A Couple More And Hakeem Jeffries Is Speaker
Yesterday, Kevin McCarthy started the news day off with an anodyne OpEd in the Wall Street Journal announcing what everyone already knew: he’s not just not running again; he’s leaving the House early— and leaving MAGA Mike, who he’s not all that fond of to begin with, with a precarious one-vote majority. He wrote that he’s leaving the House "but not the fight." LOL— with a huge multimillion dollar campaign warchest, there are absolutely some MAGAty Republicans who are wishing he would be leaving the fight. Expect to read about McCarthy recruiting and supporting candidates against the 8 Republicans who voted to remove him as speaker. Speaking of which… Matt Gaetz was quick to dance on McCarthy's political grave:
Most of what McCarthy had to say was pure canned pablum, just what one would expect from him, but he did warn that he “will continue to recruit our country’s best and brightest to run for elected office. The Republican Party is expanding every day, and I am committed to lending my experience to support the next generation of leaders.” Nancy Mace must be shaking in her boots.”
He chased the speakership for years, foolishly gave his sworn enemies a key to oust him to get them to let him serve... and then lasted 9 hellish months in the job before they used the key. If history remembers him at all, it will be as the first House speaker in history to get fired by his own conference.
The Bakersfield-centered district is too red for a Democrat to win. The PVI is R+16 and the partisan lean is even worse— a ghastly R+31. Biden won just 36.4% of the vote. Newsom won’t have to call a special election to fill the slot unless McCarthy hands in his resignation by tomorrow at 5pm. That would mean, one less Republican voting until January, 2025. If he doesn’t, he will really be sticking it to MAGA Mike, since the last time Newsom had a chance to do something like that— in the Duncan Hunter resignation (2020), that’s exactly what he did— left the seat open.
Two McCarthy acolytes, state Sen. Shannon Grove and Assemblyman Vince Fong, are already running— along with a dozen other Republicans. Gaetz, discussing the premature departures of McCarthy and Patrick McHenry, said “there is an Establishment exodus from the United States Republican conference and it my hope that we backfill these establishment, lobbyist-drawn entities with folks who are willing to fight for the America First agenda… Kevin McCarthy was not useful in that fight. In many ways he inhibited it and now he is leaving… [His early departure] “is an act of abject selfishness and it is revealing that if Kevin McCarthy can’t swing the gavel and be in charge and make the decisions, that he’s not willing to be a team player.”
On the other side of the political GOP spectrum, Liz Cheney more or less agreed with Gaetz’s assessment: “Well, I think that he’s a pathetic figure in many ways in our history. But I also think it’s important not to minimize the damage that he did, because even though he’s somebody who didn’t seem to have strong ideological beliefs, he was leading the Republicans in the House. And at each moment when his determination to do the right thing could have made a difference, he determined instead to do the wrong thing.”
Ed Kilgore thought McCarthy’s departure merited a brief report as well, noting that “His farewell missive did not so much as mention his defenestration by his colleagues; reading it, you’d think the man was on the brink of announcing a promotion to an exciting new gig. But in McCarthy’s chosen profession, there is but one higher position than the one he occupied for nine perilous months, and I’m pretty sure he’s not running for president. No, the truth is that, like Newt Gingrich and John Boehner before him, having felt the heft and power of the Speaker’s gavel McCarthy could not tolerate being in the chamber in a subordinate position. He no longer had the keys to the executive washroom, and no one had to pretend they loved him. Perhaps for a few days after his defeat he imagined a fractious Republican Conference restoring his power, full of regret for allowing a little pissant like Matt Gaetz to trigger his fall. But as his colleagues turned here and there in search for a leader, they didn’t seriously consider turning back to the Californian.”
He also pointed out that what the revolt against McCarthy was really about was “a lack of respect for the man who fought so long and hard to win the speakership, through machiavellian maneuvering and more candidate fundraisers than you could count. In the wake of all this humiliation, McCarthy may have just decided his vastly diminished job wasn’t worth the pain of those long commutes from Bakersfield to Washington. D.C.”