What a confession! Brian Fitzpatrick, a self-proclaimed Republican moderate, voted for an unqualified, unknown, extremist, inexperienced, 2020 election denier for Speaker of the House simply because “We can’t have the lights off in the House of Representatives.”
After three failed attempts, the chaotic, dysfunctional (their own words!) Republican party gave up on finding a qualified Speaker candidate and went looking for a heartbeat and a congressperson who had not offended Donald Trump.
Not only did Brian Fitzpatrick acknowledge that the new speaker does not share any fundamental policy goals with him, he also is implicitly acknowledging that there is no longer an effective role in the Republican party for a moderate. Campaigning to hold onto his seat in 2024, by claiming he is a Republican moderate will not serve him well. What good is a moderate in the current Republican party?
If there were any role for an experienced, effective moderate in the Republican party it would have been to serve as a negotiating leader working to bring different sides of the party together. Instead, even since January of 2023, when he worked to help McCarthy win the Speakership, Brian’s party has moved dramatically to the right – not in the classic conservative norm, but rather towards a nihilistic burn-it-all-down right, and he had no impact in negotiating for an experienced, compromise candidate.
After admitting that he just voted for Johnson to keep the lights on in our government, Brian had the nerve to claim that 208 Democrats own responsibility – along with a measly 8 Republicans — for McCarthy’s loss of the Speakership and the resulting chaos in the Republican party. That is a conscious misrepresentation of the facts and a classic case of looking for someone else to blame for your own failing.
The easily-documented facts are that the Democrats provided McCarthy the crucial votes he needed on September 30th to keep the government open. 90 Republicans voted against the measure, and 209 Democrats voted in favor of it. Think about that. Even at the very last minute, 90 Republicans were ready to shut down the government with all the pain and harm that would cause.
In response, and in the mode of no-good-deed-goes-unpunished, McCarthy went on the Sunday news shows and claimed that Democrats almost caused the government to shut down – a brazen case of political backstabbing.
Yet, in Congressman Fitzpatrick’s mind, Democrats were supposed to turn around immediately and save him again. The only people who bear responsibility for the demise of McCarthy’s long-sought-after Speakership are the same Republicans – temporarily in the majority — who do not want to govern, but rather want simply – and proudly – to pursue a scorched earth path.
The demise of the entire Republican party itself is now nearly complete. In his farewell address to the nation, Ronald Reagan said, “I wasn’t a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn’t spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation — from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in the principles that have guided us for two centuries.”
The current chaos caucus — the controlling wing of the Republican party — has little use for those principles. They are more consumed with alternative facts. In his conversation Fitzpatrick claimed that Speaker Johnson’s vote not to certify Biden victory was a policy difference between them. No, that was NOT a policy difference, that was an abandonment of the democratic principles that ‘have guided us for two centuries.’
Biden won by 7,000,000 votes in the popular vote and 306 to 232 in the Electoral College vote. Congressman Fitzpatrick knows/acknowledges that is true, while Speaker Johnson lives in the autocratic, authoritarian Trump world of alternative facts.
