A few days before 2022 midterm elections, The New York Times’ Ezra Klein wrote a column about the cycle’s stakes. As 2023 has unfolded, I’ve occasionally found myself thinking about the column’s opening paragraph:
What Republicans are offering, if they win the 2022 elections, is not conservatism. It is crisis. More accurately, it is crises. A debt-ceiling crisis. An election crisis. And a body blow to the government’s efforts to prepare for a slew of other crises we know are coming.
In fact, around this time a year ago, with time running out before Election Day 2022, there was some national polling suggesting Americans expected a GOP majority Congress, should it exist, to focus on concerns such as gas prices and street crime.
Quite a few observers tried to remind the electorate that there was a gap between those expectations and what Republicans were likely to deliver if given an opportunity to govern. To an extent, the warnings had an impact — Democrats expanded their Senate majority, and House Republicans fell far short of expectations and historical models — but when the dust settled on the election cycle, the GOP nevertheless ended up with a majority in the lower chamber.
And it was at that point that the party began keeping its promises: Republicans left little doubt that they’d create crises if put in positions of authority, and after being rewarded by voters anyway, the public has spent the year watching the GOP’s House majority careen from one crisis to another.
To be sure, the events of the last 10 days have been extraordinary. After all, Republicans ousted a sitting House speaker for the first time in American history, and then a week later, many GOP members rejected their own party’s nominee for speaker-designate literally one day after he won an intraparty election.
But this is also the same party that launched a debt ceiling crisis in the spring, threatened to shut down the government a few weeks ago, might yet cause a government shutdown in the near future, and launched a presidential impeachment inquiry despite not having any evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing.
It’s extraordinary, but it’s not altogether surprising. As regular readers know, at issue is a Republican conference filled with members who’ve been told they don’t have to accept compromises. Or election results. Or concessions. Or those who tell them to respect norms, traditions, or the institution in which they serve.
It’s difficult to watch these chaotic conditions unfold on Capitol Hill, but let no one say we didn’t see this coming. Republicans offered voters crises, and now the party is keeping its promises.
