'We are on the road to unraveling as a republic,' one expert said.
Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy speaks to the press after the motion to vacate his position passes in the U.S. Capitol on October 3, 2023, in Washington, D.C.The ouster of former Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy from his position this week has been described by President Joe Biden as. But several historians and political scientists say that the unprecedented action is demonstrative of a deeper problem, showcasing an erosion of American democracy.
The experts point out that it only took a small handful of Republican lawmakers on the party’s fringe — representing just 1.8 percent of the U.S. voting public — to remove McCarthy from the speakership. No speaker in U.S. history has ever been removed by a “motion to vacate” vote, and while the mechanism should exist to allow lawmakers to change leadership when needed, the way in which the situation unfolded is worrisome, they say.
“We are watching a very small number of folks from the House Republican conference have an outsize role in promoting a lot of congressional dysfunction and fiscal dysfunction,” Laura Blessing, senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University,“If you want to know what it looks like when democracy is in trouble, this is what it looks like. It should set off alarm bells that something is not right,” said Daniel Ziblatt, professor of government at Harvard University.
“If American democracy is already suffering and weak from various maladies, this unruly crisis in the House is just going to kick it a little further in that direction,” opined Harvard Kennedy School professor Alex Keyssar. “You are taking a set of institutions and you are weakening them and then pointing to their weakness.”
Multiple issues led to this outcome, and to the continued dysfunction of the House overall, these experts maintain, including an electoral system that incentivizes pandering to fringe voters with extremist viewpoints, as well as extraordinary gerrymandering of districts that makes it nearly impossible for Congress to be truly representative.
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