How Right Wing Media Created The House Speaker Fiasco
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. This is the On The Media Midweek Podcast. I'm Michael Loewinger. And you can file this one under House Speaker Drama.

At the time of this recording, the saga to elect a new Speaker of the House continues. Another day, another House Speaker nominee for the GOP. Late last night, Republicans voted for Mike Johnson of Louisiana to be their new nominee for the job. Three sources have confirmed NBC News that Congressman Tom Emmer has dropped out of the Speaker's race just hours after being nominated by his House Republican colleagues. This is the third

time in as many weeks that Republicans have nominated a new speaker, but so far none have been able to garner enough support to win the gavel. This puts Republicans right back at square one. There is no nominee. We don't know who is next. With conflict brewing in the Middle East and a government shutdown looming, House Republicans left Congress paralyzed with their inability to elect a speaker. It

It started early this month when Kevin McCarthy was ousted as Speaker of the House by the right flank of his party, led by Matt Gaetz. I rise today to serve notice. Mr. Speaker, you are out of compliance with the agreement that allowed you to assume this role. On this vote, the yeas are 216, the nays are 210.

the office of Speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant.

House Republicans nominated McCarthy's second-in-command, Steve Scalise of Louisiana. But Scalise struggled to muster support, including from the party's insurgent Freedom Caucus, leaving him short on votes. And so, a mere 24 hours after receiving the nomination, Scalise announced... I just share with my colleagues that I'm withdrawing my name as a candidate for the Speaker-designated...

Last week, the farthest right of the far right finally got their candidate. Ohio Republican and leader of the Freedom Caucus, Jim Jordan, took Scalise's place as the speaker nominee. Like Scalise, Jordan won enough votes from his party to win the nomination, but not enough to win on the House floor. This time, it was the so-called moderates who objected. And after three rounds of voting, Jordan dropped out.

CNN's Jake Tapper asked the question on Everybody's Mind. "Do you guys have any idea how clownish you look?"

Well, you know, Jake, I'm very fond of saying that Congress is a lot like high school, but even more so. I said that to Congressman Womack last week, high school, and he said that that's an insult to high school students. It's more like junior high. Brian Rosenwald is a scholar in residence at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Talk Radio's America, How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States.

I called Brian to ask him about the role that right-wing media has been playing in this drama. Brian, welcome to the show. Micah, it's my pleasure to be with you.

Jim Jordan, I think, is a strong example of the system that has led to this moment. He is kind of more of a showman than a lawmaker. He hasn't passed a single bill in his 17 years in Congress, but he has become influential and in many cases famous, largely thanks to his support of Trump.

and his rabble-rousing appearances on right-wing media. You've written extensively about the history of conservative media and how it's, quote, largely responsible for turning far-right rebels into stars. So walk me through this process. When did the phenomenon start?

I think you could even date it to the 1980s. You have the first real generation of Republican rebels in the House coming in. This is Newt Gingrich, Bob Walker from Pennsylvania, Vin Weber from Minnesota, who would form what they called the Conservative Opportunity Society.

And the House of Representatives is the majoritarian institution in Congress, which is to say the minority is usually largely irrelevant in the House. The fringe of the minority party is definitely irrelevant. So the media didn't care about these people. They're coming in screaming that they're elders who had a pretty good relationship with the Democrats and worked in a bipartisan way. They're doing it all wrong. We have to fight them. This is warfare. And you don't conciliate. You don't try to govern.

And they were not able to get their message out to the mainstream media. They weren't getting on the Sunday shows. They weren't getting quoted in the New York Times. They realized that, you know, if we send information to this new medium, talk radio, and talk radio is just starting to take off in the 80s because music sounded better on FM stereo. And once that got into cars...

That meant that AM faced an existential crisis. People started saying, well, look, the human voice sounds okay on AM radio, right? Like you don't need the same fidelity that you do for music. So these talk stations are starting and these conservative politicians have a light bulb go off and says, you know, these people need content and segments, right?

We need a platform. And they start going on talk radio. And then Rush Limbaugh comes along. He goes national in 1988. And over the course of 10 to 13 years, you get a situation where talk radio becomes almost uniformly conservative and almost uniformly nationally syndicated.

But that makes it more of a right-wing medium and something that Republicans use. When Republicans break Democrats' 40-year reign in control of the House in 1994, they give talk radio credit for this repeatedly. And they build an outreach operation to reach out to these folks. They are constantly cultivating the medium of talk radio.

And then in 1996, Fox News joined the party. That's right. 1996, Fox News joins the party. Within five or six years, Fox News is number one in cable television.

