I DON'T KNOW WHY WE THINK THE BAD GUYS LOST YESTERDAY

Yesterday, when the House of Representatives was voting to choose a Speaker, Democratic senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii posted the following at Bluesky at a time when it appeared that Mike Johnson's bid was failing:

This Speaker vote should remind all of us that literally nothing Republicans try to do will be easy, or a foregone conclusion. And often, they are going to have to come to Democrats to enact anything at all. We have lost power but we are not powerless.

— Brian Schatz (@schatz.bsky.social) January 3, 2025 at 1:47 PM

Not long after that, Johnson flipped two Republican votes and won on the first ballot. In other words, even with a slightly smaller majority, Republicans had an easier time electing a Speaker this year than they did two years ago, when it took four days and fifteen ballots to elect Kevin McCarthy.

I know this shouldn't have been a difficult vote -- Republicans settled on reelecting Johnson late last year, then a few of them decided to challenge him after the fight over the continuing resolution to keep the government running -- but in the end it wasn't all that difficult. (In that December fight, Republicans also settled their differences in time, and there was no shutdown.) Nevertheless, it's now conventional wisdom that Donald Trump will have a very difficult time enacting his second-term agenda. "Bad News for Trump’s Legislative Agenda" is the headline at The Atlantic. In The New York Times, the headline is "Johnson’s Reward for Keeping His Gavel: An Impossible Job Delivering for Trump."

But as the Times story notes, the Johnson holdouts came around precisely because of their loyalty to Trump:

Just minutes after Speaker Mike Johnson could exhale, having put down a short-lived conservative revolt and won re-election to his post on Friday, hard-right lawmakers sent him a letter.

It was not congratulatory.

They had only voted for him, they wrote, “because of our steadfast support of President Trump and to ensure the timely certification of his electors.”

We're told:

Now, with total Republican control of government and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s enormous domestic agenda at stake, [Johnson] is facing his toughest test yet.

But how much of Trump's agenda do Johnson's supporters and critics disagree on? And how much of the agenda is even legislative?

Will any Republican try to stop Trump if he begins rounding up and deporting or imprisoning undocumented immigrants? Will they object if he cracks down on trans people? Will they block him if he wants to gut renewable energy programs in favor of "drill, baby, drill"? Will any of them defend the diversity programs Trump opposes?

For that matter, will any Republicans try to stop him if he wants to sic the Justice Department on his enemies? Republicans in the House and Senate were quick to express their opposition to the selection of Matt Gaetz as attorney general, but I don't hear a word of protest from them about the choice of Kash Patel to head the FBI or Pam Bondi's nomination as attorney general.

The Times story tells us:

Mr. Johnson will be responsible for pushing through Mr. Trump’s economic plans, including one or more huge bills that lawmakers say they want to simultaneously increase the nation’s borrowing limit, extend the tax cuts Mr. Trump signed into law in 2017, cut federal spending, and put in place a wide-ranging immigration crackdown.

There certainly won't be any dissent over the immigration crackdown, and when in the past 45 years has any Republican ever objected to a tax cut?

There'll be a fight over the debt limit, as well as on the question of whether cuts to disfavored expenditures should be merely reckless or batshit crazy. (I'm expecting that at least some of the craziest cuts proposed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will be enacted into law.) But on the main agenda items -- mostly to do with the culture wars and Trump's thirst for revenge -- Republicans appear to be in absolute agreement.

And yes, I know that the House will lose two Republicans soon:

The margin in the House will only tighten if the Senate confirms Reps. Mike Waltz of Florida and Elise Stefanik of New York to serve in the administration as national security adviser and United Nations ambassador, respectively.

But Waltz represents Florida's 6th congressional district, which the Cook Political Report rates as R+14. Stefanik represents NY-21, which has a Cook rating of R+9. And Matt Gaetz, who isn't returning to Congress, represents FL-1, which is rated R+19. They'll all be replaced by Republicans very soon.

What we see whenever there's GOP infighting isn't a Republican crack-up. Republicans essentially live by the aphorism often ascribed to Arabs or Muslims, as in Leon Uris's 1984 novel The Haj:

So before I was nine I had learned the basic canon of Arab life. It was me against my brother; me and my brother against our father; my family against my cousins and the clan; the clan against the tribe; and the tribe against the world. And all of us against the infidel.

Republicans simplify this: Pragmatic right-wing extremist against the even more extreme, but all of us against the infidel. And we -- Democrats, liberals, progressives, anti-Trump Republicans, the Justice Department, public schools, librarians, trans people, climate activists, city-dwellers, people of color, people who want abortions, people who believe in vaccines, companies that pursue diversity and inclusion -- are the infidels.