POLITICS
A Lost Television Remote
The Dysfunction of the House of Representatives
In the midst of dysfunction the other day, I had an epiphany. I was looking for the television remotes (one for the smart TV, and one for the cable box), and couldn’t find them anywhere. I assume I’m not the only one that lives with a spouse and children and has this problem.
We actually do have a place for all the remotes to go, all three different types of them (also includes a DVD remote; we still occasionally use this technology). But they rarely are found in that place. They are usually scattered around the living room, never together, and never seemingly in the same place twice. In fact, I even have more than one of each remote type for just such occasions, but those duplicates are either hopelessly lost themselves, or don’t have batteries in them yet, all due to laziness and/or procrastination on my part. It’s the one thing I can count on each day: the daily search for these remotes.
I admit, this must seem pretty dysfunctional. I mean, what a ridiculous state of affairs when an item has an obvious place to go, but is never put there, and I allow myself to go to extreme measures just to compensate for the fact that I know the rules won’t be followed. So my solutions are meant to solve the problems that emerge when the original solution is not recognized, as opposed to just clearly enforcing the original rule.
Again, I assume I’m not alone here. If I am, I just confessed to some alarming dysfunction, and thus embarrassed myself. But I digress; this anecdote does have a point, after all.
When thinking later in the day about the situation in the House of Representatives, this remote search episode sprung to mind. My personal remote dysfunction is really an apt metaphor for the situation in the House right now; or, more specifically, the situation of the House Republicans and their efforts to elect the next Speaker of the House.
In my remotes search, I once again succumbed to the dysfunction, just as I always do. The first thing I did was glance around the room, to no avail. No remote in sight. I looked on the floor, the kitchen table, I scrounged around in the couch cushions, even got on my knees to look underneath the couches, and engaged the footrest and recline mechanism on one of the couches for maximum floor visibility. All frustratingly unproductive…still no remote.
After giving up all hope, my epiphany was the thought that the remotes may actually be where they are supposed to go. I got up from my humbling prostrate position and looked in the couch receptacle that is the remotes’ assigned spot. And sure enough, there they were, just as they were supposed to be.
When I think about why I hadn’t looked there in the first place, I realized it’s because the remote situation had gotten so dysfunctional that I was enveloped in it and expected this dysfunction to be the default condition. It’s so common that the remotes would not be where they were supposed to go, and so ingrained that nothing is ever done about it, that I just went along with the dysfunction as if it should be the normal state.
This is what’s happening with Republicans in the House. They are now so dysfunctional that it is expected that they will behave with more dysfunction. It is not even a question that they could or would behave otherwise, they have become defined by this dysfunctional behavior, and that is their default state.
Last week I wrote an article entitled “Let’s Call McCarthy’s Ouster What it Really Was: Bipartisanship”, in which I explained and predicted that it was likely that we were going to get a reasonable moderate consensus builder for the next Speaker. The reason for this is really pretty logical and based partly on math: there are enough Republicans in “Lean-Dem” or toss-up districts that will be motivated to make the Republicans not seem like insane arsonists in order to increase their chances of being reelected.
Also, I explained, the Republican majority is so thin that any small fracture suddenly shifts power to the Democrats. And if the fracture is wide enough, the only possible way to move forward on anything is to compromise with the Democrats. I’m not the only one out there that thinks this, but I do seem to be in the minority.
Some pundits have suggested that the Dems really missed a great political opportunity to “save” the country from further turmoil by “helping” Republicans and voting with their choice, which would have made the Democrats look like the reasonable adults in the room that are serious about governing. But this would have been the equivalent of them giving up their power, because they could have — and, in fact, did — bided their time to maximize their ability to negotiate a better alternative.
I got a lot of push-back from readers, not so much because they thought that the logic was wrong. They may have thought that, but they were more vocal about the idea that no “moderate” Republican exists, so this scenario was impossible, or not even worth considering. They’re all MAGA, they all stick together, they’re all extreme and will never work with Dems, etc. etc. They implored me to give them a name, any name, that would fit the description of this unfathomable consensus candidate for Speaker.
I do understand this reasoning, but it misses something about politics in general: behavior changes when the incentives change.
It doesn’t matter that there are no “moderates” in the Republican party at the moment, or that there haven’t been for a long time. I can’t name a perfect Republican representative that will fit this description, no one can. But that’s not the point. The point is that someone will be the one to shift their behavior now that the incentives have changed. This person may not have seemed like a moderate at any point in the past, but now they will do everything in their power to appear to be moderate. Two years from now, we’ll be describing this person as “moderate. In fact, there will probably be several of them, not just one. From this pool, a consensus-building Speaker is likely to emerge.
The incentive structure has changed to the point that if Republicans want to stay in power, they have to appear to not be crazy. This has existed for a while now, simmering underneath the surface, but hadn’t been fully pushed to the fore of political consciousness until Matt Gaetz rolled out the crazy train for everyone to see and moved to vacate the Speakership. Then the Democrats made the calculation that they would oblige and vote out McCarthy in bipartisan fashion — along with 8 Republicans — in order to maximize the nation’s exposure to the Republicans’ visit to Crazy Town.
Political shifts tend to occur in extraordinary circumstances. No one that I can remember predicted that the whole Republican Party would cower so sheepishly to Trump and MAGA seven years ago. People once thought of as respectable elder statesmen of the GOP started behaving in shockingly deplorable ways that most of us never thought possible. The last seven years or so of Trump/MAGA/QAnon leadership at the party’s helm was certainly extraordinary, as is the Republicans’ current debilitating fracture. This fever is bound to break at some point, and this appears to be is the moment where it breaks.
The force that’s been keeping it in place is the same type of dysfunction that fuels my television remotes situation. The dysfunction of the Republican Party has morphed into a very powerful force, to the point that laziness and procrastination has been putting off any type of enforcement of a logical norm.
This has resulted in efforts to resolve the situation with acquiescence to the dysfunction, so that more and more effort goes into behavior that eases the anxieties at the time as opposed to behavior that actually eradicates the dysfunction. And we’ve all gotten so accustomed to this dysfunction that it’s hard to see around and through it. The expected illogical behavior is so expected now that the logical behavior seems so out of the ordinary as to not be possible.
But, just like the remote being put where it belongs every once in a while, sometimes political dysfunction no longer serves a purpose and politicians change course. Who in particular takes up the leadership role in this is irrelevant and unpredictable at this moment. The point is that the incentive structure has changed, voters in battleground districts have proven that they do care about the House not seeming crazy, and therefore the representatives from those districts will behave accordingly, or else they will easily lose the 2024 elections.
Furthermore, the Republicans as a whole will be more likely to lose the majority in the House. This very well could result in the House being the model of good governance when the Speakership battle is all settled. Just like the good feelings of the remotes being where they belong, even in this era of politics it’s possible for things to feel right, at least some of the time.
