Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich said this week that a minority Republican opposition to naming Rep. Kevin McCarthy as speaker only serves Democrat objectives.
Causing pain to their own party seems to be an “enjoyable hobby” for these disrupters, Gingrich said, in a sobering essay on “Republican demoralization.” He said it is something akin to “watching someone burn down their own home so they can enjoy the fire.”
Moreover, thinking about the monumental challenges facing the Republican Party and the conservative movement has become a “sad, frustrating, unsettling business,” the former speaker asserted, mostly because of the infighting that prevents the party from moving forward.
Meanwhile, the Democrats “are happily watching Republicans melt down in front of the entire country like a group of tired toddlers,” he declared, which only adds to the frustration.
Things in the Senate are not much better, he said, as Senate Republicans seem to be increasingly split between what he called a “traditional Republican majority” and a “Biden-Republican minority.”
U.S. President Joe Biden shakes hands with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell during an event about the bipartisan infrastructure law in front of the Clay Wade Bailey Bridge in Covington, Kentucky, on January 4, 2023. (Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
This destructive latter group is exemplified by the photo op between Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Joe Biden to celebrate the construction of a $1.63 billion bridge across the Ohio River, part of the Democrats’ massive spending on infrastructure.
“Nothing irritates and angers conservatives and traditional Republicans more than watching their elected officials join a bipartisan media event to celebrate taking tens of billions of dollars from taxpayers to spend on politically directed infrastructure,” Gingrich noted.
The Republicans’ problems in Congress do not tell the whole story, however, as something similar or worse is looming over the 2024 presidential election, he proposed.
Republicans could be facing “the most divisive presidential nominating race since the 1964 Barry Goldwater-Nelson Rockefeller bitterness,” he suggested, which could play out as a Donald Trump vs. never-Trump nominating process. This battle could even culminate in former President Trump running as a third-party candidate if he loses the nomination.
While Republicans desperately need to unite to combat the disasters of Big Government Socialism and wokeism, Gingrich wrote, there is tragically little evidence of that happening any time soon.
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