Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become speaker of the House may well be over. Despite his promise to stay in the race no matter what, the reality of his hopeless position is about to hit the veteran California congressman upside the head.
That reality is that his detractors are not concerned about the appearance of a Republican Party imploding in a bloody mess. They don’t care about tradition, House rules, or any other hidebound custom that has been a part of the legislative and government process for more than 200 years.
This is about blowing stuff up. And they’re going to keep running through a gasoline dump with a lit match until someone makes them sit down and shut up.
McCarthy’s cave-in to the hard right of the GOP has angered and disheartened much of the rest of the Republican caucus. The fact that he hasn’t convinced any of his rabid critics to cease and desist their opposition to him has convinced some of his supporters to look elsewhere for someone to back.
Given that no one backed by the Freedom Caucus would be elected speaker by the whole House, Republicans are now faced with the prospect of a lengthy intraparty floor fight that will have long-lasting effects through the 2024 election.
Not a very satisfactory state of affairs if you’re a Republican.
McCarthy thought he could appease the Freedom Caucus, but he only whetted its appetite. Churchill’s remark could not be more apposite: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.” Ooh la la. The nihilists in the Freedom Caucus are about to munch on McCarthy. No doubt he will continue to try to stave off the inevitable. Pizzas are being delivered to his office. He’ll pull an all-nighter — call his friends and allies, rage about the psychos in the GOP, ponder his future. Perhaps Marjorie Taylor Greene, the firebrand from Georgia, will minister to his psychic wounds, exhorting him to battle her former confreres.
But McCarthy should have enough sense left to realize that when Greene, who was urging her colleagues to take the win and vote for McCarthy, is the voice of rationality in the GOP, then you’re in what George H.W. Bush liked to call deep doo-doo. Put bluntly, McCarthy is a dead man walking. Soon enough, he can retire from Congress and have a go at reopening his old yoghurt shop in Bakersfield, California. The idea that he can become House speaker is simply California Dreamin’.
The problem for the Republican establishment is that the next man up in the speaker race would be Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise. But he’s been tainted by serving as minority whip under McCarthy, and most of the GOP rebels see the two of them as Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum.
Related: Rep. Mike Garcia: ‘Day One of Being in the Majority Feels an Awful Lot Like Being in the Minority’
Once McCarthy steps aside, the real fun will begin. There are at least a half dozen Republican House members who would throw their hats in the ring and battle for the top job. But whether anyone who would satisfy both factions would emerge from this scrum is problematic — and may not matter.
But don’t be fooled: the opéra bouffe in the House is merely the overture to what looms over the next two years. There is a GOP majority but only on paper. The party is a study in dysfunction, united only by its inability to accomplish anything of merit. It will stage hearings targeting the Biden administration, pout about government spending, balk at raising the debt ceiling, thunder about cultural depravities in local schools — anything but actually govern.
President Biden and his aides are already delighting in the spectacle. The storyline writes itself: if the GOP can’t even elect a speaker, how can it expect to help run the country? It truly is delivering the greatest show on earth, but a freak show all the same.
McCarthy will be unable to serve after this humiliation. He will likely resign and go back to his yogurt shop in California. At least he’ll be spared the coming meltdown of the Republican Party.
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