It ended up taking a historic fifteen votes for the Republican-majority House of Representatives to finally elect Kevin McCarthy (BR.-California). Decidedly no thanks to Matt Gaetz (BR.-Florida), who supposedly made a deal on Friday with a few other holdouts like Paul Gosar and Lauren Boebert to vote “present” and lower the threshold needed for victory. So in order to be extra Drama Queen, Gaetz withheld his vote when called in hopes of being the guy to make the decision, but when roll call came back to him he still voted “present” even once it became clear McCarthy would still end up short. This led to a whole bunch of arguing and haggling in real time on the floor, culminating in Mike Rogers (BR.-Alabama) having to be restrained from reaching over and pasting Gaetz. Rogers’ own colleague, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, joked that “People shouldn’t be drinking, especially when you’re a redneck, on the House floor.” Or as Jeff Foxworthy would say, “if you’re a Republican Congressman… you might be a redneck.”
(After the fact, Rogers and Gaetz made up and apologized to each other. Gaetz actually said we need more cameras in Congress to show what representatives are doing. Well, that’s one thing I can actually agree with Gaetz on. At least Congress can be entertaining, if it’s too much for them to pass laws and do their jobs.)
But that seemed to be just enough embarrassment that other Republicans got the last holdouts like Matt Rosendale (BR.-Montana) to at least switch from “anybody but this guy” to “present” and McCarthy got nominated after midnight on what was then Saturday morning. It was always questionable whether doing the same thing over and over again would ever work, but apparently McCarthy’s approach of just caving on everything to everybody put the burden on his opponents as to why they still needed to oppose him. Gaetz was actually quoted as saying he was having trouble maintaining his leverage because he ran out of things to ask for. And really, I think it just came down to the same reason the Greedy Old Puritans are still following Donald Trump: They don’t have the imagination to come up with new ideas, no matter how clearly the current ideas have failed.
After the basic formalities, the leader of the opposition got to the podium. Hakeem Jeffries (D.-New York) had gotten all 212 Democrats to vote for him on every one of these ballots. And he gave an oration that was the exact opposite of a concession speech. It quickly became famous for the part where he said, “We will never compromise our principles. We’ll always put American values over autocracy, benevolence over bigotry, the Constitution over the cult, democracy over demagogues, economic opportunity over extremism, freedom over fascism …” and it became clear around that point that he was going to be making these comparisons with every letter of the alphabet, ending with “Yes We Can over ‘you can’t do it’, and zealous representation over zero sum confrontation.”
So Jeffries proved that, unlike Republicans, he knows all 26 letters, not just Q and Z.
Then McCarthy finally got to speak. On paper, it was a decent speech, and points to him if he wrote it himself (which a lot of politicians don’t). But his delivery was a dull, plaintive whine that explains why hardly anybody has respect for him. One key point was where he said, “If this week proved anything, it’s this: I never give up.” But the joke is that in order to get the status of power, he had to give up everything that gives the Speaker power, like giving the caucus the right to challenge him with just one vote. It’s sort of like if you had one of those royal succession wars like in Westeros or real-world France or Spain, and one candidate makes deals with the courtiers and rival nobles to give them all the powers of the kingship in exchange for being allowed to hold the title, and he also has to be the piss boy who runs around the court with a bucket for anyone who wants to relieve themselves. Yes, you’re the pissboy, but you get to wear the crown. It’s good to be the King.
The line of the night was probably in a Daily Beast article: “I just think we should check in,” quipped Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), “and make sure McCarthy still has two kidneys.”
The first bill the McCarthy House passed was an attempt to reverse the recent funding increase for the IRS. Among the first business of the week was a bill to prosecute abortionists if they do not attempt to resuscitate fetuses that are born alive, when there is already a 2002 federal law for that effect. The Party of Trump now wants to defund the Department of Homeland Security because they allegedly aren’t securing the border, when the whole reason the agency even exists was because the last Republican government before Trump wanted another government bureaucracy to club brown-skinned people with. Not only that, the original Open Gaming License is no longer an enforceable document and anything you make under the new License means Wizards of the Coast has rights to all your stuff.
The “Freedom Caucus” might think they won something, but really, what they got was what Democrats got when they finally took the Senate from Mitch McConnell: the most technical of majorities in which one dissent can kill any initiative because dissent in the ranks means they aren’t really a majority, and in order to have the advantages of one, they have to let a couple of prima donnas (like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) turn them all into the supporting cast of their personal opera.
This may or may not matter as much as it did with the Democrats, because Joe Biden actually managed to work with the prima donnas and other legislators to get things done in the stretch. But there was still a lot that “progressives” wanted and couldn’t get. I say it won’t matter as much to Republicans, because they don’t care about boojie shit like “legislation” and “public service” and would rather just stage witch hunts in committee rooms in the afternoon then go on Fox News after 8 pm to brag about how butch they are.
And it seems we don’t even know what Kevin gave away to be King Pissboy. For all the talk that Gaetz and others make about “democracy” and “transparency”, Axios reported that the real details of how the House operates under McCarthy are determined by a “private document that only some House Republicans have seen and others refuse to talk about“. Even conservatives like Nancy Mace of South Carolina told Axios “What I am raising hell about is whatever potential backroom deals may have been done.” So you can imagine what Democrats are thinking. I’m not sure what the Republicans have to hide. I don’t see what could be more discrediting than supporting Kevin McCarthy.
Some of the Republican ideas, like a committee to investigate our dependence on China, and a demand that legislation not be voted on without 72 hours notice, are not bad at all. But even when Republicans could count to eleven without pulling down their pants, you could never get them to do anything that would actually reduce the size of government (again, see the Department of Homeland Security) or protect individual freedom, let alone cut spending and taxes in enough proportion to dent the deficit. So naturally they’re less believable on old “conservative” issues like libertarianism and national defense and more believable on Trumpnik issues like abortion prohibition and pursuing grudges. Like with Ukraine, where their demand to cut funding to the Zelenskyy government is less about fiscal prudence or isolationism and more about the fact that their Master’s Master would rather that he get to complete his genocide without anyone fighting back.
The only problem with letting the kids run the playpen for two years is that we still need two houses of Congress to pass a budget, and most of these brats would rather not pass a budget. Again, not because of any fiscal conservative desire to force Democrats to impose some budget discipline, but because FUCK YOU, That’s Why. They seem to forget that every single time that Republicans forced a government shutdown over the debt, even under Trump, the public relations hit and bureaucratic consequences were such that it always weakened the Republican position in the long run, which is why such standoffs have always ended. But then if Republicans had a long-term memory, they would remember that Joe Biden won the election. As it is, everyone is scared that continued standoff would wreck the US government’s “full faith and credit” and backing of our national debt, which already took a hit in 2011 during the Obama Administration. And if a budget standoff has the global effects that all the conventional thinkers fear, that will end up wrecking the world economy. And as with previous standoffs, voters aren’t going to blame Democrats even if a Democrat is president. Everyone assumes that certain seats are “safe” for Republicans but if they prove themselves to be sufficiently malign and incompetent, even some of those safe Republican states and districts might fall to Democrats, as Georgia and Arizona did in the last few cycles.
At that point Mike Rogers is going to have to get in line behind Mitch McConnell, Dan Crenshaw, and a few other Republicans to kick Matt Gaetz’ ass.
Assuming of course that such cockamamie ideas can even get off the ground. After all, there’s nothing in the Republicans’ little agreement (from what we know of it) that says that a Democrat can’t be the one to call a no-confidence vote on the Speaker. But then they know that if they called that play, the Republicans might go back to conference and find a Speaker with balls.
Like Nancy Pelosi.