House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) brokered a deal this week to avoid a government shutdown — and he did so with a "clean resolution" that the far-right would be expected to vehemently oppose — because it passed with mostly Democratic votes.
A similar situation just a few weeks ago saw Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) booted from the speakership, leading to weeks of fighting and rudderlessness in the House.
And yet Johnson doesn't seem to face any serious challenge yet.
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What this signifies, wrote Amanda Marcotte for Salon, is that the GOP has abandoned all of its small-government, fiscal discipline facade and now stands for nothing but culture wars.
"McCarthy had to suffer through 15 ballots to get elected last January, and had held the gavel for just nine months when he decided to pass a short-term funding bill in September, avoiding a government shutdown through a compromise that won some Democratic votes," she wrote.
"To McCarthy's Republican opponents, this was supposedly an outrageous offense against 'conservative' values, and an intra-GOP coup spearheaded by Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida led to his ouster as speaker within days."
However, "Johnson ... did the exactly same thing McCarthy did: He passed a short-term spending bill with Democratic votes — in fact, mostly with Democratic votes" — and the sense on Capitol Hill is he will survive with nothing more than performative grumbling from the Freedom Caucus.
This has significant implications for the entire ideological direction of the Republican Party, Marcotte argued.
What it means, she wrote, is "the death knell of a venerable conservative totem, the supposed commitment to 'small government.'"
Republicans may still advocate cuts to social programs, she continued — and one of Johnson's first moves was to try to slash funding to go after wealthy tax cheats — but "it's not a pressing concern the way it used to be. This is wholly and entirely Donald Trump's party now, which means it's primarily focused on MAGA-fied whining about culture-war grievances. Republicans no longer have the bandwidth to give a hoot about old-school Republican concerns like cutting the budget."
Once upon a time, wrote Marcotte, business leaders led the GOP by selling culture warriors on the idea that their fiscal policies were themselves a culture war — a way of undoing programs liberals use to shape society. But after years of the GOP taking political hits for shutdown brinksmanship, the culture warriors are ready to throw that overboard to achieve their greater objectives like Christian nationalism.
"The switch from McCarthy to Johnson was never about the budget fight," Marcotte concluded. "It was about MAGA's final conquest of the Republican Party."