One thing that people have always gotten wrong about conservative media is that they'd say, oh, it's just the Republican Party. These broadcasters do what they're told. There's like some morning meeting, people think, where they get like talking points, right? The deep state of right-wing media. Right, the deep state of right-wing media. That's a great way of putting it. And in reality, the power is actually the other way around.

which is politicians and their aides are cultivating talk radio hosts and talk radio hosts are only focused on one thing, making money. Rush Limbaugh used to say that his goal is to charge confiscatory advertising rates. What does that mean? I want to make the most money I can possibly make.

So they are focused on putting on the best, most entertaining, most engaging show possible. They want the maximum number of people to tune in for the longest possible time. That's the goal here. And their listeners are getting increasingly aggrieved throughout the 90s and the 2000s. You know, when you're in 94 and Democrats control everything, they have the White House, they have both houses of Congress. Republicans haven't controlled the House of Representatives in 40 years. Absolutely.

At that point, the kind of base of the Republican Party that has grown, starting with Barry Goldwater in 1964, they're just sort of happy to get a grip on power, right? Well, as you move forward, they start with the exception of the Senate between May of 2001 and January of 2003. They have unified control of Congress from 95 to 2007. And so that means that for much of the George W. Bush years,

They have unified control of government. And all of these things, the red meat, the Republican politicians have been throwing to their base on the campaign trail and promises that they've been making hasn't happened. Abortion is still legal. Roe versus Wade at that point was still the law of the land.

Bush has added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. He's expanded an entitlement. Spending is up. He's proposed comprehensive immigration reform. The deficit has exploded with the Iraq war. You know, there's a lot for conservatives to be disgruntled about. And the culture wars are only intensifying with each passing year. And they're pretty cranky. And this crankiness eventually manifests itself in the Tea Party.

Rush Limbaugh and the nascent Fox News proved that they could both deliver an exciting, rage-inducing listen or viewing experience and also deliver political wins. But you've said that the relationship between conservative media and the GOP, the party, started to deteriorate in the 2000s and 2010s. What happened?

Well, it actually isn't great from day one. Like they help each other. The hosts want to see Republicans succeed. But anytime they have to govern, anytime they have to undertake the compromises required by governance, our system is set up with lots of checkpoints, lots of ways to slow things down.

And they never had a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. So they always had to compromise and talk radio didn't like those compromises. Nuance is boring. It doesn't sound good on the air to explain. Well, you know, we have 55 senators and we need 60, which means we need Democrat. You know, you just bored your audience.

Talk radio and cable news have always fundamentally been kind of a soap opera. The villains were Democrats, the mainstream media, academia, Hollywood, and the heroes were the house themselves and Republican politicians, conservatives. Well, what happens and you get into the 2010s is

A new villain emerges, the Republican leadership. Today, we could use the term the swamp dweller, the ultimate insult that you could make in conservative media, basically saying these guys never fight for you. They always roll over. So they start just absolutely blasting Republican leaders. And some of this starts in the late Bush years, but it is especially acute, I think, once

the Tea Party wave happens in 2010 and Republicans have the House of Representatives. So they have to govern, but there's divided government, which means they're going to have to compromise to get around those moments where if you do nothing, there's a crisis and like something really bad happens. And conservative media doesn't want to hear that. They say, just stick to your principles and whatever happens, happens, which sounds great for them. They don't have to run for reelection, right? But this relationship really sours.

We've seen other quote unquote moderate speakers struggle with this. For instance, in 2015, John Boehner stepped aside amid pressure from Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows and other hard right conservatives backed by the right wing media.

You said that the banner was one of the first moderate Republicans. The irony of this is when Boehner gets the house in the early 1990s, he's part of this gang of seven rebels who are excoriating the leadership. This guy is like Mr. Far right at the beginning, right?

And he's a rock ribbed conservative on every issue down the line. The only difference is that John Boehner has a belief that, you know, you have to govern. He's a pragmatist on some level. Ideologically, these guys should have loved John Boehner. And instead they turn him into a piñata. He played golf with Limbaugh. He had been friendly with Hannity. Like he had good relationships with these guys off the air. And they just start to use his words. They start beating the shit out of him.

