Republicans identify their enemy and they are them. Republican altercations against themselves

 Echo opinion published in The Washington Post by Dana Millbank:  "I will fight anyone who says congressional Republicans are competent."

Reasonable people can disagree about which member of Congress was most unreasonable this week.

Was it Kevin McCarthy? After one of the eight Republican backbenchers who ousted the former speaker claimed McCarthy sucker-punched him in the kidneys, causing “a lot of pain,” the California Republican responded by saying that “if I kidney-punched someone, they would be on the ground.”

Was it Senator Markwayne Mullin? At a hearing of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the Oklahoma Republican challenged one of the witnesses to “stand your butt up” and fight him then and there in the committee room. “In a fight, I’m gonna bite,” the senator said in a podcast after the incident. “And I don’t care where I bite, by the way.”

Republicans use physical violence to censure each other.  

Was it James Comer? The Kentucky Republican, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, exploded at an otherwise sleepy hearing on the General Services Administration, repeatedly shouting “bulls---” at a junior Democratic member of the committee and telling him: “No, I’m not going to give you your time back! … You look like a Smurf!"

Was it the perennial (retired street walker 😈 ) winner Marjorie Taylor Greene? After eight fellow Republicans thwarted her attempt to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, one of them said Greene lacks “maturity.” Greene responded by telling her 2.8 million followers on X that the man who called her immature was a “p---y” who does not have testicles.

Or was it late-entrant George Santos? On Thursday, the House Ethics Committee said the New York Republican had “brought severe discredit upon the House” and that it had uncovered “additional uncharged and unlawful conduct” beyond the 23 charges he already faces. Santos responded by claiming he was being “stoned by those who have flaws themselves” — and by calling for a constitutional convention. He dropped his reelection bid, as he prepares a possible move from the House to the big house.

The week began with Greene’s failed attempt on the House floor to impeach Mayorkas. It continued with a failed initial attempt to bring a temporary spending patch to the floor to keep the federal government open for another 60 days. And it ended in a yet another failed vote on the floor, in which 19 Republicans blocked GOP leaders from beginning debate on the annual Commerce, Justice and Science appropriations bill. In the past, it was unheard of for lawmakers to defy their own party leaders on such routine procedural votes. This year, it is commonplace.

After this last failure, which followed similar failures on the floor in recent weeks to pass four other appropriations bills because of intra-GOP squabbles, House leaders called off further votes for the week and sent lawmakers home early for Thanksgiving to “cool off,” as the new speaker, Mike Johnson, put it.

Now, Johnson (R-La.) has passed exactly the same sort of “clean” temporary bill that cost McCarthy his job. And once again, GOP leadership came crawling to Democrats to supply most of the votes. After all the trauma, House Republicans are right back where they started.

As Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.) put it to Politico: “It’s the same clown car with a different driver.”

Six weeks ago, House Republicans ousted McCarthy because he relied on Democratic votes to pass a “clean” temporary spending bill to keep the government open without demanding spending cuts. They shut the House down for 22 days while they found a new speaker.

There is one thing about which there can be no debate: This is what Republican governance looks like in the year 2023. It has been one kidney punch after another to competent leadership.

“We’ve had enough!” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), head of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, told reporters on Wednesday after he and his colleagues shut the House down yet again by blocking debate on the latest spending bill. “We’re not going to be part of the failure theater anymore.”

After the House called off votes for the rest of the week, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), a Freedom Caucus member, held the floor for 55 minutes, railing against his own newly elected leadership. “What in the hell are we doing in this chamber?” he demanded. “I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing — one — that I can go campaign on and say we did. One!” he shouted.

A Cabinet-level officer has not been impeached since 1876. House Republicans would very much like to change that, but they don’t yet have the votes. That might be because they haven’t produced evidence of high crimes or misdemeanors by Mayorkas — only evidence that he is implementing President Biden’s policies, which they do not like.

Greene used a “privileged resolution” (a maneuver seldom used in the past but also commonplace in this Congress) to force a snap vote on Monday night on impeaching the secretary without completing an impeachment inquiry. As lawmakers carried on conversations, the House clerk read Greene’s venomous resolution about “willful admittance of … terrorists”; “the invasion of approximately 10,000,000 illegals”; “border crosser[s] who have invaded”; “gotaways”; and even “illegal people.”

After such white-nationalist bromides, 200 other Republicans sided with Greene. Among them was Rep. Tony Gonzales (Tex.), who had earlier called his fellow Republicans’ border policies “un-Christian.” But now that Gonzales is facing primary challengers backed by members of the House Freedom Caucus, he held a news conference at which he said was “honored” to stand with his “good friend” Greene and thank her “for her leadership.”

