Aziz Huq Contributes to Roundtable Discuss About McCarthy’s Ouster as Speaker of the House

‘What Is Broken in American Politics Is the Republican Party’

October 6, 2023 POLITICO Magazine

It’s not easy to shock official Washington, but the sudden defenestration of Kevin McCarthy managed to surprise and unsettle even those who had predicted it since he was elected speaker earlier this year.

While McCarthy became the first speaker ever ousted by a motion to vacate, he’s the latest in a long line of GOP leaders to do battle with conservative rebels and be felled in one way or another. John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and now McCarthy — those are the recent ones, but the pattern goes back to Newt Gingrich. Why does this keep happening?

We asked some of the smartest thinkers and observers of politics and Capitol Hill to weigh in. Something seems broken in American politics — but what is it? Does the dysfunction stem from a sickness in the Republican Party, or is it decay in the institution of Congress? Or is it something else entirely — and is there a way to fix things, so we can return to some semblance of a healthy democracy?

Their responses leaned heavily toward blaming a populist, Trumpian, or even nihilistic turn in the GOP, although others took issue with the premise of the question, arguing that stability in politics isn’t always a sign of health or that American politics may not be as fractured as it seems. Few, though, were optimistic about improvement any time soon.

Here’s what they had to say:

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‘Another profound repudiation of the Constitution’s core’

By Aziz Huq

Aziz Huq teaches law at the University of Chicago and is the author of The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies.

A gloating Steve Bannon concisely caught the underlying hard-right goal of driving Kevin McCarthy from the speakership: Dismantle people’s belief that “government is a benefit.” The project is pure chutzpah: Disable Congress in plain sight, and then loudly complain that the government you’ve just wrecked doesn’t work. In its method and its aims, it is a project at war with the Constitution.

Consider method first: For its operation, the Constitution’s design presumes legislators who prize national interest over what James Madison called “factious,” local interest. Madison thought that national elections would “refine and enlarge” the quality of national representations in comparison to their local peers. To us, this seems optimistic at best. But politicians are not just the sum of the structural forces acting on them (gerrymandering, dark money, etc.). They have agency, and can make choices. Those on the hard right who precipitated McCarthy’s fall demonstrated an unblinking zealotry and contempt for their colleagues within and beyond the party in ways that exemplify the spirit Madison repudiated. It is a spirit, as McCarthy himself acknowledged in his resignation speech, sharply at odds with the Constitution’s design.

And what of aims? The Framers conducted a “Revolution in favor of government,” to quote the historian Max Edling. They built a government that would work. While the outer contours of federal power have long been contested, the core aim of the Constitution to create a working state to meet the international and economic challenges of the day was never in doubt. Advocates of the hard-right project today deeply misunderstand the Framers here. In effect, they ignore the first four aims listed in the Constitution in favor of an emphasis on “Liberty” (for the select, right-thinking few, at least). Such selectivity is, in its own way, another profound repudiation of the Constitution’s core.