So tell me a little bit about how talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin lifted up fringier members of the House to target John Boehner and ultimately take him down. So Mark Meadows from North Carolina, who would become Trump's confidant, chief of staff, and I guess you could call him co-conspirator now. Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan start the House Freedom Caucus because the Republican Study Committee, which used to be the right wing engine, is no longer right wing enough for that.

that and these guys are relentlessly on the airwaves and we get to this episode in i think it's june of 2015 in which the one thing you don't do in the house of representatives i know the sounds kind of arcane and procedural but the one thing you don't do is vote against your party on a rule vote they have these rule votes before any bill can come to the floor they govern debate and if the majority party doesn't stick together the rules fail and they can't vote on the actual bills

So like the one rule is you could be against the underlying bill, but if you're in the majority party, you're going to vote for the rule. Well, there's a bunch of these guys that vote against a rule on a trade bill.

in 2015. And Mark Meadows is one of them. And he's a subcommittee chairman on the House Oversight Committee. And the House Oversight Committee chairman, Jason Chaffetz, strips him of his subcommittee gavel. He punishes him for this. And there might have been a time that somebody would have rolled over and died after that and said, okay, fine, I accept my punishment. Instead, Mark Meadows just blitzes conservative media. He's on with Steve Bannon. He's on with Mark Levin.

And this makes these guys, the Mark Meadows is the world into heroes with the base. And they have a very different reputation on Capitol Hill. By the way, I had one Republican staffer, high level Republican staffer. Tell me when I was researching my book, he described Mark Meadows as a snake, quote unquote, which is, which is awfully,

Awfully similar to how you hear lawmakers and staffers on Capitol Hill talk about Matt Gaetz. That's exactly right. They hate these people. Gaetz, like Meadows, spearheaded the vote that led to Kevin McCarthy's ouster from his speakership on October 3rd, which was a first for our country. And conservative pundits like Mark Levin, Brian Kilmeade on Fox News, along with Jeanine Pirro were

outraged with Gaetz? I'm furious. First of all, we're without a speaker. This is historic. Something like this hasn't happened in well over 100 years. And now what we've got is total chaos when the Republicans are playing out their infighting on national television in a historic way instead of fighting

Joe Biden's policies. The one time we are up in virtually every metric as it relates to the Biden administration, you've got the Republicans going out there and showing how dysfunctional they are as Matt Gaetz is engaging in fundraising. And I got to tell you something, I am furious. But you believe ultimately many of these pundits were to blame.

Right. This is the real irony of this. In 2015, they're encouraging Mark Meadows to file what's known as the motion to vacate, what Gates would use to bring McCarthy down. They want him to do that against John Boehner. And he does after this episode where he's punished and then eventually restored to his subcommittee chairmanship. He eventually files this motion to vacate. And basically, Boehner had the votes. He probably could have beaten it back at that point because they had a large enough majority to make it work. But he doesn't want to make his guys have to take the vote for this. So,

So he passes all the legislation that has to pass and resigns and goes off to swill Merlot and smoke camels on the golf course. And he becomes a pot lobbyist too, which is a fun little postscript to this.

So Gates comes along and he's already seen this model of the Mark Meadows and the Jim Jordans, the guys who are always on Fox News, always on talk radio, who the base just loves. And then Matt Gates finally pulls the trigger on this motion to vacate McCarthy and conservative media. They're furious. And the reason they're furious is that McCarthy has literally bent over backwards to try to

Give them what they want to try to appease the far right. So they're furious. My favorite rant about this, Eric Erickson, prominent conservative commentator, and he hosts a talk radio show in Atlanta. And he calls the Matt Gaetz's of the world when he's criticizing them for toppling Kevin McCarthy. He calls them the poo flinging caucus.

He is apoplectic. And these guys are all ranting about this and they're furious at Gates. And it's really ironic because if it wasn't for that, if there was no conservative media to put this most bluntly, no one would know who the hell Matt Gates is. He'd be an anonymous congressman from the Florida panhandle who nobody outside of his district knew.

After McCarthy, we see members of the Freedom Caucus helping to undermine Steve Scalise's bid in mid-October, which brings us to the latest failed attempt from Jim Jordan. So can you tell me a little bit about the kind of pressure campaign that we saw from conservative hosts like Sean Hannity and Steve Bannon, who really wanted to see Jim Jordan get in there? I think what happens is they're really angry that McCarthy gets deposed. They're angry that their side looks like a bunch of clowns.

And then I think the light bulb goes off for them, which is this is an opportunity. This is a moment to finally, finally get one of our guys in power.

And they realize we've got a chance here. All of a sudden, the establishment types are kind of willing to vote for Jordan, partially because he's been a good team player. He supported McCarthy all the way through his speakership. And they've kind of got a devil's bargain going where he lets Jordan run the Judiciary Committee and do his thing in terms of investigations into the administration. And

And they've got a pretty good relationship. And so I think that kind of softens some of the establishment. Some of the establishment feels like we've got to do something. It's been like two weeks. We don't have a speakership. And I think that there are also some of them who are relatively new to the House. They don't remember the days when John Boehner was calling Jim Jordan a legislative terrorist because of the tactics he used. So they are more willing than they've ever been to vote for him.

