Is it OK to admit Matt Gaetz makes two good points?
Timothy P. Carney
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Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-FL) decision to team up with every Democrat and a few other Republicans and boot Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) from the speakership looks like a purely destructive act. It’s likely to hurt the GOP, help the Democrats, and harm conservative causes, not because McCarthy is the savior of the party or the champion of conservatism but because it is simply an act of chaos.
Gaetz shouldn’t have done it, and I don’t know why he did it. I think it would help everyone if Gaetz were defeated in a Republican primary next year.
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But sometimes people doing bad things make good points.
You could read this as a real-life instance of the most famous article from the parody site Clickhole:
“A heartbreaking story is currently unfolding that’s sure to have devastating ramifications for years to come. Just moments ago, without any warning, the worst person you know just made a great point.”
Gaetz’s first good point was that he didn’t make Congress dysfunctional. Congress, for more than a decade, has abandoned the budget process, failed to pass appropriations bills to fund the government, and thus governed by omnibus bills and continuing resolutions. This results in rushed policymaking, closed-door deal-making, and a total lack of transparency and deliberation.
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This isn’t a Trump-era thing either. Congress has been playing this way since before the tea party, and that’s bad. Gaetz rightly called out this failure of the House to do its job and the total failure to run a democratic and deliberative process.
Gaetz makes another good point about fundraising. After Gaetz was rightly excoriated for fundraising off of his pointless removal of Speaker McCarthy, he pointed out that the standard GOP fundraising process is hardly clean. The alternative to grassroots fundraising seems to be asking your lobbyist friends to assemble their clients to deliver $10,000 PAC checks.
This, of course, creates a corrupt system in which the insiders are all rewarded, and policy is steered to the benefit of the well connected.
Now, Gaetz is likely exploiting his donors, fooling them into thinking he’s accomplishing something while he accomplishes nothing, so I’m not defending him. I’m just saying he’s right that the GOP leadership has for ages been too cozy with lobbyists.