Kevin McCarthy is out as speaker, and people are, as they should, picking sides. Ray Cardello thinks Matt Gaetz is a petulant child without a plan. Ed Mosca is happy to see Republicans of the principle remove him for failing to do his job.
Republicans in at least one Facebook group where I lurk think dethroning McCarthy was a bad idea—party division. We are shooting ourselves in the foot. Question: if everyone agrees that Washington, DC, is broken, how do we think fixing it might look?
Did it look like the brief tenure of Speaker McCarthy?
While McCarthy was speaker, Joe, and the Democrats didn’t seem to have too much trouble advancing their agenda at a time when Kevin’s job – his only job – was to leverage significant concessions or bring Congress to a screeching halt. I don’t recall hearing any tires chirp.
Let’s turn that around. As the House ponders his replacement, can they be a disruptor? Someone who walks against the flow of politics as usual. A guy or gal who says no to open borders and uses the power of the body and the majority to cut purse strings to get the Executive Branch under control. Or will it be someone who must also agree to look the other way? A leader who, instead of returning the budget process to clean appropriations or bust, has to agree to support continuing resolutions and pork-filled omnibus bills to get Republican votes. Someone who agrees that 33 trillion isn’t too much debt, we can afford some more.
Kevin McCarthy might be a great guy and a passable member of Congress, but it took fifteen attempts before he managed enough votes to get the gavel. And only after multiple concessions to the freedom wing of the Caucus and the very thing that got him “fired” from the gig. One of those concessions was a rule allowing any member to call a vote to vacate. That’s not exactly a guy with a mandate. Any Republican pretending anything else has a poor memory.
Here’s another unpleasant truth. In the wake of his departure as speaker, only Republicans can fail to elect one of their own to the post. Democrats will reject anyone who is not an R, which is meaningless unless Republicans screw it up. Is the departure of McCarthy as Speaker an expression of distaste at the removal from leadership of a milquetoast insider, or are we afraid our Republicans will do worse?
I have a few years of experience as an observer of politics, including the ones where Kevin McCarthy was Speaker of the US House. He was no great find. He’s much closer to the Inside the Beltway party than flyover country Republicans, but he could have been more like the latter.
Twelve appropriations bills. All he needed to do was bring the budget process back into line by forcing votes on each of the individual appropriations bills, clean and neat. Democrats would have been the ones shutting down the government, and we’d be able to put a name to the department, its largesse, and who was affected. He opted for a continuing resolution which, like the omnibus bills of the past decade-plus, have helped drive waste, fraud, abuse, and deficits (plus interest) into the pockets of our grandchildren.
I’m not saying I didn’t like the guy. Given the choices at the time, he appeared to have potential, but as often happens, he hid his Georgetown flu or got a more severe case along the way. He’s not the first or the last, and such is our problem. Too few members of Congress keep the principles they claim to get elected when they get to DC – it is a rare, perhaps even precious, trait, and we need more of it.
And I get why you might think Matt Gaetz was a petulant child, but he did something of which most Republicans are incapable. He got Democrats to vote for change Republicans can believe in if Republicans can stop bitching about displacing a budding DC insider from leadership long enough to replace him with someone with a bit more backbone.
Republicans control the US House, but what exactly have they done with that? If you are unsure, compare McCarthy’s US House to any Democrat majority, no matter how slim. They act like they can’t lose and refuse to accept no for an answer. They use their power to advance as much of their agenda as they can and to block every other, regardless of which branch of government.
Was McCarthy finally moving in that direction? I saw no evidence of it. And I’m not saying the Republican majority will manage to do better, just that someone had to rip off the bandaid, or we’d keep doing worse. America is worse off under McCarthy as Speaker. Much worse.
Are you sure you want to defend that?
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