2023, When Kevin McCarthy Was House Speaker For A Few Months
Farewell, Kevin, you won’t be missed.
Kevin McCarthy exits the House of Representatives after a dismal year where he repeatedly made drunk history. When Republicans narrowly, just barely (thanks, New York!) won control of the House in 2022, McCarthy began his desperate quest for the gavel.
McCarthy had the same majority as former Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2021. She’d go on to pass additional COVID relief, a major infrastructure package, gun safety legislation, and the Inflation Reduction Act. She kept the lights on in DC and avoided catastrophic debt defaults — these are apparently cookie-worthy achievements when Republicans are in charge. Oh, and she also kept her job the whole time, which is where McCarthy struggled.
The House Republican caucus’s far-right nihilist wing never fully trusted McCarthy, but he won them over after careful deliberations and savvy negotiations that resulted in him giving them everything, plus his dignity and some never-ending breadsticks. He was the first House speaker with a gavel and no pants.
This fool agreed to a rules change where any malcontent could trigger a motion to vacate the speakership. A competent speaker could use procedural votes to slow down or outright block the motion, but if it reached the floor, a simple House majority was sufficient to send the speaker packing. Kyle Stewart at NBC News wrote in January, “In theory, a small group of Republicans who want to force out the speaker could work with Democrats to reach the votes needed to remove the speaker.” That theory would soon become reality.
But first, McCarthy was subjected to no less than 15 rounds of ritual humiliation before he was finally elected speaker. During his brief moment of triumph, he tried joking about the ordeal, telling Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, “I got to warn you. Two years ago I got 100 percent of the vote from my conference.”
Jeffries didn’t need McCarthy’s “warning.” It’s like a parent warning my son not to stick a knife into a sparking electrical outlet. My kid isn’t stupid. That’s a you problem. Jeffries will win the speakership with 100 percent of his caucus on the first vote — or any “no” votes would’ve been arranged and approved beforehand and won’t affect the outcome, a classic Pelosi move. Jeffries trained with the best. McCarthy trained with a confused seal.
Once he was speaker, McCarthy wielded the gavel and sat in Pelosi’s former office. That was the extent of his notable achievements. He successfully advanced the MAGA vendetta against Reps. Ilhan Omar, Adam Schiff, and Eric Swalwell and removed them from key committees. Next year, these three Democrats will continue to serve in the House — or Schiff might move to the Senate — while McCarthy works on his memoir, likely titled I Came, I Saw, I Left Like A Loser.
President Joe Biden ran circles around McCarthy during negotiations to raise the debt ceiling. Republicans held the nation’s full faith and credit hostage and assumed they could extract painful concessions from the White House, including rolling back all the president’s actual legislative achievements, such as the tax incentives for fighting climate change in the Inflation Reduction Act.
McCarthy blinked and got nothing that warranted all the drama. He insisted he kicked old senile Biden’s ass and while Biden was happy to let him go on thinking this so the economy wouldn’t collapse, the lunatic wing was pissed. McCarthy thought he could appease the crazies with a BS impeachment inquiry. That didn’t work. Matt Gaetz and his fellow crackpots wanted to draw and quarter Hunter Biden while also forcing a pointless government shutdown.
That creepy overgrown bobble head was McCarthy’s true foe, not Biden or Jeffries. Gaetz, with the help of seven other Republicans, yanked the gavel from McCarthy. He’d lost his lifetime goal within 10 months. It’s the third-shortest speaker tenure. Theodore Pomeroy served a single day at the end of the 40th Congress in 1869. He refused to continue in the next Congress. Michael Kerr was speaker for 258 days before his death. McCarthy is still technically alive.
He announced in early December that he’s leaving the House completely but “not the fight,” which is what quitters say. He’s tried to spin his sorry speakership with some lies about Nancy Pelosi. He claimed she’d only ever lost seats as speaker, which is not even true on some twisted technicality. She first took the gavel in 2007 and in the 2008 election, Democrats expanded their majority by 21.
During a recent exit interview on Fox News, McCarthy lied some more about Joe Biden, who he says should be removed as president because he’s “not there.” Biden is still in the White House. It’s McCarthy who’s going away. He said in his farewell remarks that he’s leaving the House in better shape than he found it, and that is technically true because he’ll no longer be there.
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OT: Just got Daddy home, we made a detour to Publix for subs (he loves their Italian sub) and he is now happily in front of the TV watching the Jaguars beat the Panthers. The doctor at the hospital recommends a change in his insulin, so we are hoping that these incidents won't happen anymore.
“The man’s fundamental hollowness clung to him like poop on a shoe.” — Michelle Cottle
And THAT is how you write a political obituary.