Kevin McCarthy’s Rise and Fall and Potential Rise Again
Deposed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has been in the political power game for a long time. He was deposed because a small minority of his own party, the Gaetz Gang, decided he had to go. In their view he was insufficiently conservative in failing to shut down the government, defund the defense of Ukraine, and default on America’s debts. They had him over a barrel due to the narrow and quite divided Republican minority in the House and the Rules concessions that he had agreed to, in order to secure their earlier support for Speaker. The context behind the revolt is that McCarthy earlier this year negotiated the budget agreements with the Senate and the White House to reduce spending significantly in the coming budget year; his critics feel he should have been able to negotiate even deeper spending reductions.
Democrats were not about to save McCarthy from defeat for their own reasons: 1) he was part of the effort in the House to throw the Presidential election to Trump; 2) he went to Mar a Lago to beg for Trump’s forgiveness soon after 1/6, and blocked bipartisan House investigations into 1/6; 3) he authorized an Impeachment inquiry against Biden with no evidence whatsoever and no House vote to authorize it, and 4) he coddled and thus empowered the far right extremists in the House who eventually then deposed him. If McCarthy wanted genuine bipartisanship, it was up to him to seek it; he never did.
The House is now paralyzed in the absence of a new House speaker and cannot act. The choices are horrible: Steve Scalise, Jim Jordan, or Kevin McCarthy all over again. The Gaetz Gang comprises extreme political conservatives who want deeper and deeper cuts in federal spending and will use the federal debt, the annual appropriations process, and the speakership itself as hostages to get their ways. Jordan and Scalise are both more conservative than McCarthy and acceptable to the Gaetz Gang. The major differences between them are funding for the defense of Ukraine (Scalise supports, Jordan opposes) and Trump’s endorsement of Jordan who has been doing everything within his power to block the federal and state trials of Trump for purloining top secret documents, trying to overthrow the election, and widespread fraud, and Jordan in 2020-21 was a key player in Trumpian efforts to reverse his electoral defeat and overthrow the results of the Presidential election of 2020. McCarthy is now offering his own candidacy to break the expected impasse in the House Republican conference, but the Gaetz Gang is still unalterably opposed to him. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/steve-scalise-jim-jordan-house-speaker-rcna119451