Juan Williams: Today’s GOP has no interest in governing

In a poker game, you’d say Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) showed his hand. 

After badgering Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court, with asinine talk of books about “racist” babies, the Texas Republican had a slip up. 

As People magazine reported it: “Senate observers say they saw Ted Cruz checking his Twitter mentions earlier this week between fiery exchanges during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.” 

Photographs showed Cruz frantically scrolling through his phone at the hearing. According to a tweet from a Los Angeles Times photojournalist, Kent Nishimura, Cruz was “searching Twitter for his name” after a particularly tense exchange with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin [D-Ill.]. 

The big win Cruz was seeking was a spike in mentions of his name in the right-wing media echo chamber. 

What matters most to him is being a star in a party celebrating conspiracy theories, white racial grievance, and unthinking loyalty to former President Trump’s authoritarian impulses. 

Mocking anyone outside that club is part of the game. 

That made Jackson a target.  

This quest for social media stardom is not a bug among a few Republicans. 

It is now standard operating procedure for a party broken by addiction to displays of right-wing extremism.  

The GOP shows no interest in governing. It has no legislative plan to deal with inflation or reform the broken immigration system. Zilch. That work is left to Democrats. 

Republicans failed to react even when Trump made a public appeal to Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, in the middle of Russia’s war on Ukraine. Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, was looking for political dirt on President Biden’s son, Hunter.  

A similar move, during a 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, got Trump impeached for the first time. 

Democrats seem to think that such outrageous behavior makes it obvious that the GOP is no longer a responsible political actor. 

But voters still see the GOP as a legitimate political force, even preferable to Democrats in some comparisons. And news organizations cover them as a normal political party.  

The truth is GOP elected officials don’t answer to voters or leaders in Congress. They answer to radio talk-show hosts who get ratings as extreme provocateurs and have no interest in solving the nation’s problems. 

Cruz is not alone in gauging his worth by the response of right-wing social media. 

Sen. Josh Hawley (R- Mo.) used misleading evidence to demean Jackson as soft on people convicted of child pornography charges, a thinly-veiled nod to QAnon conspiracy theories that Democrats exploit children. 

And there is more. 

Consider the following three Republicans who gave up on governing in exchange for trending on Twitter.

First, there is former Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). He would have been in line to be the chairman of the most powerful committee in Congress, the House Ways and Means Committee. 

Instead, he resigned at the beginning of this year to become CEO of Trump’s sketchy social media company, which is already under investigation by federal regulators. 

Second there is Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. 

She sent text messages to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during the period after the 2020 election when Trump was seeking to retain power. In some of those texts, Ginni Thomas promoted deranged conspiracy theories from the darkest corners of the internet. 

Now there are calls for her husband to recuse himself from future cases related to the Jan. 6 insurrection. 

And then there is Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.). 

In a podcast, he said he was invited to wild sex parties in Washington and, separately, saw prominent people doing cocaine.  

Cawthorn is already infamous for calling Zelensky a “thug.” He labeled the Ukrainian government “incredibly corrupt” and “evil,” and said it was “pushing woke ideologies.”  

This caused the most prominent anti-Trump Republican in Congress, Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) to brand Cawthorn a member of the “Putin wing of the GOP.”  

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said the North Carolina freshman admitted to him that his orgy story was “exaggerated.” 

“It is just frustration. There is no evidence behind his statements,” McCarthy told reporters, adding he had “lost…trust” in Cawthorn. 

But McCarthy did not punish Cawthorn. 

Past GOP leaders, such as Presidents Eisenhower, Reagan and George W. Bush, created a party of conservative principles — limited taxes, cultural conservatism, and a strong belief in America as a military and economic world leader. 

Now members of that faction of the party are denigrated in the right-wing echo chamber as disloyal RINOs – Republicans in Name Only. 

Many polls show around 70 percent of Republicans agree with the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. 

Twenty-five percent of Republicans now agree with the core QAnon conspiracy theories, according to a February poll by Public Religion Research Institute. The FBI publicly rates the movement as a terror threat. 

Odds favor a Republican majority in both houses of Congress after the election in seven months. 

What happens when the politicians current calling themselves Republicans — wholly uninterested in governing — wield the power of the federal government? 

“I fear for our democracy if the Republicans were ever to get the gavel. We can’t let that happen. Democracy is on the ballot in November,” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). 

Pelosi is right. The key to stopping the GOP may well be to understand their motivation.  

It isn’t about ideology. It’s about getting “likes” and trending on right-wing Twitter.  

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.