‘This Is Chaos at Its Worst’: Rep. Carbajal Reacts to Political Decapitation on the Hill

“Chaos, chaos, chaos,” said Santa Barbara’s Congressmember Salud Carbajal, both exclaiming and explaining. “Chaos! This is chaos at its worst.”

Carbajal, now in his fourth term in Washington, D.C., was referring to the government shutdown imposed by the removal of Republican House Speak Kevin McCarthy at the instigation of Rep. Matt Gaetz, a right-wing firebrand, plus a handful of the party’s hardline conservative caucus.

Last week, Gaetz — who married a woman from Goleta at a wedding on Catalina Island two years ago —took advantage of new rules that he insisted upon when McCarthy became speaker earlier in the year that allows just one member of the party to call for a vote on the speaker’s removal. Because no Democratic members of Congress would go to McCarthy’s rescue, the House found itself effectively decapitated for the first time in American history. 

Carbajal noted that he has been through four government shutdowns thus far because Congress could not find the votes needed to maintain ongoing funding for government operations. But this is the very first time in his tenure — or anyone else’s — the House has been without a Speaker. 

“Until we get one, nothing gets done. There will be no committee meetings, no committee actions,” he said. “Nothing will get done. And we have a lot of work to do.” 

Not only does Congress have to pass yet another continuing resolution to keep funding government operations sometime this November, but it has to also act on several critical appropriations bills affecting foundational funding programs, such as agriculture and military spending, not to mention spending for Ukraine. 

Three Republicans candidates have since surfaced who are vying to replace McCarthy, the Republican from Bakersfield of whom Salud had alluded to contemptuously in the past for his unwavering fealty to former President Donald Trump. The first vote for a possible new Speaker is scheduled to take place this coming Wednesday. Whether any of these candidates — Republicans Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise being the best known — can get over the hump has yet to be seen. 

“It’s anybody’s guess,” Carbajal said. “But these guys have to come together and figure it out.”

Bad blood between McCarthy and Gaetz goes back a long way, but the biggest eruption took place after McCarthy worked with the Democrats to pass an ongoing spending resolution — without the massive spending cuts Republicans have insisted upon — to prevent a government shutdown on September 30. But Democratic leadership showed no interest in giving McCarthy the votes he’d need to survive the defections from eight Republicans. Carbajal said that when Democrats caucused with leadership between the deal and McCarthy’s ouster, they were shown videos of interviews with McCarthy in which the then soon-to-be ex-Speaker trashed and thrashed Democrats for taking the country so deeply in debt. 

“Was there any humility or anything to acknowledge we’d just worked something out?” Carbajal asked. “No. Instead he just doubled down.”

Carbajal added McCarthy could have reached out to Democrat Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries or any other Democrats leaders, but that he never did. 

“Nope. Nothing,” Carbajal stated. 

Carbajal wastes little opportunity to extoll the virtues of “bipartisanship” in his many public statements and belongs to a congressional organization made up of Democrats and Republicans in equal number known as the Problem Solvers Caucus. Carbajal declined to provide any details of any discussion or debate within the Problem Solvers as to what, if any, efforts should be undertaken to salvage McCarthy’s speakership, explaining those exchanges remain confidential. 

Since McCarthy was politically defenestrated, congressional rules and bylaws give limited authority to his appointed second-in-command. What constitutional authority is vested in this position — now occupied by a congressmember named Patrick McHenry — is of considerable debate and uncertainty. Carbajal strongly suspected McHenry’s powers will be limited to helping facilitate the elections necessary to name a successor to McCarthy.

Carbajal was quick to rebut any suggestion that Democrats bear responsibility for the current chaos on the Hill. 

“This was not some Democratic thing,” he stated. “The Republicans set the rules … and called the vote that led to his downfall.” 

When the Democrats held the majority in the last Congress, Carbajal pointed out, they held a similarly slim majority — by just five votes. 

“You know what we did?” he asked rhetorically. “We governed.” 

With a five-vote majority — not to mention a slim majority in the Senate and control of the White House — Democrats managed to pass three massive pieces of legislation designed to address the nation’s failing infrastructure, help develop alternative energy, and promote the manufacture of computer chips in the United States and not China. 

“Yes, we had disagreements among ourselves and we fought,” he said, “but we governed.” 

Carbajal took office the same year Donald Trump was sworn in as president. Since then, the political melodrama has exploded at an exponential rate — two impeachments of Trump, one impeachment inquiry of Joe Biden, countless indictments against the former president, COVID, the January 6 insurrection, and all the festering polarization that has accompanied all of it. 

When asked what it’s like to be in the middle of all that, Carbajal paused and said, “The sad thing here—the really sad thing — is this is all I’ve known.” 

Carbajal’s only prior point of reference, he said, was during his tenure serving on the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors. “Sure, we had disagreements and there was drama, but nothing remotely like this. But for the most part we worked together, and we did our jobs. This is just chaos. I feel like I’m in a remake of the movie Beetlejuice.”