And Jordan, there's a vote on a Friday that makes him the speaker nominee for the Republican caucus. And then they take another vote where they're like, how many of you will vote for him on the floor? And there's like 55 people who say no. And conservative media is like, all right, that's our cue. That's our chance to make this happen.

And they start pressuring them publicly and privately on the airwaves. But also Sean Hannity is calling lawmakers. And Sean Hannity is a producer going around asking staffers. There's a form email that leaks saying,

where she's asking staffers, you know, saying, I heard your members going to vote against Jim Jordan. And if so, with all of these bad things happening in the world that Congress needs to address, can you explain why they'd be against him? Like a very leading, like, Hey, you better vote for him or there's going to be consequences. We're coming after you. Right, right. We're coming after you. You know, it's, it's in the guise of a question, but it's not really a question.

So the right wing media machine ultimately failed to get Jordan elected as speaker, even after three rounds of voting on the House floor. So what does this tell us about the power of conservative media? Is this just like an anomaly or does this tell us that there are limits to their power?

there are two things that are true. The first is that Jim Jordan gets 200 votes and he probably could have twisted enough arms to maybe get another four or five, something like that. If they were the decisive votes, uh,

But what it comes down to is they have such little margin for error. And by that point, the caucus was so fractured. You had people who were angry at Jim Jordan on a personal level because they felt like he didn't support Steve Scalise enough. And they were Scalise's friends. So like you had those kinds of personal petty dynamics involved. And all you needed was like four people to vote against him. You know, it's 217 that they needed.

The other thing to keep in mind with conservative media is conservative media has never been great at getting bills into law or forcing people to do things. Where they are particularly effective is, are these guys who voted against Jim Jordan, might they face primary challengers in 2024? And if they are,

Is conservative media championing those primary challenges, undermining all the advantages of incumbency, helping them to raise money and name recognition, saying, you know, remember when this guy knifed Jim Jordan in the back? Well, now you have a chance for retribution. You can get payback, vote for so-and-so in the primary. Like, they can do that kind of thing. So it remains to be seen whether there's any retribution for this driven by conservative media.

Here we have this highly dysfunctional GOP trying to figure out how to fix the House speaker situation with no end in sight. What can we learn from the way this speaker race has been covered? And how should the press be writing about the GOP today in the context of this conservative media machine?

Well, we've learned a couple of really important things. The first thing we've learned is that the media does not understand how to describe the state of the House Republican caucus ideologically. They keep calling people moderates who literally are down the line party people on every issue. You can't find a single issue where they are to the left of the party or where they really dissent from the party line. Okay. And they're referred to as moderates simply because they're like the least wacko in this caucus.

And I think that that really distorts the ideological tapestry of the Republican Party for voters, where people who don't tune in a lot hear them call some pragmatic conservative a moderate and think, okay, you know, I should be voting for this person. They're a moderate. That's what I like. They kind of benefit politically from this, and it skews Americans' understanding of politics. But more importantly, this kind of leads to a broader problem, which is

The media continues to treat the GOP in 2023 like it has treated both parties for all the modern media era. They want quotes or soundbites from both sides. They want to get what the Republicans have to say out there. They are willing to cover issues that Republicans are making stories out of. The best example of this is their whole impeachment investigation of Joe Biden, which again is based in nothing.

There's no evidence whatsoever to show that Joe Biden did anything wrong. This is kind of much ado about nothing. And yet when you read these stories on it, that's often like buried deep in the story where they say, you know, Republicans are charging this or Republicans had witnesses in this hearing or all of these other, you know, they cover the blow by blow.

And what the media has to understand is as much as we have an impulse for balance, as much as we want to present both sides fairly and let voters make the call, is that that advantages a party that is willing to lie shamelessly. And we see this most obviously in 2020 election denialism.

This isn't government dysfunction. This isn't government not working. This is the Republican Party proving itself unable to govern. This is the Republican Party proving that it has gone so far right and become so much of a chaos caucus that they can't even do the most basic things that need to happen.

And I don't see that in headlines. I don't see that as the dominant narrative here of like the GOP just can't be trusted to run things. Brian, thank you very much. Micah, it's always a pleasure to be with you. Brian Rosenwald is a scholar in residence at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Talk Radio's America.

Thanks for tuning into this week's Midweek Podcast. Be sure to check out the show on Friday for a look at the role Saudi Arabia has played and might play in the current Middle East conflict. In the meantime, keep up with OTM by following the show on Instagram and Twitter. And while you're at it, join the On The Media subreddit, r slash On The Media, where we plan to do some fun internet experiments. I'm Michael Olinger.