Chaos, not just theory?

Steve Barnes

“Maybe I need a sobriety test,” said U.S. Rep. Steve Womack, having announced that he would seek re-election to the House of Representatives, where he has sat for the Third District since 2011. There had been a bit of speculation that Womack, a former mayor of Rogers, might step down. For a half-dozen years he had been privately expressing frustration unto fury with the state of affairs in Washington, and wondering how effective he could be in reshaping its processes. Conservative by nature, instinctively pragmatic, Womack was disturbed by the increasing polarization of the parties — there wasn’t much of a center remaining — and was quietly appalled by the illiterate hooligan who was despoiling the White House and turning the Republican Party into a personality cult.

We spoke a few days ago, only minutes after the House of Representatives recessed for the weekend, the leadership having twice been blocked from bringing to a vote the defense appropriation bill, which not that long ago would have been accomplished before breakfast. But the GOP’s Freedom Caucus, free to (again) humiliate Speaker Kevin McCarthy, was demanding concessions that couldn’t clear the House, let alone the Senate. The Faustian bargain the Speaker had made with the crazies had once again stalled the business of the nation, with a government shutdown only days distant.

As I was speaking with Womack, a quote from McCarthy made its way across my computer screen. An entirely different breed of lawmaker had joined the Republican conference, he exclaimed, men and women “who just want to burn the whole place down.”

Indeed, Womack said, “and some of (the far-right rebels) will use this to raise money!”

A bit later in the day, Womack had more to say.

“This is painful. It gives me a headache. This is a very difficult series of missteps by our conference,” he told POLITICO. “If you can’t do, what can you do?”

So, what now for the weakest Speaker since the office was created? The Biden impeachment inquiry McCarthy authorized only to mollify the Freedom Caucus didn’t do the trick. If he cuts a deal with House Democrats on essential spending his GOP adversaries threaten to strip him of his office, and might well succeed. A bizarre, even macabre situation: Individuals such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia screwball who came to fame for wondering aloud about “Jewish space lasers,” and Paul Gosar, the Arizona zany who argued for hanging the “treasonous” chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, essentially have the same authority as does the Speaker. The once unimaginable scenario saw McCarthy acknowledging as much, perhaps inadvertently, when he employed a single noun to describe the once unimaginable House landscape: “Chaos.”

The ailments of Democrats in both chambers of Congress now scarcely rate as distractions. The abandonment by the majority leader of the Senate’s long-standing if uncodified dress code to accommodate an ailing, eccentric slob. A multicount federal bribery indictment against the then-chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and his wife, whose taste in le décolletage is less daring than merely absurd. House members from safe Democratic districts whose proposals shove their more moderate colleagues in less secure constituencies against the wall. And, of course, Hunter Biden; and his father, assailed as corrupt on the basis of thus far zero evidence.

Chaos? Precisely the term arch-conservative columnist Gerard Baker employed, and days before McCarthy chose it, when he warned of not only the overall toxicity of American politics, but the likelihood that the immediate past president would win renomination and, possibly, a second term in the Oval Office.

“Like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody really expects chaos,” he reflected. “We know things could get messy but we are somehow conditioned to think they’ll sort themselves out somewhere short of actual chaos.

“A combination of denial, wishful thinking, old-fashioned American optimism and a simple lack of imagination means the full horror of what may happen in the course of the next year has not sunk in,” Baker writes from abroad. But: “Unless something entirely unexpected changes, the world’s most powerful country is on a collision course with political realities that pose the most serious threat to the republic’s cohesion since the civil war.”

A former editor of the Wall Street Journal, Baker’s immediate concern was the grim prospect of a Donald Trump convicted of one or more of the scores of felonies of which he is accused, but nonetheless succeeding in November 2024. It is the threat of chaos squared, of the previously unimaginable, that has serious people wondering if they need a sobriety test.