Ross Douthat: 'But in the negotiations over the speakership, it’s been clear that certain pre-Trump patterns are still resilient.'
Rep. Matt Gaetz delivers remarks as the vote for Speaker of the House continues for a fourth day at the Capitol, in Washington on Friday, Jan. 6, 2023. Rep. Kevin McCarthy pressed on Friday for a deal with right-wing holdouts that could deliver him the speakership after days of failed votes on the House floor.
Not that the flood didn’t change the landscape. Some of the House Republicans who have bedeviled McCarthy are Tea Party throwbacks, but others are more Trumpian figures, creatures of right-wing celebrity and brands unto themselves. The would-be Republican populists in the Senate — figures like J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton — aren’t libertarians in the style of circa-2013 Cruz, which may change the role the Senate plays in intra-Republican battles.
Part of Trump’s original success rested on the way he freed the Republican Party from this dead end by resolutely refusing to campaign on the True Conservative™ catechism and elevating issues that mattered more to less-ideological conservatives and swing voters.
On fiscal issues, this kind of strategy would recognize the impossibility of either a grand bargain of the kind that eluded Boehner and Obama or the forcing of meaningful fiscal changes on a Democratic-controlled Senate and White House. Instead, it would propose budgets that mostly seek cuts in places that matter to Democratic interest groups and govern with deals that include some inevitable fakery and gimmicks, but basically just preserve the status quo.
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