There’s this Luke Combs lyric that popped to mind on Tuesday as I watched ex-future House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s dream die: “I ain’t gotta see my ex-future mother-in-law anymore,” says one of country music’s only celebratory breakup songs. “Oh, Lord, when it rains it pours.”
McCarthy, poor lamb, was the last to know that the office he’d already moved into was not yet his. Even if the Bakersfield Republican does somehow grab the gavel now, he’s so weak that it won’t be for long.
And it’s not at all surprising that Donald Trump sees McCarthy in mortal political peril and for an entire day asks, “Kevin who?”
“We’ll see what happens,” the noncommittal and committed-to-nothing Trump initially said when asked if he was still supporting McCarthy. On Wednesday morning, Trump finally did put out a statement of full support. But who do you think is enjoying this sad spectacle more, the former president or former Speaker Nancy Pelosi?
Though I’d hate to see anyone fail because he can’t do math, McCarthy is really in trouble because he has no loyalty other than to his own ambition.
Nearly two months ago, I wrote this about the House elf that Trump used to call “my Kevin:” “The lesson of the legend of Faust, if you recall, is that his deal with the devil brought him power and parlor tricks but not happiness, or even contentment. (We coulda told him, right?) Like GOP California congressman Kevin McCarthy, he sold his soul to a con artist and got only some hard lessons in return.”
Here are some of those lessons: Kevin, you shoulda read both Faust and Frankenstein.
When you want something in the worst way, that’s how you might get it.
And even in DC, there apparently is such a thing as being too nakedly ambitious.
If, having given blood so many times before, McCarthy can’t think of anything else to give away to the Freedom Caucus, then what? He’d give them a kidney if he could, but what does he still have that they want? And will they still jump because Trump says so?
The most important thing for the sanity caucus is to keep an election denier away from the speakership.
“This once-in-a-lifetime humiliation of a party’s nominee for speaker is chickens coming home to roost for McCarthy, who whitewashed insurrection on the House floor,” said Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin. “Nobody’s getting killed now, but the House GOP now sleeps in the bed they made with Trump and Bannon.”
Absolutely true, but my probably cockeyed, country-over-party hope is that Democrats are trying to locate six Republicans who might join with them to elect a moderate Republican as speaker.
Yes, this is highly unlikely, mostly because we’ve gotten too tribal for that.
Only, neither Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries nor anyone else in his party is going to become speaker in a Republican-controlled House.
So if Democrats really want to govern — to accomplish even such basics as making sure the debt limit is raised — more than they want to revel in the clear inability and disinterest of most Republicans in doing so, what a service they’d be doing America by building a coalition.
The two parties are not the same; one believes in democracy, and the other does not.
But not all Republicans are the same, either; if you think that a Speaker Fred Upton would be the same as a Speaker Jim Jordan, or even a Speaker McCarthy, then we definitely disagree. Wouldn’t we rather accomplish at least a little something than spend the next two years looking into Hunter Biden’s laptop?
Neither party is going to elevate someone like now former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, because that would be setting up her White House run.
But what about Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon, or since the speaker doesn’t even have to be a member of Congress, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan or former Mass. Gov. Charlie Baker?
If Democrats have the chance to block an undemocratic speaker and don’t take it, they’ll have missed a historic chance to show how different they really are.
