Democrats' Hollowed-Out Center

Centrist Democrats were largely AWOL in the House speakership fight. Lost in Jeffries’s protestations about bipartisanship was the fact that every House Democrat voted with eight Republicans to remove a speaker who had cut a deal with them on both the debt ceiling and temporary funding of the government, realizing by their own admission that it could result in a speaker who would do neither of those things unless a rump of Republicans agreed to empower Democrats in a coalition government.

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Self-styled centrist Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) said in a statement as the motion to vacate was approaching that McCarthy was “not the leader I would choose — he doesn’t have the pulse of the people of Maine’s Second District. Absent any significantly meaningful benefit for Maine’s Second District, I see no reason to vote for him.” But all that would have been required was for a handful of such Democrats to vote present, reducing the threshold for McCarthy’s retention of the gavel. …

McCarthy’s Republican coalition partners were undoubtedly unpalatable even to centrist Democrats. But after Democratic PACs pumped millions of dollars into ads helpful to so-called MAGA Republicans during the midterm elections, it seemed another example of the party preferring to campaign against GOP dysfunction rather than counteract it in a bipartisan fashion. Democrats’ purity about McCarthy didn’t stop them from collaborating with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL).

The obvious Democratic rejoinder is that they are not to blame for the problems inside the Republican Party, which include erratic leadership and poor coalition-building. Yet these problems are frequently discussed and scrutinized, not least by conservatives who would like to see the GOP move in a different direction. The dwindling number of centrist Democrats, and the liberals who pretend to be among their ranks, all too often get a pass.

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[The chaos of the last three weeks is mostly on the GOP, but that shiv in the back by Jeffries to McCarthy will not be soon forgotten. Good luck in getting anyone else to work with Democrats. Johnson certainly will take the appropriate lesson from it. — Ed]

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