I asked Gonzales about all of Greene’s “invasion” talk, which she repeated at the news conference. “I, I, uh — 435 members, we all have different styles,” he replied.

After her impeachment resolution went down, Greene railed, in a video posted on social media, against Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who thwarted her. “If we have people serving on Judiciary Committee that don’t believe in impeachment, then why are they on this committee?” she demanded.

One of those lawmakers, Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.), told a few of us on Tuesday morning that Greene “lacks the maturity and the experience to understand what she was asking.” This prompted Greene’s allegation that Issa “lacks” part of the male anatomy.

Greene confronted Mayorkas on Wednesday as he testified before the Homeland Security committee and told him, “You can honorably resign, or we are going to impeach you — and it’s happening very, very soon.”

But before Greene could force another vote on impeaching Mayorkas, she had more crazy to attend to. At the same hearing on Wednesday, she demanded that the FBI, which she erroneously asserted was part of the Department of Homeland Security, “stop targeting innocent grandmothers and veterans who walked through the Capitol on January 6th” as part of an “event.”

Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana, another Republican on the panel, joined in the insurrection insanity. He alleged (with an accompanying poster) that he had identified two “ghost buses,” painted white, that were “nefarious in nature and were filled with FBI informants dressed as Trump supporters deployed onto our Capitol on January 6th.”

Your party is drowning in disinformation and conspiracy theories. Who you gonna call?

Ghost buses.

Maybe Rep. Tim Burchett had it coming. Speaking with a few of us outside the GOP caucus meeting on Tuesday morning in the Capitol basement, the Tennessee Republican, one of the eight who helped oust McCarthy, renewed his accusation that McCarthy “lied to me.”

As the caucus meeting broke up, Burchett was talking with NPR’s Claudia Grisales in the hallway when “McCarthy shoved Burchett,” Grisales recounted, and Burchett “lunged towards me.”Burchett chased after McCarthy, yelling “You got no guts” and “you’re pathetic, man.” He then gave a series of interviews on the Capitol steps, telling CNN’s Manu Raju that it was “a clean shot to the kidneys.”

As Burchett finished the interview, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) walked over and pretended to shove the startled Burchett.

McCarthy denied he intentionally hit Burchett, but McCarthy antagonist Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) immediately filed a complaint with the House Ethics Committee saying the former speaker “assaulted Representative Tim Burchett.” Gaetz, the target of an Ethics Committee inquiry into alleged sexual misconduct, said the panel should be “interviewing, under oath, the alleged assailant.”

Informed by reporters that Gaetz had filed the complaint, McCarthy responded with a smile: “I think Ethics is a good place for Gaetz to be.”Maybe Rep. Tim Burchett had it coming. Speaking with a few of us outside the GOP caucus meeting on Tuesday morning in the Capitol basement, the Tennessee Republican, one of the eight who helped oust McCarthy, renewed his accusation that McCarthy “lied to me.”

As the caucus meeting broke up, Burchett was talking with NPR’s Claudia Grisales in the hallway when “McCarthy shoved Burchett,” Grisales recounted, and Burchett “lunged towards me.”

Burchett chased after McCarthy, yelling “You got no guts” and “you’re pathetic, man.” He then gave a series of interviews on the Capitol steps, telling CNN’s Manu Raju that it was “a clean shot to the kidneys.”

As Burchett finished the interview, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) walked over and pretended to shove the startled Burchett.

McCarthy denied he intentionally hit Burchett, but McCarthy antagonist Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) immediately filed a complaint with the House Ethics Committee saying the former speaker “assaulted Representative Tim Burchett.” Gaetz, the target of an Ethics Committee inquiry into alleged sexual misconduct, said the panel should be “interviewing, under oath, the alleged assailant.”

Informed by reporters that Gaetz had filed the complaint, McCarthy responded with a smile: “I think Ethics is a good place for Gaetz to be.”

The Senate has been a relative bastion of tranquility and sanity this year. But there are exceptions. One is Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.). Since February, the former college football coach has blocked more than 400 military nominations in protest against the Pentagon’s abortion policies. 

A few Republicans have gone to the floor repeatedly to force him to object to the nominations, one by one, for hours at a time. This week, they kept him there until 3:44 a.m. Thursday.

Tuberville refuses to budge, no matter how much damage he does to military readiness and officer retention. “The only thing in this world I honor more than our military is the Constitution,” said the man who in 2020 claimed that the three branches of government were “the House, the Senate, and the executive.”  😡😟😕

Now, however, Mullin is trying to dethrone Tuberville as the most pugilistic Republican in the Senate. As McCarthy was allegedly elbowing Burchett’s kidneys, Mullin, on the other side of the Rotunda, was threatening to do even worse to Teamsters president Sean O’Brien over the witness’s past trash talk on social media.


