What happened to House GOP centrists?
They finally had a chance to defeat Trump extremists who turned the U.S. House of Representatives into a dysfunctional clown show for three weeks.
But instead of grabbing control from the radicals, they caved and gave their votes to a low-profile agent of Trump chaos, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.).
Johnson is an election denier who refused to vote to certify the 2020 election results. He also signed an amicus brief supporting Texas’s lawsuit to overturn President Biden’s victory in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“Mike Johnson wants to criminalize abortion care. … Mike Johnson wants to end Social Security and Medicare as we know it,” said House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). “Those are extreme views.”
Earlier, in the fight to name a Speaker, a group of 20 or so moderate House Republicans looked ready to defeat the radicals. They blocked Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a Freedom Caucus extremist, from the top job.
Jordan is a high-profile election denier and a central player in former President Donald Trump’s plot to overturn the last presidential election.
Once Jordan was defeated, the far-right actors were busy knifing each other.
That’s when the centrists had the opportunity to get the House GOP caucus back on the path of conservatism that had won the presidency for former Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
They were steps from victory when Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) won enough votes to take his nomination to full vote on the House floor. But Trump denounced him as a “Globalist RINO.” Emmer’s sin was having voted to certify the 2020 election results and having been openly critical of the violent attack on the capitol by Trump supporters.
Once Emmer withdrew, the centrists folded, confirming their impotence.
“This has been about who can appease Donald Trump,” Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) astutely observed of the three weeks of dysfunction in the House caused by far-right, Trump Republicans battling each other to lead the Republican majority.
The heart of the centrist House bloc that chickened out comprises 18 Republicans representing congressional districts where President Biden got more votes than Trump.
Beyond those swing-district members, there are middle-of-the-road Republicans with pragmatic approaches to fiscal issues and national security as well as centrist conservative views on social issues.
If you look at the membership of three of the House GOP’s leading coalitions — the Problem Solvers, the Governance group and Main Street Republicans — they had enough firepower to keep the Speaker’s chair vacant and force the GOP to accept someone less extreme. They could have even worked with Democrats to that end. Instead, they turned tail and ran.
Now the meager opposition to Trump on Capitol Hill is among Republicans in the Senate. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the leader of the GOP caucus, remains no fan of Trump, but he rarely condemns the Trump-led extremists in the Senate or the House. McConnell limits his opposition to votes on funding the government and support for U.S. defense of Ukraine and Israel.
At this point, the only Republicans daring to speak up about the odious decay caused by Trump are being pushed out of Congress or they have already been thrown out.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) leads the soon-to-depart Republican opposition to Trump.
“I don’t really have a home in my party,” Romney told CBS last week. “I come from a tradition of, you know, Ronald Reagan, and George Herbert Walker Bush, and George W. Bush, and John McCain … anti-Putin … anti-authoritarians … involved in the world because it’s in America’s interest, [Republicans who believe] character counts. … That’s the party I’ve come from. And I don’t recognize that in the great majority of our party today. And that, for me, is very troubling.”
Former House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney leads the already-ousted caucus of traditional conservatives opposed to Trump’s impact on the GOP brand.
“I don’t even know [if] I should call it my own party,” Cheney said last week, essentially echoing Romney in lamenting the state of the party in Trump’s grip. When she was asked about threats made against House Republicans and their families for opposing far-right, Trump-backed candidates for Speaker, Cheney pointed to Trump.
“The domestic threats are absolutely being driven by Donald Trump and … his supporters, who in fact have encouraged and taken steps that have resulted in, as we saw on Jan. 6, political violence,” Cheney said.
Cheney was referring to reports that Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska] and his wife received threats after he refused to back Rep. Jim Jordan, a founder of the extreme, Trump-supporting House Freedom Caucus.
Cheney later described some House Republican Trump loyalists as not only glad to break the government but “frankly, some of whom are white supremacists, some of whom are Anti-Semitic.”
“I think Donald Trump is the single most dangerous threat we face,” Cheney concluded.
I’m a Democrat. I never thought I’d have to celebrate Romney and Cheney for their traditional Republican ideas – respect for election results, trying to govern and opposition to authoritarian governments.
But times change.
Republicans need some centrists with a backbone in Congress.
If the MAGA extremists throw out Johnson for working with Democrats to keep the government open, they’ll need a new speaker.
Speaker Romney? Speaker Cheney?
Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.