2023-10-04 11:00:09
Can we still count on the United States of America? The question arises, after the tragicomedy of Tuesday October 3, which ended with the ouster of the Republican “speaker” (president) of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, after the defection of a handful of radicalized elected officials . What is at stake goes beyond the fate of a man finally devoured by the tiger he thought he could ride. This is about the institutional functioning of the leading world power, which will be out of budget in around forty days. It is also about its ability to provide an attacked country, Ukraine, with crucial aid for its survival.
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Elected with great difficulty in January in the fifteenth round of voting, after having multiplied the concessions to the wing claiming to be the most loyal to former President Donald Trump, the elected official from California will go down in history for the most in short, to this function since 1876 and for this excommunication served by part of his own troops. After accepting the opening of an impeachment investigation against President Joe Biden on more than fragile grounds and overwhelming the House Democrats with criticism, he could hardly expect them to save him.
Kevin McCarthy and his gravedigger, Florida elected official Matt Gaetz, are the faces of what the Republican Party has become in less than two decades, from the emergence within it of the quasi-insurrectional Tea Party movement in 2009, driven mainly by hatred of the federal state. The Grand Old Party has transformed itself into a party of disorder, agitated by purges justified by a concern for ideological purity which often masks pure personal ambitions, subjected to a Donald Trump who is drowning in legal proceedings.
Democratic dysfunction
Compromised in the attempt to invalidate the results of the 2020 presidential election during the vote which followed the infamous assault on the Capitol by a Trumpist horde (a good hundred Republican elected representatives of the House had voted against these results), the Party Republican has proven incapable, first and foremost Kevin McCarthy, of breaking with the instigator of this chaos. This servility was not repaid. Donald Trump decided today to undermine the functioning of the party by shunning the televised primary debates and insulting his conservative adversaries with the regularity of a metronome. We can imagine what a dizzying vertical of power he would put in place, without even mentioning his plan to purge the federal state of any element deemed suspicious, if the polls were favorable to him in 2024.
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The basis of the Republican crisis is a democratic dysfunction which manifests itself in the centrality of primaries in which only one in five voters participate, at the expense of the most moderate candidates. This drift is verified in general elections decided in advance in approximately 350 constituencies out of the 435 that make up the House of Representatives, as much due to electoral gerrymandering as to the deep break of the United States into two countries that disagree on everything, or almost. The impossible hegemony of one camp over the other should force compromises, while the prospect of the latter has become anathema.
The field of ruins that the House of Representatives has become can only worry the allies of the United States and delight their adversaries. These adversaries can count on the blindness of Republicans who claim to be patriots.
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