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Kevin McCarthy has just lost the 11th round trying to be speaker. And it’s funny how we’re supposed to feel about this. We’re all supposed to be highly upset, outraged, appalled, on the verge of tears about the fact that some of his colleagues are trying to make it hard for Kevin McCarthy to become the speaker of the House. Very upset.
But why exactly is it so upsetting? It should be hard to become speaker of the House in this country. Very hard. It’s a big job. It’s one of those powerful jobs in the world. It’s not one of those positions you give to elderly men who’ve campaigned from their basement.
If you want to be the guy who’s second in line from the presidency in America, you’ve got to work for it. And Kevin McCarthy certainly has worked for it this week, whatever you think of him. You get the feeling McCarthy would crawl naked through a sewer to get this gig. And that’s not necessarily an insult, by the way. It’s what it takes, obviously. Maybe it’s what it should take.
So if you take a deep breath and you think about it for a second, nothing we have seen in Washington recently, the supposedly apocalyptic world-ending drama of politicians arguing with each other, none of it qualifies as especially unusual or even bad. This is what democracy looks like when you get up close. I want one thing. You want another thing. We schedule a vote to see who gets it, or in this case, 11 votes.
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But whatever. How is that a disaster? Well, it’s not a disaster. It’s how the system is supposed to work. But don’t tell the moron community that. They’re too overwrought to hear you. Watch.
JOY REID: An epic fail and stunning humiliation for Kevin McCarthy, who took the knee for Donald Trump, then gave away the store to the cuckoo fringe of his party.
NICOLLE WALLACE: You couldn’t construct a narrative that combines the elements of extremism, election denialism and incompetence more perfectly than the last 12 hours on the Republican side in the House.
RYAN ZINKE: It’s embarrassing. And now, there’s a lot of hard feelings on both sides. Again, you have 90% of the caucus. 90% of the caucus standing firmly behind Kevin McCarthy.
JAMES CARVILLE: They look petty. I mean, they’re putting on a show. I’ll call it political ploy.
CHARLIE SYKES: He’s decided instead to pull the pin on the grenade and toss it among themselves. What an extraordinary moment of political failure by a political party.
DAVID JOYCE: It’s either personal against Kevin or remember that this is the same brain trust that brought you almost two years ago, January 6.
BEN DOMENECH: The way that they’ve gone about trying to achieve these demands has resulted in essentially this terrorist standoff between them and the overwhelming majority of people in their conference.
Whew, they’re so excitable. Are you following this? The failure to make it super easy and simple for Kevin McCarthy is “extremism,” declares NicolLe Wallace. It’s just “embarrassing,” says Ryan Zinke. It’s “pornography,” says another. Poor old Charlie Sykes got so upset watching the proceedings that he compared to a vote in Congress to an exploding hand grenade. There was smoke and fire and shrapnel and the shrieking of the dying, calling out for their mothers because some people would not vote for Kevin McCarthy. That’s what it was like in there, ladies and gentlemen. Some of us will never recover.
Then another one of the buffoons in the clip you just saw went further and called the whole thing “terrorism”, which is the remorseless use of violence against a civilian population to effect a political goal. So, Chip Roy, is Usama bin Laden now. Hunt him down in his cave.
Dan Crenshaw of Texas, filling the role recently vacated by his friend Adam Kinzinger, said virtually the same thing yesterday. Anyone who doesn’t support Kevin McCarthy for speaker is a “terrorist.” And Crenshaw’s voice seemed to crack with emotion as he said it. He meant it. What’s going on here exactly? Why are these people so upset?
Well, part of it, of course, is political. Dan Crenshaw is a committed neo-liberal. He’s a tool of his donors. He’s hawkish on Ukraine’s borders but indifferent to ours. And Dan Crenshaw knows that Kevin McCarthy is the least conservative speaker he is likely to get ever. And they all think that. Watch one of them make the case.
