The same lethal combination of vindictiveness, name calling, vulgarity, sabotage and paralysis that caused the meltdown on the House floor continued to consume the party off the floor.
Republican lawmakers, on the verge of fisticuffs in their caucus meeting in the Capitol basement Tuesday night, burst out of the room complaining to reporters about the “bull—-” and “horse—-” decision by McHenry to have a week-long adjournment to cool down.
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) said he would lead an effort to expel Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) from the House Republican caucus — part of the payback for the “eight selfish a–holes” (as Lawler put it to Axios’s Andrew Solender) who ousted McCarthy (R-Calif.).
Though House rules gave McHenry the temporary speakership “for the sole purpose of electing a new speaker,” McHenry promptly abused his power by evicting former House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and former majority leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) from offices they’d been given in the Capitol; Pelosi, in California for the funeral of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, was told she must vacate immediately and the office locks would be re-keyed.
Republican lawmakers threatened to quit the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus. The moderate Republican Governance Group threatened to expel Rep. Nancy Mace (S.C.) because she had voted to oust McCarthy.
Former House Republican Markwayne Mullin (Okla.), now in the Senate, attacked Gaetz by giving an interview to CNN’s Manu Raju about his former colleague’s sexual exploits. Another Senate Republican, John Cornyn (Tex.), said “the next speaker is going to be subjected to the same terrorist attacks” that bedeviled McCarthy.
Three members of the House GOP leadership team that failed so spectacularly over the past nine months — Majority Leader Steve Scalise (La.), Majority Whip Tom Emmer (Minn.) and conference chair Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) — all signaled plans to move up the leadership ladder.
Now the election of a new speaker, scheduled for next Wednesday, is in serious doubt. Neither of the announced candidates, Scalise and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), has a clear path. Others threaten not to elect any speaker without rules changes to prevent a repeat of what happened to McCarthy. And Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Tex.) helpfully announced that he would “nominate Donald J. Trump for Speaker of the House.”
On Wednesday, a casually dressed Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), a top McCarthy lieutenant, worked his way through the Capitol, warning journalists to settle in for a long slog. “This is potentially a setback of weeks and, I hate to even say this, but potentially even longer,” he told CBS’s Nikole Killion.
Perfect. Just six weeks from the next government-shutdown deadline, and with the United States unable to send weapons to Ukraine to hold off Russia’s invasion, the House majority has ceased to function at all.
“My fear is the institution fell today,” McCarthy said in his farewell-to-the-speakership news conference Tuesday night. Going down to defeat, he kept claiming that his ouster wasn’t “good for the institution” because “I believe in the institution” and “the institution was too important” to be so assaulted by Gaetz (and Democrats) who weren’t “looking out for the country or the institution.”
This was rich coming from a man who: voted to overturn the 2020 election results; bowed and scraped at Mar-a-Lago after Jan. 6, 2021; destroyed a bipartisan Jan. 6 commission his own designee negotiated and then trashed the Jan. 6 committee; released Jan. 6 security footage to Tucker Carlson; undermined the rule of law by attacking the prosecutions of former president Donald Trump; and launched the impeachment of President Biden without a shred of evidence of wrongdoing.
I’m sorry, but anyone who thinks McCarthy is a defender of “the institution” ought to be institutionalized.
The former speaker is correct that the House had failed. But he has the causation backward. It didn’t fail because he was ousted; he was ousted because the House had already failed. And the ones who caused it to fail were McCarthy and his colleagues.
For years, they have taken every opportunity to trash the institutions of government — the FBI, the Justice Department, the IRS, the “woke” military, the CDC, NIH, the courts, the election system, the presidency. After laying waste to all other institutions, it was inevitable that House Republicans would also trash the one institution they controlled.
McCarthy’s allies cast Gaetz as aberrant. But the same demagogic techniques that Gaetz used against McCarthy — dishonesty, conspiracy, vengeance — have been deployed routinely by House Republicans in recent years, and particularly for the past nine months, against the Biden administration and congressional Democrats. Gaetz was merely doing as his Republican colleagues taught him.
When you govern on lies, you can’t be surprised when one of your own lies about you. When you govern on personal vendettas, you can’t be shocked that one of your own acts on a vendetta against you. When you govern with contempt for democratic norms, you can’t be sanctimonious when one of your own trashes the norms that protected you.
Moments before he called up the resolution that would topple McCarthy this week, Gaetz, carrying a folder with his speech notes, walked up to use one of the tables designated for Republican speakers during debates.
But Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (Pa.), the Republican chief deputy whip, turned him back. John Leganski, a senior McCarthy adviser, added a contemptuous flourish, shooing Gaetz away with the back of his hand. Ultimately, Gaetz wandered across the aisle and parked himself at an empty lectern typically used by Democrats.
Then, in their closing argument in the debate that followed, McCarthy’s allies had the chutzpah to attack Gaetz — for speaking from the Democratic side. “You need to look no further than where the opponents are sitting today in this chamber!” proclaimed Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.), making the false insinuation that Gaetz was a Democratic tool. “They’re not over here — they’re over there!”
Republicans applauded Armstrong. “Yeah!” cheered a Republican lawmaker.
Gaetz, speaking truthfully for once, protested that “you sent me over here.”
It was fitting that the McCarthy forces’ closing argument against Gaetz — a man who in McCarthy’s telling had never uttered “one true thing” — would itself be grounded in deceit.
In perhaps the most revealing moment of the debate, Rep. Tom Massie (R-Ky.) rose to plead for McCarthy. “This motion to vacate is a terrible idea,” he said. He warned that “if you vote to vacate the speaker … this institution will fail. Please do not vacate the speaker.”
But Massie himself began the ruinous cycle of right-wingers purging speakers for being impure. As he acknowledged, he was a co-sponsor of the motion to vacate Speaker John Boehner, and he was one of the prime antagonists who hounded both Boehner and Speaker Paul Ryan into retirement. Those ousting McCarthy were using the very technique Massie pioneered — and now, too late, he wants to recork that bottle. But the poison has already escaped.
McCarthy and his defenders claimed Gaetz was acting out of personal retribution toward the speaker. “You know it was personal,” McCarthy said, insinuating that Gaetz’s real motive was pique over McCarthy’s refusal to quash an ethics probe into sexual and other misconduct by Gaetz. (“I’ve seen the texts,” McCarthy teased.)
Right, and McCarthy knows something about retribution, having led the eviction of Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell and Ilhan Omar from committees (and the censure of Schiff) over what Republicans explicitly acknowledged was revenge for things Democratic leaders had done.
McCarthy ally Graves, during the debate, piously denounced Gaetz for sending out fundraising solicitations that cited his motion to vacate. “Using official actions, official actions to raise money: It is disgusting,” he said. Yet Gaetz was only doing precisely what two top lieutenants of McCarthy had done in the past couple of weeks: Both Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (Ky.) and Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith (Mo.) had sent out fundraising appeals that cited their work on Biden’s impeachment.
Armstrong, another McCarthy ally, was entirely correct when he said during the debate that instead of valuing loyalty, integrity and competence, “we have descended to a place where clicks, TV hits and the never-ending quest for … celebrity drives decisions and encourages juvenile behavior that is so far beneath this esteemed body.” Yet then he claimed McCarthy “has done more in nine months to restore the people’s house than any speaker in decades.” Er, by elevating Marjorie Taylor “Jewish Space Lasers” Greene (Ga.) to power and influence in the Republican caucus? Or by restoring the stature of Rep. Paul Gosar (Ariz.), a white-nationalist icon, or by blocking attempts to expel indicted Rep. George Santos (N.Y.), a serial liar?
McCarthy’s defenders were furious about Gaetz’s allegation that McCarthy struck a “secret side deal” with Biden to send billions to Ukraine. But they were perfectly content to place Gaetz in a conspiracy theory of their own. “Is Gaetz secretly an agent for the Democratic Party?” former speaker Newt Gingrich, a McCarthy ally, posted on social media. McCarthy repeatedly alleged that Gaetz was working with Democrats to oust him.
In reality, plenty of Democrats would have voted to save McCarthy — but his own toxic partisanship prevented him from offering even small concessions in exchange for their support. Instead, he went on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday and claimed that Democrats “tried to do everything” to stop a short-term spending bill from passing the House on Saturday and “were willing to let government shutdown.” (Fully 209 of 210 Democrats voted for the bill.) Hours before Tuesday’s vote, McCarthy explained why he wouldn’t offer Democrats even a crumb for their votes to save his speakership: “I win by Republicans, and I lose by Republicans.” And so he did.
The new speaker could easily pull back from this destructive madness by abandoning McCarthy’s insistence on drafting and passing legislation with Republicans only. “The only way to defeat this,” moderate Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said of the extremists in his caucus, “is to have more bipartisan spirit.” Otherwise, no matter who succeeds McCarthy, “within a month they’ll be having the speakership held over their head and the vacate-the-chair threats.”
That’s the one course that could salvage the House as an “institution.” It’s also the one course his fellow Republicans absolutely refuse to take.
Credit: Source link
