“Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly,covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails. “
- Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter XVII
So all the Democrats were fretting and all the Republicans were gloating about all the laws they would get to pass and all the investigations they would get to start against Democrats once they had control over the House of Representatives this term. Except, officially, they’re not in control. Kevin McCarthy (BR.-California) was the designated candidate for Speaker and did get an overwhelming majority of his caucus to make him leader of his party, but unlike the Senate (where unwritten tradition apparently allows the leader of the majority party to run the whole show just because), Article I of the Constitution says the House has to elect its leader by consensus of the entire chamber, including the opposition. Because the Speaker is the presiding officer, no other procedures, including the swearing in of members, can begin until the Speaker is chosen. And since the Republican majority in the House, including the people who voted against McCarthy’s leadership, are only ten more than the Democrats, those opponents only need five votes to torpedo McCarthy’s Speaker bid. Well, guess what. The first round of votes, all 212 Democrats voted for their leader, Hakeem Jeffries (New York) and 19 Republicans went against McCarthy. Since then, they have gone through the same result, as of Thursday night, ten more times. Well, not exactly the same result. In the fourth and subsequent ballots, Victoria Spartz (R.-Indiana) voted “present” which lowered the threshold McCarthy needed but ultimately meant one less vote in his favor since none of the defectors went to his side. On Friday, McCarthy still fell short on a twelfth and thirteenth vote, but got more than ten Republicans back to his side, perhaps because today is the second anniversary of their Viceroy trying to seize control of our government by force, and they wanted to honor the occasion.
This after McCarthy went to any and every length to make sure he had the whole Republican Party behind him in his quest for the Speaker’s office. He admitted on tape after the Trump Riots (TM), “I’ve had it with this guy. What he did is unacceptable” but McCarthy continued to support Trump’s claims that the 2020 election of Joe Biden was illegitimate. For example, he had signed an amicus brief supporting Trump’s case in Texas v. Pennsylvania, which the Supreme Court refused to hear on the grounds that one state cannot contest the election process of another state. Hours after the Trump Riots, McCarthy was one of the Republicans who voted against certifying Biden’s win in two states. On January 28, McCarthy appeared at Mar-a-Lago to take a picture with Trump, an act that the mainstream media described as “kissing Trump’s ring”, since they’re operating on the rules of basic cable. He aceeded to the wishes of Matt Gaetz (BR.-Florida) and other Trumpniks who demanded the excommunication of Liz Cheney (R.-Wyoming) from House leadership for opposing Trump’s auto-coup. This as Kevin insisted, “I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election”. In June 2021, McCarthy opposed the creation of a bipartisan House commission to investigate the Capitol riots, threatening the committee assignments of any Republicans who participated, inadvertently giving a free hand to Speaker Nancy Pelosi to have her own committee with two Republicans, Cheney and retiring Congressman Adam Kinzinger (Illinois) who were already on the outs with the Church of Trump. Which is part of how the committee got recordings that both McCarthy and Cheney had participated in, which might be why Gaetz and the other Trumpniks won’t back him as leader, since they have no more reason to trust what he tells them than Cheney had to trust what he told her.
McCarthy is – what’s the term I’m looking for here? – Ah yes. A “bitch-ass nigga.”
One of my Facebook friends posted that Kevin must have a thing for public humiliation. I said, “I figured that out from his actions immediately after January 6.”
One of the journalists reporting on this for MSDNC said that Kevin McCarthy’s problem is that he can’t change being Kevin McCarthy. No, I would say the problem is the exact opposite. Kevin McCarthy has changed being Kevin McCarthy lots of times. Nobody trusts him, nobody likes him, nobody respects him, and no one will follow him.
Apparently Kevin didn’t figure out that if you’ve already conceded everything to the other party, you have no leverage to make them hold to their side of the deal. But among Kevin’s myriad vices, the foremost of them is stupidity.
The spiritual lesson I get from Kevin McCarthy is that you should never crave a thing so desperately that you make it obvious to others how much you want it. Because then they know how to make you dance on their string.
He’d already agreed to bring back the old House rule (prudently tanked by Pelosi) that members could bring a vote of no confidence in the Speaker if it had just five supporters. After the sixth ballot, McCarthy agreed that McCarthy’s leadership PAC would not spend any money on “safe” seats for Congress, meaning he would not support any candidate who was opposed to the Trumpniks. He has also now agreed that a no-confidence vote only requires one Congressman, so basically anything he does is subject to liberum veto. What is liberum veto? Well, in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, this was a right of any man in the Sejm (senate) to hold up any legislation at will, meaning one person could thwart an otherwise overwhelming consensus. This weakness in the system made “Polish parliament” an insult term in Western Europe and is considered one of the reasons that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth declined and died, because Russia (among other countries) figured out they could buy the vote of any Polish senator to stop the Commonwealth from doing anything in its best interest, including stopping Russia from undermining and seizing their territory.
