McCarthy Again Proves He's The Weakest Speaker In History
Ken Buck has long been considered one of the most conservative politicians in Colorado… and in Congress. He’s a former law professor unimpressed by CrossFit and Q-Anon scholar Marjorie Traitor Greene’s constitutional pretensions. On Sunday, he told Jean Psaki that “Marjorie filed articles of impeachment on President Biden before he was sworn into office more than two and a half years ago. So the idea that she is now the expert on impeachment or that she is someone who should set the timing on impeachment is absurd. The time for impeachment is the time when there’s evidence, if there’s evidence linking President Biden to a high crime or misdemeanor. That doesn’t exist right now and it isn’t really something where we can say, ‘Well in February we’re gonna do this.’ It’s based the facts. You go where the facts take you.”
Psaki then asked Busk, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, if McCarthy’s speakership is at risk. He said he thinks “there’s a perfect storm brewing in the House in the near future, in September. On the one hand we’ve got to pass a continuing resolution; we also have the impeachment issue. And we also have members of the House, led by my good friend Chip Roy, who are concerned about policy issues… You take those 3 things together and Kevin McCarthy has made promises on each of those issues to different groups and it is all coming due now at the same time. It’s going to be very difficult to pass a continuing resolution with only Republican votes. I think if he reaches across the aisle and gets Democratic votes and goes to a higher number that he has promised before… that is the issue that will cause him problems down the road.” He thinks ultimately McCarthy will be able to keep his job because no one else who can do it wants it. “I think that what saves Kevin is the lack of enthusiasm from anybody else to do the job.”
I am certain he knows Matt Gaetz. They’re both active in Freedom Caucus meetings. And Gaetz would do anything to get that job… if he’s ever cleared by the House Ethics Committee on a myriad of unsavory charges he’s still facing, like sex trafficking a minor. In fact, on Monday, Jake Sherman, Andrew Desiderio and John Bresnahan wrote that “Gaetz loathes McCarthy” and he blames McCarthy for the long drawn-out investigation. “Gaetz has threatened to try to remove McCarthy as speaker if the California Republican impedes a Biden impeachment inquiry vote. But again, the votes aren’t there right now to launch such an inquiry.”
Sherman, Desiderio and Bresnahan also noted that they’ve “gotten the sense from members of McCarthy’s leadership team over the past week that a government shutdown is quite possible— even likely. One senior House Republican lawmaker told us that there’s a 75% chance of a shutdown after federal agencies run out of money on Sept. 30. McCarthy wants to pass a stopgap funding bill to keep the government open beyond that date, perhaps until November. In McCarthy’s mind, that avoids a shutdown while giving House Republicans more time to pass appropriations bills. The House is set to take up the mammoth $886 billion defense spending bill this week. And if the House is able to pass a Homeland Security spending bill next week— currently the leadership’s hope— then the House GOP will have established a position on the key issue of border security funding that they can use in talks with the unified Senate. This is the argument McCarthy will make Wednesday in a closed-door House Republican meeting. McCarthy is likely to say he’s willing to have a showdown with the Senate over FY2024 funding, but the House GOP needs to pass bills to put him in the strongest position. And to pass bills, the House needs more time… [I]t’s not clear McCarthy can convince enough House Republicans to pass a short-term continuing resolution on their own. If he wanted, McCarthy could pass a CR, but he’d likely need a sizable number of Democrats to do so. That’s politically perilous for him. Doing anything with Democrats will spark pushback from the House Freedom Caucus and other [fascists]. Another weakness: It’s far from certain that McCarthy will be able to pass more appropriations bills— period. [Fascists] are demanding huge spending cuts that won’t fly in the Senate. Passing any rules for spending bills will be a challenge.”
That sounds bad enough on its own right? But there’s more “there is a group of Republicans who want to shut down the government to either prove a point or to use the crisis to force McCarthy out. Smart House GOP lawmakers understand that they have zero leverage over a Senate that’s passing appropriations bills with big bipartisan margins. The House will have less than zero leverage if Republicans can’t move any spending bills after years of crying for regular order. The White House wants $16 billion for the recent natural disasters in Hawaii, Florida, Vermont and elsewhere, plus $24 billion for Ukraine. McCarthy’s plan is to add the natural disaster money to a CR and then try to extract border policy changes and additional funding in exchange for Ukraine money. It seems like a fine plan until you consider that the Senate will take the CR, add the Ukraine money and send it back to the House with a shutdown looming. McCarthy wouldn’t put that bill on the floor, sources told us. This is McCarthy’s biggest political dilemma. He’s stuck between the two wings of his conference here. If you speak to most House Republicans, they’ll acknowledge that they don’t have the votes for an impeachment inquiry right now. Will they at some point? Maybe. Expect the GOP leadership this week to send a letter to the White House asking for sensitive documents. If the administration doesn’t produce them, Republicans are convinced the votes will materialize for an inquiry.”
