On Sunday, Rep. Jason Chaffetz announced that he was running for the second highest-ranking job in the federal government after the president, Speaker of the House of Representatives. The speaker is second in line after Vice President Joe Biden to be president according to the Constitution and the Presidential Succession Act. If Representative Chaffetz is successful, both the second and third person in line will be congressmen from Utah since Sen. Orrin Hatch as President pro tempore of the Senate is third in line.
Most Washington watchers don’t give Chaffetz much of a chance due to his age and lack of experience, but he may surprise everybody. Napoleon assumed command of the armies of France at age 25. Barack Obama was elected president halfway through his first term as senator. These things can happen. Chaffetz might actually become speaker.
—The leading candidate right now, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, is regarded as “John Boehner Light” by many of the Republicans who will have to elect him.
—Chaffetz has earned a good reputation among these same Republicans for his valiant efforts in the fight against Planned Parenthood and other lost causes.
—McCarthy is battling a growing reputation for having “foot in mouth” disease due to his comments about Hillary Clinton and the Benghazi committee on Fox News.
—Chaffetz has won against older, established politicians before. He was elected in a contest against a six-term incumbent, Chris Cannon, who outspent Chaffetz six to one and who was endorsed by President George Bush and both Utah senators. Chaffetz started his campaign polling at 4 percent. In the different world of internal House of Representatives elections, Chaffetz won a four-way race to become the chairman of the key House Oversight and Government Reform Committee when nobody expected him to win as well.
—Almost nobody else is running. The only other candidate, Florida Rep. Daniel Webster, is widely regarded as a token opposition.
The question then becomes, “What can we expect from Speaker Chaffetz?” I think the answer is a lot of broken lances and windmills.
In the early 1600s, Miguel de Cervantes wrote one of the earliest novels, Don Quixote, about a Spanish Don who decides he is the man destined to cure the ills of the world. He succeeds only at charging unsuccessfully at windmills because he believes they are giants that he must defeat. In the end, Don Quixote regains his sanity and repents of his foolishness. We’re unlikely to have this kind of storybook ending with Speaker Chaffetz.
One main reason Boehner quit the job was that the right wing of the right wing is sick and tired of Boehner actually compromising with Democrats for the sake of governing the country. They want someone who will sacrifice anything and everything if they don’t get their way. Many of these congressmen gained office through unbending local political battles and deeply believe in their own slogans. This works well on the local level where one party controls everything. For example, it works well in Washington County.
The right wing of the right wing actually would shut down the federal government again to defund Planned Parenthood. The people who will form the core of Rep. Chaffetz’s support will expect him to run the House of Representatives using their values.
We’ve seen this type of governance before. House Speaker Dennis Hastert created “Hastert’s Rule,” which states that the House will only be able to vote on issues that Republicans agree on in private party conference. Hastert created the foundation that George Bush used to launch the Iraq war. Before that, House Speaker Newt Gingrich refused to compromise, too. Gingrich started the tradition of shutting down the government when his side didn’t get their way. He did it twice.
Relentless, hard-core intransigence does not work on the national level where people from Manhattan, N.Y. and Manhattan, Kan. have to cooperate somehow. That’s a strength, not a weakness. When America has stumbled, as in Iraq, it happened because one side gained too much power for our own good. You might remember the quote, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The requirement to compromise in order to govern helps America stay out of trouble.
Napoleon gained absolute power at age 25 and won most of his battles. But in the end, so many citizens of France died in his campaigns to “Make France Great Again” that the whole country suffered a population crash and the economy was ruined for many decades after that. Napoleon’s unwillingness to compromise made Britain and Germany the leaders in Europe instead of France.
I guess you’ve got to give the guy credit for thinking more of himself than most of the rest of us do!