JONAH GOLDBERG: There is this widespread myth among many of my conservative brethren that being electable makes you more moderate, that being electable makes you part of the establishment. There is no freaking establishment. If there was an establishment, this wouldn’t be happening. Kevin McCarthy would be, by almost any objective measure, one of the two or three most conservative Republican speakers in U.S. history, at least for the last hundred years. Paul Ryan was the most conservative speaker. This idea that being part of the establishment makes you a RINO-squish-loser is this fantasy that these guys are getting high on, on their own farts and like Fox green rooms on. It’s nonsense.
“You know what?” scolds the moron. “Kevin McCarthy is conservative enough for you, so shut up and accept him or else we’re gonna call you names.” Okay, tough guy, settle down.
So again, what you’re seeing here is the usual left-right ideological politics at work. But that is not all that is going on because actually, most politicians are not very ideological, even the ones who claim to be. They wouldn’t know an idea if it got in the shower with them. In fact, a lot of them are agnostic about ideas.
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But the one thing that every politician has in common, every one of them, is every one of them wants to win elections. That’s the goal. And honestly, by that measure, Kevin McCarthy has underwhelmed. The red wave that we were all promised, remember that? It didn’t materialize last fall. The midterms were a crushing disappointment. Now, that is not all Kevin McCarthy’s fault. If you want to blame a single person, blame Mitch McConnell, who deserves it.
But Kevin McCarthy was the head Republican in the House when that happened. That debacle happened and he shares responsibility for it. That’s true. But you’d never know that from listening to Republican leaders in Washington. They don’t talk about it. They’ve never atoned. They have no plan to change. They’d like to ignore what happened in November and move on as if everything is fine. That means McConnell continuing to be minority leader. That means McCarthy as speaker. That means Ronna Romney McDaniel still running the RNC – the same team that was in place two months ago.
How does that work exactly? If I’m a valet parker and I crash your car, you don’t give me another car to park until I take a driving lesson, right? Oh, but not in Washington. I have another car, a more expensive one this time.
Because if there’s one thing that Washington hates, on a bipartisan basis, it’s accountability. And unfortunately, the Republican Party is no different in that. No one is ever punished for failure or ever forced to explain how those failures happen. And as a result of that lack of accountability, no one ever improves. Everybody just keeps getting rewarded for producing the same disasters.
Think about that. If you raised your kids like that, they’d be in prison. So maybe the main thing that’s making people mad is that. Republican voters see the same people in charge producing the same mediocre results, paying a lot more attention to lobbyists than to them. That’s not democracy. Actually, it’s the opposite of democracy. And watching this drives them insane.
It’s a fair bet that most people don’t hate Kevin McCarthy as a man. He’s no Mitch McConnell. Pretty nice guy, actually. But most normal people do hate the system that keeps promoting Kevin McCarthy for turning in a subpar performance. So say what you will about the effort to prevent McCarthy from becoming speaker, the “terrorism,” as we’re calling it. It’s terrorism. That effort has one upside. That effort has challenged the current system in a meaningful way.
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Kevin McCarthy may in the end become Speaker of the House. He likely will because no one seems man enough to challenge him directly, so he’ll get it by default. But he’s trying really hard, so maybe he does deserve it. But here’s the critical thing to know. If he does become speaker, by the time he becomes speaker, Kevin McCarthy will have learned a lot. Kevin McCarthy will have publicly acknowledged his failures. He will have been forced to face the people he has disappointed both within the Congress and outside of it. And he will have promised to change.
So here we will have suffering, accountability and repentance. Those are not bad things. No. Those are the best things. Those are the wrenching life experiences that turn the mediocre into decent people. And Kevin McCarthy never would have done any of that unless he was forced to. None of us will ever do any of that unless we’re forced to.
So 20 of Kevin McCarthy’s colleagues have forced him to become better and the rest of us ought to be very grateful to them for doing it because no one else was going to.