“If you want to run your mouth, we can be two consenting adults. We can finish it here,” said Mullin, a McCarthy friend who graduated from the House to the Senate in January.


“Okay, that’s fine. Perfect,” O’Brien answered.


“You want to do it right now?”


“I’d love to do it right now.”


“Well stand your butt up right now then.”


“You stand your butt up, big guy.”


Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) intervened. “Sit down!” he admonished Mullin. “You’re a United States senator.”


Mullin, a former wrestler and mixed martial arts fighter, told reporters he had no regrets about his behavior. “How do you not handle it that way?” he asked.


Shortly thereafter, at an otherwise sleepy House Oversight Committee hearing, Moskowitz needled Comer over a recent Daily Beast article accusing the chairman of having the same sort of family business dealings and conflicts of interest that he wants to impeach Biden for. Comer nearly went all Markwayne Mullin on the “Smurf.” (Moskowitz was wearing a light blue suit and tie.)


The article asserts that Comer and his brother operated a “shell company,” that “Comer channeled extra money to his brother, seemingly from nothing,” and that Comer had family agriculture interests at the same time he “held important positions in agriculture oversight.”


Comer went on a rambling, sputtering diatribe. “My father, who was a dentist, had some farmland. … All this bullshit … dumb, financially illiterate people. … I’m one of the largest landowners. … You’ve already been proven a liar. … I will sit with Hunter Biden and Jim Biden, and we can go over our LLCs.”


“Mr. Chairman,” Moskowitz observed, “this seems to have gotten under your skin.”


Comer went on Fox News that night to explain his defensive outburst to Sean Hannity. “I wasn’t going to sit there and let Moskowitz lie about me and my family,” said the man who has spent the year peddling similar innuendo and outright lies about the “Biden crime family.”

When Moody’s Investors Service lowered its outlook last week on the U.S. government’s creditworthiness, it specifically cited Washington dysfunction: “renewed debt limit brinkmanship, the first ouster of a House Speaker in U.S. history, prolonged inability of Congress to select a new House Speaker, and increased threats of another partial government shutdown due to Congress’ inability to agree on budgetary appropriations.”

Johnson ignored all that, instead putting out a statement blaming the Moody’s action on “President Biden and Democrats.” He then led the House through another week of dysfunction.

The speaker introduced a temporary extension of government funding, adopting a tiered approach with multiple expiration dates that had been proposed by the House Freedom Caucus. Members of the Freedom Caucus immediately trashed the plan. Johnson met with the caucus on Monday night to try to sway them. The group issued a statement on Tuesday morning saying Johnson’s plan “contains ... not a single meaningful win for the American people.”

“Not much of a honeymoon in this job,” Johnson said on CNBC.


The House Rules Committee also took up the proposal on Monday afternoon; five hours later, it adjourned without voting on it. Republicans didn’t even have the votes to bring the proposal to the House floor for a debate.

At Tuesday morning’s caucus meeting, Republicans found themselves in a familiar state of paralysis. “The Republican conference is a colorful group,” Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) told us, “and we’ve got between 20 and 40 who find it almost impossible to get to yes.”

Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) blamed the trouble on the “immature man child,” Gaetz, for ousting McCarthy. Van Orden, known for his screaming outbursts directed at teenage legislative pages and others, complained that his colleagues “act out of emotion rather than logic.”

At a news conference, Fox News’s Chad Pergram pointed out that Johnson hadn’t satisfied the “arch conservatives” in his party who were accusing him of surrendering to Democrats.

“I’m one of the arch conservatives,” Johnson pleaded. But he argued that “you’ve got to fight fights that you can win.”

At the same news conference, Majority Whip Tom Emmer (Minn.) urged, “Now is the time for House Republicans to stay united as a team.”

Members of the Freedom Caucus then went to the House floor and threatened to block GOP leaders from taking up that day’s spending bill, for the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services. A group of 10 hard-liners withheld their votes — forcing Johnson to hold the vote open while he cajoled them in the center aisle; eventually, they relented.

Because Johnson couldn’t get Republican votes to take up the government-funding resolution under normal procedures, he instead had to suspend the rules and pass it with a two-thirds majority. This meant that Democrats would have to bail him out — just as they had McCarthy.

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) taunted during the floor debate: “It is the Democrats who have come to save America and to stop this dastardly shutdown.”

It was true. Two-hundred nine of 211 Democrats voted for Johnson’s 60-day stopgap. But 93 Republicans voted against it — three more than the number who opposed McCarthy’s 45-day stopgap in September before they booted him from the speakership.

Will Johnson, after three weeks on the job, now face the same fate?

Unlikely, for a simple reason: House Republicans have now proved beyond all doubt that absolutely no one can govern them.