Travails & Self-Inflicted Tribulations Of The Speaker-In-Name-Only

Last night, Tom Nichols discussed how McCarthy is paying off his debts to the GOP’s extremist fringe, “by engaging in petty payback, conjuring up inane committees, threatening to crash the U.S. economy, and protecting a walking monument to fraud named George Santos, who may or may not actually be named ‘George Santos.’… Politics, in Washington or anywhere else, is about deals. No one should have expected McCarthy to make his way to the gavel without signing a few ugly promissory notes along the way. Sometimes, friends are betrayed and enemies are elevated; an important project can end up taking a back seat to a boondoggle. Just ask Representative Vern Buchanan of Florida, who got pushed out of the chairmanship of Ways and Means in favor of Jason Smith of Missouri, a choice preferred by the MAGA caucus. ‘You fucked me,’ he reportedly said to at McCarthy on the floor of the House. ‘I know it was you, you whipped against me.’ Buchanan, a source on the House floor told Tara Palmeri at Puck, was so angry that the speaker’s security people were about to step in. It’s one thing to pay political debts, even the kind that McCarthy accepted despite their steep and humiliating vig. It’s another to hand off control of crucial issues to a claque of clowns who have no idea what they’re doing and are willing to harm the national security of the United States as long as it suits their political purposes.”

McCarthy’s shuffle of the Intelligence Committee pales in comparison to the creation of two new committees, both of which were part of the Filene’s Basement clearance of the new speaker’s political soul. One of them, on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, is a continuation of the Republican assault on science that predated Trump but reached new heights with the former president’s disjointed gibbering about bleach injections. The committee will include the conspiracy theorist and McCarthy’s new best friend Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Ronny Jackson of Texas, the former White House physician who assured us in 2018 that Trump only weighed 239 pounds and was in astoundingly good health.

The COVID committee is unlikely to move the needle (if you’ll pardon the expression) on public health. No one’s mind will be changed if Jackson and Tucker Carlson bloviate to each other about things neither of them really believes. Most of the damage from such a committee will likely be concentrated among the vaccine refusers, who already seem determined to get sick and die to make a political point.

The “weaponization” committee is worse, and likely to do far more damage to the United States, because it is starting from the premise that the machinery of the United States government— law enforcement, the intelligence community, and federal agencies— has been turned against the average American citizen. Jim Jordan, who stands out even in this GOP for his partisan recklessness, will serve as chair. The committee will include members whom I think of as the “You-Know-Better-Than-This Caucus”: people with top-flight educations and enough experience to know that Jordan is a crank, but who nevertheless will support attacks on American institutions if that’s what it takes to avoid being sent back home to live among their constituents. Two standouts here are Thomas Massie (an MIT graduate who apparently majored in alchemy and astrology), and the ever-reliable Elise Stefanik (Harvard), whose political hemoglobin is now composed of equal parts cynicism and antifreeze.

The committee will include other monuments to probity, such as Chip Roy; Dan Bishop, who has claimed that the 2020 election was rigged; Harriet Hageman, the woman who defeated Liz Cheney in Wyoming; and Kat Cammack of Florida, who alleged that Democrats were drinking on the House floor during the speakership fight. All of them will have access to highly sensitive information from across the U.S. government.

…I suspect that the Jordan committee will not look to uncover abuses, but rather to portray any government actions that it does not like as abuses, especially the investigations into Trump. It will be the Church Committee turned on its head, as members of Congress seek to protect a lawless president by destroying the agencies that stand between our democracy and his ambitions.

Kevin McCarthy will be fine with all of it, as long as he gets to wear the top hat and red tails while indulging in the fantasy that he is in control of the clowns and wild animals, and not the other way around.

This morning, Washington Post writers Leigh Ann Caldwell, Theodoric Meyer and Tobi Raji came up with a catchy headline: McCarthy’s Concessions Are Giving House Republicans Angst. The relatively mainstream conservatives in the Republican House conference knew McCarthy “was giving up a lot, and some of those concessions are already causing problems for the House GOP. Three of the 11 bills House Republican leaders promised would go straight to the floor to kick off the year have been pulled back because of opposition within the party— a sign of the growing pains of a new majority.

The one everyone in DC is laughing over is Buddy Carter’s plan to abolish the IRS and transfer more of the tax burden— almost all of it— from the very wealthy to the middle class with some conservative buttery called a “fair tax,” abolishing what’s left of a progressive taxation system and instituting, instead, a 30% sales tax on everything. McCarthy promised to allow a vote on it but now the Democrats are using it to define the party. “Previous iterations,” wrote Caldwell, Meyer and Raji, “went nowhere for a reason: It’s wildly unpopular, and most analysts say it would hit lower-income and middle-class Americans the hardest… Many Republicans aren’t on board. McCarthy himself suggested on Tuesday that he doesn’t support the bill.

Meanwhile, they wrote, “Democrats think they've hit the jackpot. ‘It will impose a tax hike that is dramatic on 90 percent of the American people, working families, middle-class folks, seniors, and those who aspire to be part of the middle class, the poor, the sick and the afflicted,’ Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday at a news conference with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Schumer has hit Republicans on the fair tax every day this week. President Biden said Tuesday that he’s thrilled to talk about it, and he’s expected to bring it up again in a speech in Virginia today.”

The newest YouGov poll, released yesterday by The Economist, doesn’t bode too well for forever conservative dreams of cutting Social Security and Medicare. Just 18% of registered voters think that’s a good idea (22% of Republicans)— as opposed to 73% of registered votes (and 64% of Republicans who think it’s a bad idea and oppose it.

McCarthy also promised a vote on the very extreme border security bill that Texas reactionary Chip Roy has been pushing. Roy, in fact, claims, he will push the country into default unless his bill is passed. Democrats won’t vote for the bill and many Republicans don’t like it either. McCarthy seems to be promising different members of his caucus different things about these two divisive pieces of legislation. Don Bacon (R-NE) says McCarthy told him the border bill will go back to committee where it can be made less extreme and controversial. Roy claims otherwise.

And McCarthy’s own vow to kick Ilhan Omar off the House Foreign Affairs Committee is in trouble too and he’s already threatening members who won’t back him on this. (So far two, Nancy Mace and Victoria Spartz said they’re not going to vote to boot Ilhan off the committee, although many people note that Mace is all talk and always goes along with the leadership in the end anyway. Bacon, who had been making noises to vote against McCarthy on this, has already buckled.

Two right-wing Islamophobic Democrats, Josh Gottheimer (Blue Dog-NJ) and Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) are threatening to help McCarthy kick Ilhan off the committee.