Did Kevin McCarthy Think Impeach! Would Distract Chaos Caucus From Government Shutdown?
These assholes can operate on multiple levels of crazy at once, thank you very much.
Poor Kevin McCarthy! Who — other than anyone who’s read, heard of, or seen a Bazooka Joe comic about Faust — could possibly have predicted that he would find himself in so many uncomfortable situations after he promised the extreme right wing of his party anything it wanted in exchange for letting him play House Speaker? Just this week, after he finally announced an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden’s many very bad but indefinable crimes Tuesday, House Republicans repaid him by threatening to remove him as speaker because they still doubt his commitment to Sparkle Fascism.
On top of that, NPR reports that McCarthy “calculated” his impeachment inquiry concession “could help fund the government and avoid a shutdown at the end of the month.” But nah, the House Chaos Caucus wasted no time Tuesday making clear that they still want to shut down the government if they don’t get massive budget cuts that reverse almost everything Joe Biden and Democrats passed in the last couple years.
As we noted yesterday, Florida Man Matt Gaetz insisted that if McCarthy tries to keep the government funded temporarily with a continuing resolution, Gaetz and allied crazies would consider that an “automatic motion to vacate.” That opinion seems to be shared by others in the Let’s Never Govern At All caucus:
"Those are two separate conversations and two separate actions by Congress," said Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles, a Freedom Caucus member. "There is no leverage with an impeachment process. And if anyone tries to use that to leverage votes for a CR, there will be hell to pay."
NPR reports that McCarthy on Wednesday tried to rally the people who control him by presenting a plan to “continue passing individual spending bills to present a united GOP front to respond to the bipartisan bills coming out of the Senate.” Unfortunately, for that plan to work, the House would need to pass 12 appropriations bills for various parts of the government, and so far it’s passed only one. With just 11 working days scheduled for the House this month, there’s no way in hell the House will get the other 11 bills passed by the end of September, when the current fiscal year ends and the government no longer has authority to operate. (It’s a very dumb system but also the very best in the world because how dare you insult the Founders?)
As of Wednesday afternoon, progress on passing anything had pretty much fallen apart already. McCarthy had to give up on bringing the annual Defense Department funding bill to the floor because far-right Republicans wouldn’t even agree to vote for the procedural motion to consider it. That had nothing to do with what’s in the bill, which is already loaded up with all sorts of terrible culture wars measures that’ll never pass in the Senate. Instead, the Free Dumb Caucus refused to move it forward without guarantees from McCarthy that they’d get deep cuts in non-defense spending.
Never missing an opportunity to take hostages, the loony wing has already won promises from McCarthy to hold votes on slashing aid to Ukraine, and to reduce various Pentagon officials’ salaries to $1 to punish them for wokeness, not that they’ll have the votes to pass.
Looking at the whole sorry mess, Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) told reporters yesterday to be ready for further cray-cray:
"Fasten your seatbelts, because it's going to be a shitshow. […] If you can't pass defense, you can't pass any of them." [“shitshow” un-asterisked from NPR’s reporting — Dok]
And as always seems to happen with government-shutdown shitshows (say that five times fast), at least one delusional Freedom cocker, Bob Good (R-Virginia), insisted a shutdown of the federal government wouldn’t be a big deal. Good explained that in the fantasy world he inhabits, the government shutdown is all pretend anyway: “There's not going to be much impact from that if we do that.” He said the House can just stay in session well into October to finish the funding bills, apparently unaware that “no funding” means no, the House can’t do that.
House Rules Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma), who apparently isn’t a drinker of poisoned Flavor-Aid, pointed out that there’s this place called reality, where
“Shutting down the government is the political equivalent of putting a gun to your head and saying 'do what I say or I'll shoot' — you hurt yourself, you're not going to advance your objective."
Haha, he is such a RINO! Doesn’t he know that if you really believe and you hold your breath until your face turns blue, you’ll finally get everything you want, just like no government shutdown has ever accomplished even once?
Over in the Senate, at least one anonymous Republican senator dismissed the impeachment inquiry as the stupid theatrical exercise it is, telling the Hill that the exercise in futility would hurt Republicans on the whole and calling it “a waste of time. It’s a fool’s errand.”
“It seems like we’re spending a lot of time on things that matter to them that don’t matter to the people I want to have a positive opinion of Republicans next November … This is not driving [general election] turnout,” the lawmaker said. “The only thing that this does is let the folks over there get on TV. It doesn’t do anything to help us with our campaigns next year … They’re all acting like children.”
It’s kind of cute how brave some Republicans get when they don’t actually use their names, talking about their House colleagues like a bunch of toddlers. The same senator suggested that “Maybe this is just Kevin giving people their binkie to get through the shutdown.” Sadly, it increasingly looks like they do not want a nap or a juice box; they want to tear up all the plushies and poop in the play kitchen, then have a long sobbing/screaming fit until America comes to its senses and lets them run everything.
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It's an entire circle-jerk of hostage takers. Just so sad that poor li'l Kevin is caught in the middle (laughs and laughs). Less funny that the rest of us are victims of the petty party.
I can almost always guess a Dok article thanks to an AI-generated header image. Love this one! Pretty sure his hand looks like that.