Rachael Bade, Eugene Daniels and Ryan Lizza reminded their readers that we’re only 19— now 18—days from a government shutdown, which they dubbed McCarthy’s Mess. The fascist wing who opposed McCarthy to begin with, say they have “spent weeks hearing from unhappy constituents back home — many who are itching for a funding fight and salivating” over a Biden impeachment. Some are openly threatening a “motion to vacate” if he cuts a deal with Democrats to keep the government open, although the only names that keep coming up at Gaetz, Bob Good and, maybe, Chip Roy.
The trio of Politico reporters wrote that they “spoke to many other Republicans on both sides of the clash, and even McCarthy allies are sensing a shift— and raising red flags about his team’s approach. ‘I don’t think they are taking this nearly as seriously as they should be,’ said one member close to the speaker. The funding fight could come to a head this week, with the House set to consider the Pentagon spending bill. It’s chock-full of goodies for conservatives and should be the easiest of the 12 bills to clear, but the hard-liners are already threatening to block it in order to force McCarthy’s hand on spending cuts. One problem for McCarthy is that [fascists] are demanding things he can’t easily give— further slashing discretionary spending levels, defunding the DOJ’s Trump probes or zeroing out Cabinet member salaries— concessions that Senate Democrats would never agree to and Biden would never sign into law. He doesn’t currently have the votes to launch a Biden impeachment inquiry, either.”
One wing-nut today told them that there’s “rising discontent with McCarthy on the homefront: ‘There’s now enough support from the base to be like, Look if we’re not going to get results from McCarthy, we can get the results from somebody else.’… Roy shied away from overtly threatening McCarthy’s gavel but made clear he has no fear of a shutdown. ‘There will be blowback, and I don’t give a damn,’ Roy told Politico. ‘I can promise you the people that I represent are 100% on board with going full-scale, full-tilt at stopping the continued status quo…The people I represent will be saying, ‘Please keep it up and keep going.’”
Is that so? Or maybe Roy thinks he only represents Republicans in his district. In 2020, when the Democrats put up a viable candidate, Wendy Davis, Roy scraped by with 52.4%. Davis won 205,780 votes. Does Roy think he doesn’t represent them in Congress? Probably. He barely won the parts of the Bexar County ins district and lost both Travis and Hays counties. Even in 2022, when the Democrats didn’t field a strong candidate, she won 122,655 votes won the Travis County parts of the district and came even closer to win the Bexar parts than Davis had.
And it isn't just Swalwell calling out Gaetz on his bullshit. This morning, Cincinnati freshman Greg Landsman told Axios that “Most of us came here to govern and get things done, not indulge Matt Gaetz when he has one of his tantrums.” But McCarthy did blink. Less than two weeks ago, he promised the mainstream conservatives in his party that "If we move forward with an impeachment inquiry, it would occur through a vote on the floor of the People's House and not through a declaration by one person." This morning-- since he doesn't have the votes-- he just stepped out of his office into the hall and announced it to a gaggle of reporters. Since the Republican committee chairs, far right clowns Gym Jordan, Jason Smith and James Comer, have no evidence of anything, this is quite the step for the speaker. Eventually he'll need 218 Republicans to move forward. It should be interesting to see if he can get that many... Extremists are already trying to send a message by seeing if they can recruit a plausible fascist to primary Buck.
Siobhan Hughes reported that “a group of hard-line Republicans has wrestled with how aggressively to respond to what they call his failure to keep the promises he made” but once again, she’s not naming names either, just Bob Good— who everyone knows hates McCarthy’s guts, Matt Gaetz, with a hint that fascists Ralph Norman (R-SC) and Eli Crane (R-AZ) may be part of the conspiracy putting pressure on McCarthy by pretending they’ll oust him. Last night, McCarthy puffed up for a bit of theatrical bravado and said he knew the gang of malcontents around Gaetz were bluffing and that was "wasn't concerned." And then this morning...
I can’t stand it. These republicans are freaking insane and out to destroy this country. Cretins. We’ve gotta vote them out.
Congressional dysfunction is another reason to expect the reich. When you can't just do what you want when you don't have enough votes, the answer is to commence a reich where you can do what you want without anyone else's permission. And everyone who bitches can be arrested or killed.
Ever so clearly nobody recognizes any of the signs nor remembers anything about Germany in the late '20s to the mid '40s.
Oh well. maybe if you could figure anything out, you'd have voted better for the past 55 years.