Kevin McCarthy Is Screwed

Who Could Possibly Have Seen This Coming

Update: Kevin McCarthy is (Politically) Dead

Tires squeal and kick up a cloud of dust as the driver floors the vehicle—it’s Kevin McCarthy with a car full of furious, screaming Democrats. Behind him, Matt Gaetz accelerates his enormous pickup in hot pursuit, truck nuts flapping behind him. The bridge up yonder was washed away in the last flood, the Speakers’ only hope is to get enough speed to jump the gap. He’s off—he’s airborne, he’s—

Freeze frame. Waylon Jenning’s voice echoes across the dusty plain: “That McCarthy boy sure is gonna have a hard time gettin’ out of this one!”

If you’re reading this substack you’re probably familiar with the Great Budget Bill Showdown XI, but let’s back up anyway. The legislative branch has the power of the purse, which means that every year they have to pass an enormous omnibus spending bill so the government can pay to do things. Republicans would like the government to do fewer things. Democrats would like the government to do more things. The budget determines how many things the government can do. You see the problem here.

If the omnibus spending bill doesn’t make it through the House and Senate and receive the President’s signature, the government can’t pay for almost any of the things and it shuts down. Some people, like air traffic controllers, have to come in and work but they don’t get paid to work. They get backpay if and when Congress gets their shit together, but not before. We’re talking 2.2 million federal workers and 1.3 million active duty military personnel. Some essential services remain open, like socialized medicine for veterans. The Brookings institute has a good breakdown of who gets screwed when the budget doesn’t happen.

In the past, mainstream Republicans and Democrats have agreed that the government should do some things, which meant that no one wanted a shutdown, even though we got them all the time. Now, however, we have something called the Freedom Caucus, so named because they would like to free us all from the shackles of everything the federal government does except for national defense and *checks notes* yeah, basically just national defense. Everything else is either states’ rights or a free-for-all.

From these maniacs’ perspective, a government shutdown is kinda rad

I have never, in the six shutdowns I’ve lived through, seen a group of politicians more eager to shut the government down than the Freedom Caucus. It’s not just that they’re entirely refusing to compromise on any of their demands (we’ll get to that in a second), it’s that they resisted even passing a stopgap measure to fund the government for a couple more months so they could keep fighting about it. Demanded it, actually. In their list of demands.

Kevin McCarthy, current Speaker of the House, has made his bones pretending to be a maniac too. He isn’t. As I’ve written before, he’s a politician born and bred: the kind of loathesome slime who will say or do anything to gain power. He’s made it this far by sensing which way the wind is blowing and moving whichever way it takes him. It took him to the Tea Party. It took him to MAGAland. It gave him just enough momentum to seize the Speaker’s gavel after 14 humiliating rounds of his own party telling him to go fuck himself.

Late last week, in a shocking act of what, if you squint, could be considered heroism, the House Speaker cooperated with the Democrats to avoid massively disrupting American lives. Together, they passed a stopgap spending bill to delay government shutdown until November 17th, when we’ll get to endure another round of excruciating budget bullshit, but at least federal workers and air traffic controllers get paid, benefits go out, and we get Fat Bear Week.

In doing so, McCarthy has committed a cardinal sin, the cardinal sin. The first, second, and third rule of GOP politics is: never work with the ChiCom woke fascist cabal of secret communist pedophiles actively trying to trans your children through DEI and execute the Great Reset through walkable cities. Actual goddamn lizards. Satan’s army. Openers of the demonic portal that hovers over the White House, pushers of the deadly COVID vaccine, authoritarian monsters who are actively planning to publicly execute Real Americans™ unless Trump wins in 2024.

Compromise with such a hideously evil force cannot be countenanced. Yet McCarthy compromised anyway, because he is a politician. Usually that word is an insult: here and now it is his only saving grace. We look down on politicians because politics is dirty by nature: not because of corruption and bribery and the opportunity to collect Scrooge McDuck money in your own home, but because a politician’s job is to compromise with people who hold values antithetical to their own. My side thinks there should be a social safety net. Your side wants bootstraps. Now we have to sit down and come up with a solution that’s neither, so everyone can be mad at us forever.

