Brooks and Capehart on the political chaos in the House

Amna Nawaz:

At the end of this chaotic, but also reflective week on Capitol Hill, with the House speaker's battle and the January 6 anniversary, we turn to the analysis of Brooks and Capehart. That's New York Times columnist David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart, associate editor for The Washington Post.

Good to see you both.

Jonathan Capehart:

Great to see you, Amna.

David Brooks:

And you.

Amna Nawaz:

So, it took four days, over a dozen rounds of votes for Kevin McCarthy to just break the logjam, to try to work towards getting the votes to become speaker. He hasn't done it yet, as we sit here and speak right now.

But, David, let's talk about the holdouts, the ones who have consistently, the small number of members who consistently oppose him and still do. Are they just anti-McCarthy? Are they never going to back him?

David Brooks:

I don't think they're anti-McCarthy.

I think there's two schools. Chip Roy, who was earlier in the program, a congressman with a goatee, he does want to change the rules. And there's a case to be made that Congress needs reform. Most of them are not like that.

And, in my view, it's wrong to call them very conservative. There are a lot of Republicans who are very conservative. These are nihilists. They came here, and they're quite open about that, especially with their friends, and they say, we just want to burn the place down.

And we normally think, those of us who go in even journalism or go into political life, for sure, that you have some positive agenda, like, you want to do something good for the country. That is absent in these people. It's a posture of rejection, a posture of negativity.

And so they just want to be negative, be oppositional, and then go on TV and say everyone else has screwed up. And so this is a form of nihilism that is in the Republican Party. It's certainly in the conservative media sphere. Tucker Carlson was very much on these guys' side.

And it's something really that's a menace to the health of that party.

Amna Nawaz:

You agree with that assessment?

Jonathan Capehart:

Absolutely.

Amna Nawaz:

Yes?

Jonathan Capehart:

Yes.

I mean, there's nothing to add really to what David said. I mean, the fact that there's going to be another vote maybe tonight, maybe tonight, he really — McCarthy breaks the logjam and gets the that he needs. But nihilists don't care about the schedule. They don't care about the timetable. They don't care that folks won't get paychecks because there's no officially no Congress. They want to blow stuff up.

And what better way to blow stuff up than to, with each vote, destroy the dreams, hopes and aspirations of Kevin McCarthy?

Amna Nawaz:

So, whether it's McCarthy or someone else, can anyone govern this caucus?

Jonathan Capehart:

At this point, no.

The rules package that they just released moments ago, whoever the next speaker is, is going to be beholden to the Freedom Caucus, beholden to these nihilists.

Amna Nawaz:

If you have a number of these Freedom Caucus members on the Rules Committee, right, if you have — Kevin McCarthy, we understand, reportedly has already allowed them to lower the threshold. It's going to be really easy to get rid of the speaker if they want to.

What does that mean for the next two years?

David Brooks:

Yes.

Well, the Rules Committee is the one that really strikes me. That's the committee that schedules, that controls the floor. And so it's just going to be a lot easier, if you got those — that many people on the Rules Committee, for them to just block things.

And so it could be nothing will happen in this Congress, just because they have the ability to block. But the thing — and I think Jonathan mentioned this last week — that absolutely has to happen is, we have to raise the debt ceiling sometime around July. And if we do that, the full faith and credit of the — if we don't do it, the full faith and credit of the United States is destroyed.

So, they're going to want to attach all sorts of riders to that the Democrats will not accept, a balanced budget amendment, things like that. And that means it's highly unlikely — I don't see how they get a debt ceiling raised in the summer with this political landscape.

And that would be catastrophic.

Amna Nawaz:

I mean, that's a remarkable thing to say.

David Brooks:

Yes, we have had the fight. I think, in 2011, there was a fight about it.

Jonathan Capehart:

Yes.

David Brooks:

But sanity prevailed.

And we are the last, best hope of Earth, but we're no longer sure sanity is going to prevail.

(LAUGHTER)

David Brooks:

So, that's what we're staring at.

Amna Nawaz:

Dare I even ask, how do you think this ends, just this round of the battle for the speakership?

Jonathan Capehart:

Oh, I — look, hope springs eternal. I think McCarthy will eke it out.

But what will it mean, really? He will be speaker in name only, living under threat of being removed every moment of his life the moment he gets the gavel.

And, to your point, my biggest fear is the debt ceiling. The only thing we can hope is that Kevin McCarthy would have enough guts and fortitude to go to Leader Jeffries and say, I need 212 of your people to vote for raising the debt limit, and I will bring six, and we can take care of this.

But, if he does that, he's done.

Amna Nawaz:

Do you see that happening?

David Brooks:

No, but I think the main threat for any normal mainstream conservative Republican is the threat the 20 on the right. The threat is not a bunch of moderate Democrats.

