For this House GOP majority, nothing comes easy

Hours after Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) secured his party’s nomination for speaker of the House, the steady drip of less encouraging news continued.

Rep. George Santos (R-NY) announced he was “an ANYONE but Scalise” (dramatic emphasis in the original).

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The indicted lawmaker declared he was defecting for the most Santosian reasons: “after 10 months and having had 0 contact or outreach from him, I’ve come to the conclusion that my VOTE doesn’t matter to him.”

Except Scalise can only lose four Republican votes on the House floor, assuming all Democrats vote against him. With Santos’s desertion, the sitting House majority leader is well on his way to the number of holdouts that forced defenestrated former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to go 15 rounds to win his abbreviated stint with the gavel.

Santos’s vote does matter. So does that of every Republican whose motivations range from the self-interested to the ideological, as McCarthy himself learned.

Just before Santos became the latest to announce his intention to withhold support from his Louisiana colleague on the floor came another news alert: former President Donald Trump is not expected to help Scalise become speaker.

Trump had endorsed Scalise’s rival for the speaker nomination, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH).

Some of this was inevitable. House Republicans, with Scalise’s blessing, opted to report their nominee for speaker out of conference with a simple majority rather than change the rules to require 217 votes out of the starting gate.

The speedy approval of Scalise averted a protracted fight within the House Republican Conference, but virtually guaranteed one on the House floor.

If Republicans were in no hurry to project a united front in order to pass spending bills and avoid a government shutdown, the Hamas attacks on Israel might have accelerated their timeline.

But the war in Israel hasn’t gotten GOP lawmakers on the same page, at least not yet.

Scalise could once again prove the doubters wrong on Thursday, just as McCarthy did many times before him — until he didn’t.

There is also the question, being asked by jittery centrists and recalcitrant conservatives alike, of whether all this historic speaker-toppling and chaos was worth it to just bump Scalise — whose politics aren’t radically different from McCarthy’s — an extra wrung up the ladder.

Consequently, not every Republican is going to pass up the opportunity to elect the first Freedom Caucus speaker easily. For them, Scalise’s Republican Study Committee credentials simply won’t do.

There is also the question of sending a bigger message with the speakership than to award the gavel to another member of the existing leadership team.

But eventually, other considerations also matter. Among them: the House is the only part of the federal government’s elected branches Republicans presently control and it cannot function without a full-time speaker.

At some point, Republicans need to start governing with and working to defend in the fast-approaching 2024 elections the majority they have rather than the more homogeneously conservative one many of them would prefer.

Democrats and Republicans alike share one dilemma in common. Both parties, or at least their activist bases, have sweeping agendas they can seldom win sufficient political power to enact. Instead of attributing this to polarization and their candidates limited popular appeal, the base blames their leaders’ weakness and treachery.

Both parties are fighting to purify their leadership, or in Trump’s case liberate it from normal political constraints. They are also looking to maximize their opportunities while in power.

American political institutions are largely built to require a level of consensus in favor of major changes that is rarely possible in today’s climate. The most recent exception was the big Democratic congressional majorities that accompanied Barack Obama to power in 2009.

But the consensus behind those majorities was largely a negative one, a repudiation of George W. Bush. When Obama and the Democrats began to act on their positive agenda, they were swiftly rebuked by the voters and those majorities ceased to exist in the 2010 elections.

Where progressives envision bulldozing all the obstacles in their way by nuking the filibuster, abolishing the Senate, and scrapping the Electoral College, conservatives try to govern as a minority within a majority, extracting concessions from their leadership through constant threats of regime change and attempting to leverage them from Democratic presidents through blocking must-pass legislation like spending bills or the federal debt ceiling extensions.

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That’s the long game in the Scalise speakership fight, though some have shorter-term objectives.

Until the impasse is resolved one way or another, many voters will have the same question of the GOP majority that Casey Stengel asked about the 1962 New York Mets: “Can’t anyone here play this game?”