Here’s the thing I’ve always thought about Steve Scalise: He’s got an ability to be many things to many people.
I’m not talking about ideology or partisanship. There, the Jefferson Parish congressman — and ever-so-briefly the official GOP choice to be speaker of the House — is utterly immovable. Scalise is a conservative who believes in conservative things, few questions asked or nuances considered. And he’s a Republican who pursues the party agenda at every turn.
But he’s got a different kind of flexibility, one that always served him well, until last week anyway. Those of us who’ve been around a long time saw it during his days in the Louisiana Legislature.
On policy, Scalise embraced divisive causes, writing legislation to prevent New Orleans from suing gun manufacturers and authoring a constitutional amendment to declare that marriage can only involve a man and woman. But he also led the bipartisan effort to build a local film industry by offering generous tax credits.
Politically, Scalise vocally rejected David Duke’s racism and antisemitism, and yet he famously spoke to a Duke-affiliated group, at the invitation of a Duke associate who was well-known in Jefferson Parish political circles. Scalise, like many Louisiana Republicans in the 1990s, also embraced some of the same causes that the onetime Klan leader had promoted during his runs for offices, such as opposition to welfare programs and set-asides.
He’s always been a loyal GOP soldier, even when party elders didn’t return the favor. After David Vitter was elected to the U.S. Senate seat in 2004, Scalise planned to run for his House seat, but the bigwigs instead backed flashy newcomer Bobby Jindal, who had never before lived in the district where Scalise had spent his whole life. So Scalise stepped aside and waited another few years until Jindal ran for governor and the seat came open again.
Once Scalise finally made it Congress, he rose quickly to become the head of the Republican Study Committee, a large caucus dedicated to bringing more conservative ideas into the party’s mainstream. It seemed to work, as Scalise soon started climbing the formal leadership ladder, landing most recently at House majority leader, one rung below speaker.
He was never a leader of the Trump wing of the party, and at times, Scalise’s instincts pointed him in a less disruptive direction, like when he tried to thwart the Congressional aspirations of Marjorie Taylor Greene by backing a primary opponent.
But he made his peace with the party’s embrace of the former president, and at key times, he put whatever principle he might have had aside and played the enabler. Jan. 6, 2021, was just one example; Scalise huddled with Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as they sought help warding off the violent throngs storming the Capitol, then turned around and fed Trump’s unfounded claims of irregularities by voting against certification of Joe Biden's win in some states. Later, he would point the finger at Pelosi for not taking enough precautions, but not at Trump for inciting the riot.
Another way to put all this is that Scalise has a talent for placating people. The most successful politicians do, traditionally. They give as much as they need to, to as many different factions as they need to, in order to get more of what they want than what they don’t want.
In a world that hadn’t turned upside down, this talent would have secured Scalise the speakership. Instead, some of his colleagues refused to be placated — while others made demands he refused to meet.
If you listened to Republicans who didn't support him even after he won a narrow majority of the caucus’ votes, you heard that Scalise was too mainstream or too out there, too similar to deposed former speaker Kevin McCarthy or too disloyal to him. For all of Scalise’s fealty to Trump, the former president backed Jim Jordan, who shares his my-way-or-the-highway worldview. So that’s what Scalise got for contorting himself into a Trump defender all these years. Sad.
Clearly personal conflicts also contributed to Scalise falling short, including previously under-radar tension that prompted Garret Graves of Baton Rouge to throw cold water on Scalise’s bid, when the state’s Republican members should have been in lockstep.
But the fact that Scalise could not get enough Republican support to take his bid to the floor — that so many decided that it’s better to lean into complete chaos than embrace Scalise’s particular skill set — speaks volumes about where the party is right now.
There’s that old saying about not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. With this crowd, it seems, nothing short of perfectly dysfunctional will do.