As the dust settles over the Republicans’ tortuous path to selecting Representative Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker, it’s clearer than ever that insurrectionism is key to understanding the party’s apparent chaos and conflicts. At the most basic level, the twenty or so House members leading the rebellion against McCarthy constituted a near-perfect Venn diagram overlap with those representatives most involved with supporting and retroactively justifying Donald Trump’s attempted coup two years ago. But the motivations of these coup-supporting and -adjacent representatives provide an even more direct link to insurrectionism. I think Josh Marshall nails one huge connection here:
The members of Congress who directly participated in the failed Trump coup forced McCarthy to cede control of the House to them. Beyond the atmospherics, that’s the reality of what happened [ . . .] They now plan to interfere and derail the investigations of and possible prosecution of the coup plotters using their control of key investigative committees. In other words, the attempted coup continues, now in a rearguard action to protect the perpetrators from accountability for their actions.
These GOP members’ interests in protecting themselves from further investigations is central to their interest in wielding power. Marshall is dead on in saying that “the attempted coup continues,” but I’d go a step further, and argue that the radical Republicans of the Freedom Caucus are also potentially laying the groundwork for a future coup attempt, by obfuscating and preventing full accountability for the previous one. This is a form of corruption, certainly, but a corruption tied at its core to subverting America’s democratic order — to insurrectionism.
Reflecting on the machinations in the House, Brian Beutler neatly describes how the House rebels embody a corruption that’s inextricable from a full-on assault against democratic governance:
Their aims as legislative terrorists, such as we can discern them, aren’t the kinds of nonstarter policy demands that marked Republican hostage taking in the Obama years (gut Medicare, defund the Affordable Care Act, etc). They are rooted in the realm of corruption. They want to steal elections. They want to sabotage criminal investigations that implicate themselves, Donald Trump, and January 6 defendants, current and future [. . .] They want to institutionalize a standard of impunity for Republicans caught in the reach of legitimate oversight, and a different standard of total compliance for Democrats, whether investigating them is merited or not.
“They want to steal elections” is a pithy distillation of what these House kingmakers want — a future goal verified by past behavior. But what makes this an existential problem for the United States, and a looming challenge for the Democratic Party, is that it should be clear by now that the entire House GOP has made itself complicit in this insurrectionary agenda. Again, Beutler gets to the heart of what’s happening here, writing, “[The broader House GOP’s] failure to confront the MAGA wing is an endorsement of the MAGA uprising over the alternative of conceding an inch to political reality or the national interest.” Describing advice he’d offer to newly-elected minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, he goes on to writes that:
it’d be timely for him to drive the wedge a little deeper. To make it clear that the GOP’s unanimous decision to reject any kind of consensus, to relinquish any claim on the right to set off bombs on Capitol Hill, constitutes a party-wide endorsement of the MAGA takeover. That what we’re witnessing here isn’t dysfunction so much as the entire party going through the stages of grief before re-embracing the politics of insurrection and MAGA-style fascism with open eyes.
There are some hopeful signs that using the lens of insurrectionism to describe the GOP’s behavior is growing traction, at least among liberal commentators like Beutler and Marshall. But in addition to this perspective needing to be adopted as a basic pro-democracy tenet of mainstream media, it’s essential that the Democrats hammer home this view. Thus far, at least some Democrats get it: Representative Ilhan Omar recently referred to McCarthy’s “deal with far right insurrectionists that would hold the entire US and global economy hostage to extreme cuts to everything from housing to education, healthcare, Social Security and Medicare,” while Representative Sean Casten had tweeted that, “If McCarthy wins tonight, it will be because - on January 6, of all days - he put members who were implicated in J6 in positions of great power. Will the so-called "moderate" Rs object, or will they simply repeat the "silence of our friends" mistake they made 2 years ago?” And writing of the agonized Speaker election, Representative Jamie Raskin tweeted that, “This once-in-a-century humiliation of a party’s nominee for Speaker is chickens coming home to roost for McCarthy, who whitewashed right-wing insurrectionism on the House floor. Nobody’s getting killed now, but the House GOP now sleeps in the bed they made with Trump and Bannon.”
Many others, like minority leader Jeffries, have laid down Democratic attacks that talk about the extremism of the Republicans running the GOP show — but without calling out the fundamentally illegitimate ends of Republican power. And so what still remains for the Democrats to do is to make a consistent and persuasive case to the American public that GOP behavior no longer constitutes American politics as usual, but is fully aimed at subverting democratic politics, free and fair elections, and accountability for those who commit heinous crimes against the public interest. It is fair and accurate to use the framework of insurrectionism to convey the true horror and danger of our political times.