeSantis invoked in his inaugural address on Tuesday.

Even as the party struggles to find itself, Reagan remains their north star.

Republican lawmakers as different as Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin (a leadership loyalist who delivered one of McCarthy’s nominating speeches) and Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina (who nominated one of McCarthy’s challengers and is among the 20 renegades) both brought up Reagan as a model without prompting.

But when I reminded Bishop that Reagan was not available for nomination in 2024, the North Carolinian could only chuckle.

Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND), however, was not laughing when he considered this messy interregnum and the difficulties of keeping House Republicans together for the next two years.

“If we get through this,” Armstrong said of the speakership battle, “it’s just the beginning, not the end.”

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Miami Democrats face internal feud after disastrous 2022 midterms

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The 2022 midterms saw Republicans win Miami-Dade County for the first time in 20 years. Now, the Democratic infighting has begun.

Ten party officials in Florida’s most populous county are asking the statewide Florida Democratic Party to audit the county party over alleged campaign finance “improper activity.” The request comes after Republicans won nearly every race in the county, which Hillary Clinton won by nearly 30 percentage-points just six years ago. The county has long been held up as an overwhelming Democratic home turf.

Miami-Dade Democratic Party Chair Robert Dempster has said an audit of the county party is underway, but the group of 10 say they would like to hand off those duties to the statewide party. The Miami-Dade Democratic Executive Committee has 257 total members.

“Many signers of this letter have been raising the alarm for many months that Robert Dempster was unfit to lead our Party,” former Miami-Dade County Democratic Chairman Juan Cuba said during a Friday interview. “And even after losing every race in Miami-Dade this November, there has been zero accountability and very little self-reflection.”

Dempster said the county party is behind on audits, but those were due before he took office and the “10 signatories are well aware of that.” He also said that Cuba also fell behind on audits when he was chairman of the county party.

“We have been exceedingly transparent with our membership about our finances, reporting and our efforts to reconcile any good faith errors, and can provide meeting minutes since we installed a new treasurer a few months ago as such,” Dempster said.

The group says if Florida Democratic Party Chairman Manny Diaz does not conduct an audit, they will turn the matter over to the Miami-Dade County Inspector General’s Office and the Florida Elections Commission.

“Our sincere hope is that there was no illegal campaign activity during his tenure, but if this audit finds wrongdoing, we demand you to take immediate action in suspending and removing Robert Dempster as DEC Chair,” read the letter.

Diaz did not return a request seeking comment. He is facing his own calls to resign after a disastrous election cycle that saw Gov. Ron DeSantis wins by a historic 19-points and Republicans take legislative supermajorities even though Republicans underperformed across the country.

Among those signing the letter are Cuba, former Democratic state Rep. Cindy Lerner, former state Rep. Robert Asencio and Verlance Echoles, president of the Miami-Dade Democratic Black Caucus.

The letter to Diaz alleges the county party has $61,000 in contributions and $107,000 in expenditures not accounted for on campaign finance reports, no expenses reported for the second quarter, and a contribution given to Miami City Commission candidate Quinn Smith recorded two months after he lost.

The 2022 midterms were a disaster across the board for Democrats, but losing Miami-Dade County was perhaps the single biggest symbolic blow. There had been signs in recent years that Republicans had been making in-roads into what was once one of the state’s bluest counties, but its flipping red was still seen as a big blow to Florida Democrats.

Diaz, the state party chairman, is a former Miami mayor, who was elected by party leaders amid the promise that he could help boost fundraising efforts, but that never materialized. Republicans raised significantly more than Democrats in nearly every key midterm race, but Diaz has so far declined to step down.

The 10 signatories want the audit completed by Jan. 20, which coincides with a Florida Democratic Party organizational meeting where they will decide on party leadership headed into the 2024 presidential election cycle.

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Appeals court blocks Jen Psaki deposition in social media lawsuit

A federal appeals court has blocked efforts by Republican-led states to force former White House press secretary Jen Psaki to testify about efforts by the Biden administration to urge social media firms to take down certain kinds of posts or bar users from posting.

The order on Thursday afternoon from the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is another not-so-veiled rebuke to District Court Judge Terry Doughty, who has been overseeing the suit the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana filed last year claiming that the administration’s pressure on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube was so intense that it amounted to censorship.

The three-judge appeals court panel said Doughty failed to give adequate weight to longstanding legal principles calling for depositions of current and former senior government officials to be limited to instances where they are truly essential.

The attorneys general and several private individuals have argued that Psaki’s statements about encouraging social media firms to take down misinformation about the coronavirus and about election fraud are grounds to subject her to questioning, but the appeals judges sharply disagreed.

“The plaintiffs argue that a deposition is required in order to, among other things, illuminate the meaning of these statements. Much of this desired illumination, though, is apparent from the record,” Judges Edith Clement, Leslie Southwick and Stephen Higginson wrote in their joint order. “In a similar vein, the plaintiffs say they need to uncover the identities of government officials and social media platforms mentioned in Psaki’s statements. The record is already replete with such information.”

The 5th Circuit panel also suggested that in the absence of evidence that Psaki herself was interacting with the social media firms or dictating policy, there was little reason to demand her testimony.

“As Press Secretary, Psaki’s role was to inform the media of the administration’s priorities, not to develop or execute policy,” the appeals judges wrote. “Unsurprisingly, then, the record does not demonstrate that Psaki has unique first-hand knowledge that would justify the extraordinary measure of deposing a high-ranking executive official.”

Clement and Southwick are appointees of President George W. Bush. Higginson was appointed by President Barack Obama.

“The central concern of this court is that absent ‘extraordinary circumstances,’ depositions of high government officials should not proceed,” the appeals judges wrote. “That rule is a constant across the decades regardless of who the officials are.”

The federal government has turned over numerous records in the case and depositions of other officials have gone forward, including of an FBI agent who detailed the agency’s interactions with social media companies. Last month, the FBI issued a statement defending its contacts with Twitter, among other social media firms.

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the statement said. “The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

Psaki, who left the White House in May and now works for MSNBC, declined to comment on the ruling on Thursday. A spokesperson for Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey declined to comment.

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry’s office said in a statement: “We have no problem with the court’s request. We look forward to obtaining more discovery.”

The appeals court has also placed a hold on three other depositions that Doughty, an appointee of President Donald Trump, approved in the case. In November, the same appeals panel said Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly and White House Director of Digital Strategy Rob Flaherty did not have to submit to questioning while the appeals court deliberated further on the issue.

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