Shutdown battle shows GOP’s 'wingnut caucus' doesn’t understand constitutional governance: journalist

With a federal government shutdown looming, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is making a last-ditch effort to work out some type of funding agreement with far-right members of his caucus. But talks haven't been going well, and McCarthy's frustration is obvious.

Meanwhile, Democrats are arguing that a shutdown debacle could be avoided if far-right House Republicans would simply honor the bipartisan debt ceiling agreement that McCarthy and President Joe Biden reached earlier this year.

In a think piece published by The New Republic, journalist Robert Schlesinger stresses that the actions of pro-shutdown House Republicans go beyond a desire to create chaos — they show a fundamental failure to understand how constitutional governance works.

Schlesinger, author of the book "White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters," explains, "The hard-right keeps pushing McCarthy for ever-greater spending cuts. Never mind the fact that they will never make it through the Democrat-controlled Senate or receive President Joe Biden's signature. This is an immutable reality."

Schlesinger continues, "Yet the GOP's wingnut caucus continues to fling barbs at hapless House Speaker Kevin McCarthy as if this was all somehow his doing — as if despite barely holding control of one half of one branch of government, he ought to be able to extract political victories simply by dint of being the fightiest fighter ever to fight the scourge of big government."

The shutdown battle, Schlesinger laments, reflects "the GOP' authoritarian turn" and an inability to understand "how the system works."

"Dramatic pronouncements about fighting and winning might play well on Fox News and Newsmax," Schlesinger argues, "but condemning compromise as weakness and failure creates an atmosphere where nothing can possibly get done and the people involved have delusional expectations about what qualifies as a win."