The vote for House speaker has turned into a real cluster-you-know-what, hasn't it?
After three inconclusive votes yesterday - something that hasn't happened in over a century - he insists he'll undergo a second day of humiliation.
Here's his essential problem: He has a firmly established reputation for blowing with the wind.
His main appeal to those focused on the direction of the GOP is as a fundraiser. He knows how to schmooze and bust loose the cash.
But he's lukewarm when it comes to actually standing for anything. In 2015, he pretty plainly stated that the main purpose of forming a committee to investigate Benghazi was to knock down Hillary Clinton's poll numbers. When he came in for the resulting opprobrium, he apologized and said the committee's formation was not politically motivated. Well, which is it? When you state that it was politically motivated on Sean Hannity's show, you sounded pretty pleased about it.
We probably ought to heed the words of Bill Thomas, who held the House seat that McCarthy now occupies immediately beforehand, and for whom McCarthy worked on his congressional staff, as well as serving as a district director. They were friends as well. Here's Thomas on McCarthy now:
A former mentor to House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy blasted the aspiring speaker in remarks published this week for a profile of McCarthy.
“You never know what’s inside, really,” former California Rep. Bill Thomas (R), who employed McCarthy for years, told the New Yorker in a piece published on Monday. “Kevin basically is whatever you want him to be. He lies. He’ll change the lie if necessary. How can anyone trust his word?”
McCarthy's behavior since January 6, 2021 has been the main cause of his current troubles. From his call to Trump from the House floor as the riot was unfolding, in which he screamed "do you know who the f--- you're talking to?" only to have the Very Stable Genius respond, "Well, Kevin, I guess they're more concerned about the election than you are," to his temporary position of agreeing with Trump that the election was invalid, to his coming around to conceding that Biden had won, to his shameful pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago a few weeks later, he solidified his bona fides as a phony.
Empty suits usually wind up pleasing nobody. A handful of performative yay-hoos - Gaetz, Boebert, and those of similar odor - is catalyzing this paralysis in the House. But there is also a group of moderate Republicans that find just a bit too much of this odor wafting off of McCarthy.
But what are we looking at if it becomes unmistakably clear that he can't muster the votes? Are either Jim Jordan or Steve Scalise - both drool-besotted throne sniffers - really viable possibilities?
Of course, this all emboldens Democrats. Their job of basing policy, as fleshed out in legislation, on identity politics militancy, climate alarmism and wealth redistribution just got easier.
But I can't work up much emotional investment in any of this. Whatever kind of solution the Republicans cobble together to get a Speaker in place and begin conducting business is not going to result in a united and principled conservative counterforce to progressivism. The next two years is going to consist of existential battles over table scraps.
I realize that politics is the art of the possible, and that the well-advised basis for voter behavior is to support the candidate for any particular office most closely aligned with one's principles. But conversations about any kind of foundation that ought to be our starting point for a program, any irreducible reason for favoring a program, platform or agenda take place well off the main stage.
So this current situation boils down to power desperation as practiced by an assemblage of people for whom I could not have less respect.
No needle of any importance gets moved, no matter how this turns out.
