From Gingrich to McCarthy, the Roots of Governance by Chaos

[ancianita]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/07/us/politics/speaker-mccarthy-gingrich-trump.html

...The bitterly partisan stalemates of the Gingrich era may well have metastasized into a state of governance by chaos.

Mr. Gingrich’s arrival in Washington in 1979 happened to coincide with the installation that same year of C-SPAN’s cameras inside the House chamber, enabling once-obscure members of Congress to reach a national audience with combative monologues that dragged on into the night. “Gingrich was the one who understood how to use the C-SPAN cameras,” said Mark Sanford, a Republican member of the 1994 class. “And I’d say that was one of the tools that over time helped coarsen the process and led to this increasing degree of militarism we’re seeing.”

Though Mr. Gingrich and his two lieutenants, Dick Armey, the House majority leader, and Tom DeLay, the majority whip, preached ruthless partisanship, in the end, Mr. Gingrich was forced out of power by his fellow Republicans in 1998 after agreeing to a budget deal with Mr. Clinton. The party lost the House majority in 2006, “though frankly, even before then, the Gingrich faction did not feel that they had won when George W. Bush won, because they weren’t interested in his ‘compassionate conservatism,’” Mr. Hoyer recalled.

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 thrust Mr. Gingrich back into relevancy. On the night of Mr. Obama’s inauguration, the former speaker gathered at a Washington steakhouse with a small group of desultory Republicans that also included a second-term congressman from California, Kevin McCarthy. It was Mr. McCarthy who, consulting his inner Gingrich, urged a hyperaggressive approach to Democratic control in Washington.


...As the G.O.P. dissidents huddled Friday with team McCarthy in search of a deal that would dilute the new speaker’s power, Ms. Greene observed that this was exactly the kind of back-room scheming that the group purported to abhor. “It’s pure ego,” she said of the Never Kevin brigade. Mr. Gingrich, for his part, takes a relatively cheery long view of his party’s machinations. “I ran three times before I won on the third race,” he said. “We spent 16 years in the House trying for the majority before we finally won it.”

And for the current G.O.P., he said, “we’re in a period where everything’s going to be very hard.”

This is good read on the history of "zealous cooperation over zero sum," and that Democrats have suffered through and learned over two generations. And for that, for Pelosi, and the old heads who remember, today's Democrats are all the more united under Speaker Hakeem Jeffries and Speaker Schumer. Over the next two years we need to recount to voters just how long we've been in that zero sum forest so that they see that what's ahead is planned and practiced chaos. And to remember to fend off the corporate media hype that's coming if we make even one misstep. No more Charlie Brown with Lucy and the football -- either from any nicey outreach by the coup caucus, or from the gaming lingo by corporate media who helped keep the zero sum and chaos going all along.

[KT2000]

1. Also recall that

he put newcomers/troublemakers into committee chairmanship positions which is what McCarthy will do too.

[ancianita]

2. I do. But today, two can play the gaming rule to 'make the motion to vacate' -- Democrats, too,

who don't like McCarthy's committee decisions can move to vacate. So there's that.