Finally on Saturday, with just 12 hours to go before the federal government would shut down, McCarthy declared himself a grown-up.
“We’re going to be adults in the room, and we’re going to keep government open while we solve this problem,” he told reporters as he rushed to the floor in a last-ditch attempt to fund the government at current levels for another 45 days.
And if Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and the other children try to evict him from the speakership with their threatened motion to vacate the chair?
“You know what? If somebody wants to remove [me] because I want to be the adult in the room, go ahead and try,” McCarthy dared them. “But I think this country’s too important.”
Who is this man and what has he done with Kevin McCarthy?
Let’s have two cheers for the embattled speaker. He did the right thing — after he had exhausted all other options. After bumbling into another manufactured crisis, he turned to Democrats to bail him out, just as he had done on the debt ceiling.
Democrats initially suspected a trick when McCarthy announced the “clean” continuing resolution, with no changes to spending levels or policies. But after stalling for time to read the 71-page bill, they wholeheartedly embraced it: While House Republicans were split, voting 126-90 for the bill, Democrats approved it by a near-unanimous 209-1.
It’s not an ideal fix; it merely delays the shutdown threat until just before Thanksgiving, and it doesn’t provide urgently needed funds for Ukraine to hold off Russia’s invasion. But it is, at long last, a nod to sanity — especially considering that, a day earlier, House Republicans tried to slash government spending by about 30 percent. And just a few hours earlier Republicans were willing to let the government shut down.
“MAGA Republicans have surrendered,” Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), the House Democratic leader, exulted after the vote.
Actually, they hadn’t surrendered; they had been sidelined. Asked before the vote whether he had any support from the wingnuts in his caucus, McCarthy laughed. “No,” he said. “Look, I had tried that for eight months.”
Now comes a likely vote to oust McCarthy from the speakership — “it’s on tenuous ground,” Gaetz said Saturday — and his future may depend on Democrats’ willingness to bail him out. Democrats have good reason not to trust McCarthy; he is, after all, the man who weeks ago tried to placate the far right by beginning impeachment proceedings against President Biden without an iota of evidence of wrongdoing. And even if McCarthy could be trusted, how much more of his incompetence can a poor nation stand?
For much of the week, he wasn’t even trying to avert a shutdown. On the House floor, he wasted days on spending bills that would do nothing to avert the looming crisis. Then, just two days before the shutdown deadline, Republican House members staged the first hearing of their “impeachment inquiry” into Biden — an embarrassing session in which even their own witnesses said they didn’t have the goods on the president.
Three times in recent weeks, McCarthy’s team had to pull the Republican-drafted Pentagon spending bill from the floor because of Republican holdouts. On Thursday, the dissidents defeated the Republican-drafted agriculture appropriations bill. And on Friday, when McCarthy finally made a first attempt to keep the government open, it went down in flames, as 21 Republicans voted against it.
In private caucus meetings in the Capitol basement, Republicans shouted at and cursed each other. In public, they called each other names: “charlatan” and “joke” were added to an epithet repository that already included “lunatics,” “pathetic,” “weak” and “clowns.”
Outside the caucus meeting Friday evening, Rep. Steve Womack (Ark.), a seventh-term Republican on the Appropriations Committee, swung between metaphors for the caucus. One moment, he told a group of us, they were a football team using “the wrong snap count” — and the next they were a spaceship disintegrating on reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. “You make a lot of mistakes when you are tired and mad, and we are both right now,” he said, predicting with confidence that at midnight Saturday “the lights are going to go out.”
Republicans were hopelessly divided. A seven-day continuing resolution? Fourteen days? Thirty days? A $1.47 trillion or a $1.56 trillion spending level? What about the border? They couldn’t reach consensus on any of it. Gaetz and another holdout, Dan Bishop (N.C.), walked out of the meeting. Another dissident, Bob Good (Va.), left shouting, claiming McCarthy had “surrendered to the Senate,” where a bipartisan stopgap spending bill was moving.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) was actively cheering for a shutdown as some sort of punishment for Washington because of covid restrictions. “People here in Washington need to understand how it feels to be shut down,” she told reporters.
Even Rep. George Santos (N.Y.) could not lie about the chaos in the room: “We’re just screaming at each other at this point,” he told Axios’s Andrew Solender.
Things hadn’t improved by Saturday morning, when Republicans met again — this time to hear Majority Whip Tom Emmer (Minn.) tell them that they didn’t have enough votes to pass any continuing resolution of any duration — 14, 30 or 45 days. Instead, they would let the government shut down, while taking up a few bills (paying the troops, extending flood insurance) to mitigate the pain.
And then, just like that, McCarthy became an adult. In an epiphany, he saw the truth that had eluded him for eight months: There was no way to placate the extremists in his caucus.
The realization came not a moment too soon. Even McCarthy’s Republican colleagues had become baffled by his inaction. “Mr. Speaker, leaders lead from the FRONT,” Rep. Scott Perry (Pa.), head of the House Freedom Caucus, posted on social media on Thursday. “We need your plan.”
Eight months late and hours before a shutdown, McCarthy came up with a plan. It could hardly have been handled any worse.
With much fanfare, House Republicans had adopted a rule at the beginning of the year requiring the text of bills to be distributed 72 hours before a floor vote. This time, they released the text a few minutes before bringing the bill to the floor. Democrats played for time — a vote to adjourn and a mini-filibuster by Jeffries — while staff combed the bill.
Adding to the chaos of the moment, hotheaded Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) deliberately pulled a fire alarm in the Cannon House Office Building, requiring an evacuation; he was caught on tape and will probably face punishment.
Immediately after the vote, it was time for some of the 90 Republicans who opposed McCarthy’s “clean CR” to set off alarms. Rep. Andy Biggs (Ariz.) complained that “McCarthy sided with 209 Democrats” on “Biden-Pelosi-Schumer spending,” then asked on social media: “Should he remain Speaker of the House?”
Gaetz already had an answer to that. Immediately after the vote, he stood at a microphone on the House floor, gesturing to be recognized. But the presiding officer, Womack, quickly slammed the gavel to adjourn the House until Monday — postponing McCarthy’s reckoning for at least 48 hours.
Asked whether Democrats would help the speaker keep his job, Jeffries only said, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”
Maybe McCarthy can strike a deal to remain speaker. But Americans deserve better than the unremitting chaos and crises of his amateurish tenure.
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