Jonathan Capehart:

Right.

David Brooks:

And so if I was McCarthy — and this would be a political ender in this world — I would just go to 40 Democrats and say, what do you want? Let's do that.

And it seems unrealistic, but there are a bunch of states right now that are doing that, where they have an independent speaker, where they have they have had leaders in the state legislatures who are not of the ruling party, where they have cut deals, bipartisan deal.

So it's plausible in a universe other than our own.

(LAUGHTER)

Amna Nawaz:

I mean, there's a bipartisan model we can point to this week, right, when you see — it was a pretty dramatic split screen to see President Biden and Mitch McConnell standing before what they call a legislative miracle, right, that bipartisan infrastructure bill that's going to yield a big, big build — a bridge project, rather, in Kentucky.

That's a really dramatic contrast we saw.

David Brooks:

Yes.

And this is the line, the threshold that needs to be drawn. You can like Mitch McConnell, not like Mitch McConnell, like Joe Biden, not Mitch. They're professionals. And they have a sense of basic honesty and decency. You might not like George Bush. You might not like Barack Obama. They were admirable human beings.

We're not seeing that. The threshold — we have sunk below that threshold among some — a lot of people in Congress.

Amna Nawaz:

Meanwhile, we should note, as we did earlier, a different kinds of chaos, right, on Capitol Hill two years ago.

We mark the anniversary of the January 6 insurrection today. I'm curious, the further away you get from that day, how you view it now.

Jonathan Capehart:

I still view it with trepidation.

We — I mean, just think about it. Two years ago today, we saw thousands of people instigated by the then-president of the United States who stormed the Capitol trying to overturn a free and fair election.

Exactly two years later, we're still seeing chaos in the House of Representatives, when the party of that president, a lot of whom voted not to certify the 2020 election, new folks who came in running on the big lie, going after Kevin McCarthy and not voting for him and rendering the place into chaos as part of, to my mind, the ongoing insurrection.

What happened on January 6, 2021, is still happening. And I think — to set up a contrast, this split screen moment that we're in, in this country, at opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. At one end, you have got the president of the United States working with the Senate minority leader, Republican, on bipartisan infrastructure, whatever, showing what governance can look like when opposing parties come together for the good of the country.

And at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, in the Capitol, they can't — 14 ballots so far and still don't have — don't have a speaker. It's just an ongoing — it's an ongoing insurrection. And I don't see when we — when the party gets out of it, the Republican Party gets out of it, or we as a nation get out of it.

Amna Nawaz:

Among Republicans, that election lie that drove Trump supporters to the insurrection that day, that's still very potent, right?

David Brooks:

Yes.

I think they're sort of moving on beyond Trump, but they still say it was a lie. And so there's a lack of loyalty to the truth. And when I look on — after two years, and now we have a longer time frame, so I think about the gradual — all the doors the Republican Party and the country had to walk through to get to January 6.

And, to me, I don't want to prettify the past. There was Father Coughlin. There was nativists. There's been a lot of ugliness in American history. But I would say, over the course of my lifetime, and, frankly, my, at one time, alliance with the Republican Party, there were a lot of doors they walked to that created what you might call a loss of moral knowledge that — what was it, the panic of Rush Limbaugh, the — a lot of what happened to the white Christian nationalists and the evangelical communities.

There was on the radio, on TV the rise of Tucker. And so it — the standards of acceptable behavior went down and down and down, and the tolerance for violence went up and up and up.

I read in Jonathan's fine section, The Washington Post editorial today, the number of threats to members of Congress has gone up tenfold since Donald Trump was elected, 10,000 death threats to members of Congress. So, that's just in the air. And that's not attached to one person. It's a virulent stream of ideas.

And ideas have consequences. And bad ideas have January 6.

Jonathan Capehart:

And I would add that, in all the examples they use, Tucker and Rush and everyone, what we had not seen up until Donald Trump was a sitting president of the United States — well, first, a candidate for president of the United States who stirred that pot, and then who continued to stir that pot of our nation's subterranean demons, bringing them out in the open, and then doing it from the Oval Office.

And that has a power that I think we're still reckoning with, the idea that a leader of this country, someone who's supposed to lead all of us, was using that platform, that bully pulpit, to actually bully people, specific people in this country.

And that's why we have seen, I think, threats against members of Congress or elected officials go through the roof, because, if the president of the United States can do it, well, why can't I?

Amna Nawaz:

It's been a remarkable, remarkable two years. So much has happened.

But, as you noted, it took a long, long time to get here. It will take years to unravel and fix a lot of this.

Jonathan Capehart, David Brooks, thank you so much.

Jonathan Capehart:

Thanks, Amna.

David Brooks:

Thanks, Amna.