This process used to work a lot better, because Republicans and Democrats used to agree on more things—like, you know, that government should exist and mitigate the free rider problem by paying for public goods. That the Constitution is a living document and not clay tablets bequeathed from the heavens unto the Founding Fathers by God. Most importantly, they used to agree that everyone involved wanted what’s best for America. Their ideas of what’s best differed wildly, but that was a matter of opinion, not cryptosatanist evil.

By contrast, not a single politician resides in the Freedom Caucus. As I wrote back in January, in the midst of Kevin McCarthy’s humiliating confirmation hearings:

It is insane that the Freedom Caucus is ascendent and not neutered, in the same way and for the same reason that it is insane that the GOP failed so spectacularly at the ballot box last year. Nothing makes any goddamn sense anymore because the rules are changing. Too often people interpret “War is politics by other means” to mean “War and politics are the same genre of thing.” They are not. War is not politics, Clausewitz says so directly; war is a different and incompatible tactic to achieve the same genre of ends. 

As McCarthy is discovering in real time, there’s no room for a politician in a war zone.

(as an aside: it seems I shall have to endure some humiliation of my own as I link directly to my galaxy-brain “Trump Is All Washed Up” take. In my defense, the NFT thing was so stupid it melted my brain, but I was incredibly, profoundly mistaken. Trump will remain God-Emperor of the GOP until he dies, and maybe afterwards as well for all I know. )

McCarthy did eventually get that Speaker’s gavel, of course, but at a horrible price. I can’t quite call it Faustian, since he doesn’t have a soul to sell. This is more of a Shinigami Eyes situation: sacrificing his future for power in the present. Among the many concessions he made, McCarthy agreed that any member of the House can initiate a “motion to vacate” which, if passed, would force another round of confirmation hearings.

Everyone knew how McCarthy’s speakership would end the moment he said yes to that sword of Damocles. Eventually, he would fail to toe the far-right line and Matt Gaetz, who refused to vote for McCarthy even when the God-Emperor ordered him to and who regularly guest hosts on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, would murder him. Figuratively.

Probably figuratively.

Here comes the inevitable fruit of that unholy union, squalling and crying, almost nine months to the day since its conception. Matt Gaetz has filed a motion to vacate. This motion takes priority over all other House business, which would effectively shut down the government anyway, despite the stopgap bill.

McCarthy will move to kill this bill, which he can do with a simple majority vote. The Freedom Caucus will vote against him. The rest of his party will probably vote for him, just as they did during the speakership roles. Which means it all comes down to one question: what will the Democrats do? If most of them side with the Freedom Caucus, the motion goes to the floor and we endure hours, days, weeks of debate. Rounds of voting. God help us all.

McCarthy recently alienated the Democrats as well as his own party’s hard-liners. In an attempt to cut a deal with the radicals in his own party, the Speaker launched an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden’s involvement in Hunter Biden’s various nepotism schemes. No one has presented any evidence of this involvement beyond the father-son relationship, but Fox News tells me that’s what the inquiry is for: to find evidence. In related news, I’ve decided to bring charges against my chronically furious neighbor for dealing fentanyl. I don’t have any proof, but that’s what the trial is for. When exactly did you stop beating your wife, Mr. President?

Despite McCarthy’s shitassery, I don’t think the Democrats will torpedo the government by getting behind Gaetz’ motion—they are, by and large, politicians and not warriors. *They might abstain, which would do the same thing, but the results would be catastrophic for the country and they know it. It is still a horrible bind for McCarthy. As Gaetz put it to CNN:

“I have enough Republicans where at this point next week, one of two things will happen. Kevin McCarthy won’t be the speaker of the House, or he’ll be the speaker of the House working at the pleasure of the Democrats. And I’m at peace with either result, because the American people deserve to know who governs them.”

*Narrator: they absolutely did torpedo the government, proving the author catastrophically wrong almost the moment she published this article. Read the update here:

Ten years ago, McCarthy’s gambit would have paid off. He did a deal with the Republicans so he could do a deal with the Democrats. Everyone got something they wanted. No one’s happy, exactly, but the lights stay on and the government continues to more or less function.

