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.
Narrator: The Democrats absolutely did torpedo the government by getting behind Gaetz’ motion. A few hours later, for the crime of uniting with Democrats, eight Republicans united with the Democrats to make McCarthy the first Speaker ever ousted via resolution.
Oops.
My knee-jerk reaction was to blame the Democrats for this. Some kind of latent centrist instinct, I guess. Like, isn’t it more important to govern than to have petty vengeance? Wouldn’t it be good to debate the budget instead of indulging the GOP’s humiliation fetish for days, possibly weeks?
Wrong again. Two reasons:
Debate wasn’t going to happen anyway. As outlined in the earlier article, the Freedom Caucus is refusing to budge
Fuck ‘em
Kevin McCarthy fucked around, and now he’s finding out. He tried to appease the unappeasable Freedom Caucus, spat in the face of the semi-appeasable Democrats by pushing a bullshit impeachment inquiry, and, when his liberty bois turned on him like they were always going to, flat-out refused to offer any concessions to the Democrats to stay in power.
Like the Freedom Caucus itself, McCarthy wanted credit for taking a hard-line stance against cooperation without suffering the obvious consequences of his refusal to cooperate. I suspect he made the same mistake I did: with their backs against the wall, he thought, the Democrats would make whatever sacrifices needed to be made in order to keep the wheels of government turning and prevent someone farther right from taking up the gavel. It really was his only chance of coming through this alive, but the gambit failed and now it’s too late.
For a while now, the left has been yelling that the Democrats needed to grow a spine. Well, they grew one while I wasn’t paying attention, and now we’re going to have a three-ring shitshow of a confirmation hearing that makes the last one look steady and staid. Good. Kevin McCarthy deserves it. Rarely do smarmy little bastards die the death they deserve, but this—this is poetry.
Let us take a moment to eulogize the little shit:
Hear lies a man who never held a single principle in his life, who valued nothing but power, who got his start by pushing John Boehner out of the speakership and met his end in the exact same way. He lived by the sword, he died by that same sword, the world will be no worse for his absence. Put him in the ground.
With that out of the way: things are about to get very funny, and very, very stupid.
Most of the House Freedom Caucus voted to keep McCarthy as Speaker—when it came right down to it, they either didn’t want to take the heat or didn’t have the stomach for it. Here are the Hateful Eight who did:
Andy Biggs
Ken Buck
Tim Burchett
Eli Crane
Matt Gaetz
Bob Good
Nancy Mace
Matt Rosendale
Either the Republicans will take these saboteurs behind the woodshed and whip them into line, or they will have to pick a Speaker candidate that most of the Eight are willing to vote for and that the Republican caucus writ large can live with. Good fucking luck.
Don’t listen to me ever again—clearly I have no idea what I’m talking about—but I don’t see a way beyond this that doesn’t involve a Speaker farther to the right than Kevin McCarthy. That’s bad. I don’t like that at all.
And yet—how different would it really be from what we already had? McCarthy negotiate with the Democrats one time and met a bloody end almost immediately. Even if the Democrats had backed him in the name of preventing someone worse from assuming office, McCarthy comes from the reddest district in California: he was going to get Liz Cheney’d unless he somehow managed to prove that he really, truly hated the people who saved his ass by never cooperating with them again.
Meanwhile, we’re going to get days and possibly weeks of absolute batshit chaos in the House of Representatives, which means nothing will get done, but also that the Republicans are going to look like a pack of grab-ass buffoons engaged in open civil war. If nothing was going to get done anyway—and thanks to the Freedom Caucus, it wasn’t—why not get your enemies to make some campaign advertisements for you? Why not provide moderate Republicans with ammunition to accuse their far-right colleagues of siding with Democrats to sabotage their own party?
There’s no good move for the Dems here—no move that results in politics happening, or a sane and stable budget, or anything but massive chaos and brinksmanship and stupidity. In a sea of poor moves, the Democrats chose the best one available. I truly dread whatever horrific Speaker emerges from this morass…but maybe the Republicans will do so much damage to themselves in the process that his tenure won’t last beyond 2025.
And you have to admit: the upcoming clusterfuck is going to be very, very funny.
With chaos in the House, anyone want to take bets on whether Trump deliberately violates his gag order and winds up in jail (where I think he wants to be so as to more effectively play the victim in a bid to rile and radicalize his base)?
I honestly think it was the impeachment hearings that did him in with the Democrats. That was dropping a nuclear bomb on politics. I know that he did it hoping to kind of push it into a "sound bite for Fox/OANN/Newsmax" level of politics instead of a straight vote, but it's *so* spectacularly bad that the effect was essentially the same.
Close #2 was that he spent the last year or so making mutually exclusive promises to diametrically opposed factions of his party. Even if you were willing to deal with him hypothetically, he's shown that he isn't trustworthy.