Why am I bringing up Russia buying legislators to act against their own country? No reason.
McCarthy is in a way just as serious about government as his opponents. Any such deal isn’t worth the toilet paper it is written on and will soon be flushed down the john after being used for its natural purpose.
He certainly doesn’t have any serious policy differences with Trumpniks, and Trump himself is pushing for his speakership. But all the pundits cackling over the House defiance of Trump’s dictate fail to realize (as with his endorsement of COVID vaccine) that his influence is entirely negative. Trump just gave a role model to a party base that was already driven by oppositional defiant disorder. When Trump, in his own long-term interest, decides to support the structure rather than tear it down, suddenly the brats don’t listen to him. I mean when you let them get drunk every night, they’re not going to like it when you tell them to switch to milk.
Which is why Matt “Morrissey Called, He Wants His Hairstyle Back” Gaetz admitted when called out by McCarthy that he didn’t care if Hakeem Jeffries ended up getting the speakership, and why Gaetz was seen on the House floor in conversations with people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who in her previous terms was one of the people who thought Nancy Pelosi wasn’t leftist enough.
What it is is that these guys want all the freedom to be bomb throwers and all the privileges of being in the establishment. They want all the rights and none of the responsibilities. They want to have it both ways. In short, they’re Republicans.
Anti-McCarthy Trumpnik Lauren Boebert engaged in a semi-serious discussion with Stephanie Ruhle on MSDNC, the same week she had a discussion with Sean Hannity that was actually more combative, and you know, give Boebert points for showing up, given that most Republicans don’t see going on MSDNC as being worth the effort, and most of that network’s hosts agree. But one of the points she was trying to make is that for years, no one in the House leadership, in either party, really cared about conservative concerns like balancing the budget, and the only way for that to happen was for the “radicals” to use their leverage.
Reason Magazine had at least one web article this week taking this premise at face value, mocking Mainstream Media for saying these guys only care about personal power when they actually have real procedural concerns, or that they are only serving Trump when the leaders (including Boebert) have specifically gone against him to oppose McCarthy. “None of Mr. McCarthy’s opponents reversed course after receiving calls from Mr. Trump encouraging them to do so,” Lerer and Epstein note. If they are not in it for him, the Times suggests, they must be in it for themselves, because they cannot possibly be trying to accomplish what they say they are trying to accomplish—a proposition so absurd that it is not even worth considering.”
Yes, Charlie Brown, and this time I’ll keep the football on the ground FOR SURE.
The fact that Republicans – and a lot of non-Republicans – had serious questions about how Democrats were running things didn’t mean Republicans had a better idea in 2016. What is absurd is thinking that “conservatives” are any more concerned with fiscal restraint and regular order than they were last year, or when Republicans were last in charge. What is absurd is watching Republican majorities balloon the deficit that much more than Democrats who actually advertise how much they tax and spend. The last time a Republican Speaker seriously tried to change things was Newt Gingrich with the Contract With America, and we all know how that went. The reason the Mainstream Media are so quick to assume the rebels are more concerned with power and privilege than good government is because they have had years and years to watch this process, and know not to take any of these presentations in good faith, unlike Reason Magazine.
Taking the rebels seriously is to act under the assumption that these Republicans think that elected office is a public responsibility, when they think that the purpose of elected office is an opportunity to be the Christian conservative version of GG Allin. But then, given that Allin’s real legal name was Jesus Christ, the analogy may be that much more apt.
But the fact that a small minority is holding up the process underlies the point that the vast majority of House Republicans really do want McCarthy, or at least see him as the best of options. But because of their weak margin of superiority, without the holdouts, Republicans are actually outnumbered by the 212 Democrats voting consistently for Hakeem Jeffries. Nobody considers that if the Democrats are the known element and the Gaetz types are never going to vote McCarthy, the main Republicans actually have the power to make a decision. If they can’t get enough people to go McCarthy they can go outside the cycle and find a conservative that the Gaetz types do not hate, or, some Republicans, even just six, can vote for Jeffries, or Republicans can move for plurality vote, which would either lead to a Jeffries win or scare the radicals with that possibility and convince them to go with the main Republicans’ choice.
But that would mean taking a stand, even if it’s for somebody who is on paper more conservative than McCarthy, and the “normal” Republicans don’t want to alienate either McCarthy or the insurrectionists, just like McCarthy wants to be the leader of “normal” Republicans and also of the insurrectionists.
So they want all the freedom to be bomb throwers and all the privileges of being in the establishment. They want all the rights and none of the responsibilities. They want to have it both ways. In short, they’re Republicans.
And if this is the behavior you can expect from the sane and sensible Republicans, it’s no wonder the lunatics are running the asylum.