But the Freedom Caucus does not want the government to continue to more or less function. The Freedom Caucus would like to drown the government in a bathtub. They want the lights off.

The Democrats, when bargaining, often make the mistake of starting where they want to end, instead of opening with unreasonable demands and then allowing themselves to be talked down to where they actually want to be. The Freedom Caucus has the opposite problem: they’re got the unreasonable demands down pat but refuse to cede ground. Any concession to basic political reality reads as a concession to the agents of the Devil and also China to their frothing base. They can’t. They won’t.

Here’s what the Freedom Caucus is demanding in exchange for the country they’ve taken hostage:

• Restore the budget to 2022 levels ($1.471 trillion), entirely ignoring inflation and the programs they’d have to cut.

• Tie the “Secure the Border Act of 2023” to the budget bill, which would severely limit the ability of immigrants to seek asylum and also make it harder for immigrants to come here legally, because nothing says “we love immigrants as long as they do it legally!” like making it impossible for anyone to come here legally.

• “Address the unprecedented weaponization of the Justice Department and FBI to focus them on prosecuting real criminals instead of conducting political witch hunts and targeting law-abiding citizens.” In other words: stop prosecuting Trump for crimes with actual evidence behind them.

• “End the Left’s cancerous woke policies in the Pentagon undermining our military’s core warfighting mission.” Note the total lack of specifics here.

• No “blank check” for military aid to Ukraine.

The odds of getting even one of those past Biden’s desk unchanged is virtually zero. Doesn’t matter. The Freedom Caucus is a terrorist organization. They are suicide bombers. Whether the government shuts down or gives in, the Freedom Caucus gets what they want.

There is no downside to this strategy. Right now, the Freedom Caucus does nothing but benefit from their ideological purity. Their hard-line stance drags negotiations rightward and, since the actual politicians in the GOP work around the clock to thwart their insanity, they avoid the incredible backlash they’d receive if the government actually shut down, or actually massively destabilized the economy by implementing psychotic immigration policy, or actually allowed Russia to reap some kind of reward for their war of aggression against Ukraine, likely prompting China to attack Taiwan, and Azerbaijan to go to war with Armenia, and the Balkans to go to war with itself, and…

While the Freedom Caucus is winning, McCarthy and the other GOP politicians do nothing but lose. If the past is any indication, come next election the adults in the room will be hung as traitors, by which I mean primaried, or maybe actually hung, who knows at this point. The warrior class will replace them, one by one. As the warriors replace politicians, the government will become increasingly dysfunctional, which will lead to frustration, which will lead to the election of more warriors. Which will lead to war.

It pains me to say this, but the Freedom Caucus isn’t entirely wrong. They are wrong about policy, and morality, and about the Democrats being in league with Communist China, and just about everything else they believe or endorse or do, but they’re not wrong about refusing to compromise with evil.

Increasingly, working with Republicans involves compromising with evil.

I don’t hate conservatives. I try not to hate anyone. But I do hate their ideology, which I think hurts everyone and especially the people who believe in it. I think that attempts to eradicate trans people from public existence are evil, actually bedrock evil, I think that forcing ten-year-olds to give birth is evil, I think that banning books and stifling knowledge is evil. I am not willing to compromise on these things. I am not willing to force ten year olds to give birth in limited circumstances, I am not willing to sign off on colleges eliminating just half of their African American Studies curriculum.

Politics can sort out details, like how much to spend on a government program. It can’t mitigate a social schism, or fundamental moral disagreement. When two groups of people believe two radically different things, when each side believes the other side evil, and when those groups live in the same place, often next door to each other, eventually the problem stops being political.

I do not want this future for America: my country, this country that I love. I do not want the Freedom Caucus to be a preview of coming attractions. If we can’t understand each other, communicate shared humanity to each other, and work towards a better future together—if thirty-five percent of this country truly is lost to us—then we will have war in America. It may already be too late, but we have to behave as though it isn’t, on the off chance that it isn’t. Nationally, locally, and personally, we must hold onto politics for as long as we can. Filthy as they are, the alternative is worse.

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