The Marjorie Taylor Greene-Matt Gaetz bid to draft Donald Trump for the House speakership is worth taking seriously.  The reason: simple arithmetic.  There are 435 seats in the lower chamber, which means that 218 votes are needed to fill the post that Kevin McCarthy vacated on Tuesday.  With Republicans controlling 222, that means that anyone who wants to win the post can afford only four defections.  In fact, the picture is even worse since two Republican representatives are on leave, Anna Paulina Luna of Florida and Frank Lucas of Oklahoma.  So a successful candidate can only afford two.  That means garnering 99 percent of the Republican vote.  Is there anyone on Capitol Hill capable of doing this?

The answer is almost certainly no.  Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan, or whoever else wants to throw his or her hat into the ring have too many enemies to even come close.  The same goes for so-called moderates who are virtually at war with the hard-core right.  Considering that House Republicans just split down the middle on McCarthy’s 45-day stopgap spending measure, virtual unanimity is beyond reach.  The chances of House Republican settling on someone from their own ranks are therefore nil.

That leaves two ways out.  One is for a minority to break ranks and vote for Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the Democratic minority.  It’s not completely out of the question, but it would put a serious dent in GOP prospects next fall.  Yes, memories are short. But some people will remember how the Republicans surrendered to the enemy and then slunk away in shame.  The ill will will undoubtedly spill over onto Trump and perhaps give Joe Biden the extra push he needs to go over the edge.  Since Republicans are desperate to win in 2024, they must do everything they can to hold their ranks together in 2023.  A crossover vote must be avoided at all costs.

The other option is Trump.  He’s the Republicans’ fuehrer at this point, their duce, a man whose leadership is so unquestioned that the party is thinking of doing away with presidential debates altogether so members can nominate him by acclaim.  If Trump allows himself to be drafted, no Republican would dare vote no since it would mean almost certain defeat in 2024.  A Trump speakership would thus be a way for Republicans to unify their forces in preparation for the coming battle.  The fact that Trump has just endorsed Jordan is immaterial. The longer the selection process drags on, the more Republicans will realize that he’s the only choice.

When Joe Biden delivers his state of the union address in January, odds are that his predecessor and possible successor will be sitting on the dais behind him.  Weird? Yes.  But when a constitutional meltdown reaches such an advanced stage, weird things happen.  

The constitutional implications are staggering.  Trump’s number-one goal is to take back the White House, so his sole purpose in assuming the speakership will be to use it to weaken Biden.  Since compromise makes the president look good, his program will be the opposite, which is to say ceaseless confrontation.  He’ll press the pedal to the floor in terms of impeachment, and he’ll push for a government shutdown when the current spending measure runs out in mid-November.  Rival power centers will thus take shape, one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the other on Capitol Hill.  Neither will be able to accomplish a thing because they’ll be too busy dragging each other down.  

In 2020, civil war erupted after the election; this time it may well erupt before.  There are resemblances here to Petrograd in 1917 when Kerensky and the soviets grappled for control and to England in the 1640s when the legislative and executive branches, i.e. Parliament and King Charles I, were also at odds.  This is not to say that Trump is a second Cromwell, much less a neo-Bolshevik.  But dual power means nothing but scorched earth in between.

The great constitutional breakdown that began with Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America in 1994 will thus reach its logical conclusion.  The delicate balances that we’ve all been taught to revere will come undone, finally and irrevocably.  Where Cromwell eventually led to the first stirring of parliamentary democracy (after only two or three centuries), we all know what will happen after the current episode: a plunge into rightwing authoritarianism.   As The Frozen Republic warned in 1996, constitutional immobility can only lead to democratic collapse since politics need freedom to grow and develop.  Locking a political order in place, which is what an unchangeable constitution does, causes them to wither and die.  The more the crisis intensifies, the harder this central truth will be to avoid

The imperial implications are also stunning.  If Trump becomes speaker, the administration may be able to eke out some accommodation in terms of Ukrainian military aid.  But it won’t be for long, and the message will be clear that US backing is coming to a close.   Since it’s doubtful the Europeans will be able to pick up the slack, a decade-long effort to tear the Ukraine away from the Russian orbit and bring it into NATO will collapse.  The effort could end as ignobly as the 2001-21 Afghan adventure, which Biden personally championed during his years as chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee.  Whether the Atlantic alliance will be able to withstand the blow is unknown.  But it won’t be easy once the truth about Nord Stream comes out, which it inevitably will.  Volodymyr Zelensky has already warned that veterans of the Azov Battalion will take revenge if they feel betrayed by the western powers.  (It would not be a “good story” for Europe if it were to “drive these people into a corner,” is how he put it.)   If you can imagine a neo-Nazi version of Al Qaeda, then you have an idea of what could conceivably lie ahead.

Of course, this may all be too apocalyptic.  Things on Capitol Hill may sort themselves out peacefully and rationally, a new era of bipartisanship may take hold, the lion will lie down with the lamb, and so on.  For the umpteenth time, Chicken Little will have been proved wrong.  But societies do not simply pick themselves up and move on once a constitutional order breaks down.  It’s never that easy.  They will have to go through turmoil before the working class can begin picking up the pieces and rebuilding along new lines.