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This reads as hilarious to me. I've been reading some reviews and excerpts about the Mitt Romney book that came out recently that seems to be relatively unvarnished. And it's pretty clear based on what's described that a lot of right-wing senators aren't really being very honest about their true feelings. Contrast that with the dealmaking wing of the GOP. I don't understand how compromise became a dirty word for modern right wing Republicans. Suddenly making a deal is a betrayal and childish, which is not only ignorant of how politics with a slim majority literally must work, but is incredibly hypocritical because of the aforementioned pageantry on the far right while the middle literally just wants to get shit done.
I think Matt Gaetz is a performative blowhard, but also might have been totally within his rights to push to oust McCarthy. That's not really the issue. The issue is what came after, where by most accounts Jordan cynically tried to politically kneecap Scalise for his own benefit before the whipping even got started, and earned too much ill will in doing so. It wasn't even very ideological, though it could have been. And now no one has the political stature to be a replacement. This was all so, so predictable.
They're convinced that the GOP's problem is a lack of will, rather than that their political objectives are difficult, dubiously popular, and involve making tradeoffs their voters won't actually like. In fairness, in the context of intra-party negotiation, intransigence can be a benefit. Cutting a deal with the opposition is a lot more costly than cutting a deal with your own hardliners. They're also trapped by their own voters, to whom they have generally pitched the idea that there are an abundance of free lunches to be had if only the "establishment GOP" weren't too weak to eat them.
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Name a compromise in the last 30 years that secured anything you think a Republican should consider to be a positive outcome.
"Compromise" becomes a dirty word when it's used to describe you being relentlessly fucked without apology or mercy.
The Clinton-Gingrich welfare reform is the canonical example. I agree that is going to slip out of "last 30 years" soon.
The dealmaking around the 2013 sequestration got the Republicans 5 years of below-inflation discretionary spending growth and most of the Bush tax cuts made permanent - that was a better deal for Republicans than either constant law (and full expiration of the Bush tax cuts),constant policy (red ink as far as the eye can see), or implementation of the sequester as originally agreed (which would have cut defence more and other discretionary spending less).
I don't even know if MAGA conservatives want to cut Social Security and Medicare, so I don't think their failure to do so reflects bad dealmaking.
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