Requiem For Kevin

Today we’ve got a heavy lift. We’re going to try to justify the existence of Kevin McCarthy.

Yesterday the Democrats did what we advised them not to do. They sided with eight hard-right political terrorists to oust McCarthy as Speaker. (I don’t know. Sometimes I get the impression that Hakeem Jeffries and Democratic strategists don’t even read YSDA.) Our argument was that as bad as McCarthy was, he wasn’t going to be replaced by anybody better. For now he hasn’t been replaced by anybody.

It looks like some other poor schmuck is going to have to go down the same road McCarthy did just nine months ago. They’ll have to negotiate with the terrorists, putting themselves in a box which leaves them no room to govern. Republicans might as well run next year on the slogan: Let’s run this clown car into a ditch!

It’s hard to blame the Democrats. Among many other things, McCarthy spent Sunday morning on the talk shows putting them in the same category with the radicals in his own party less than 24 hours after they saved his bacon on a government shut down. Not surprisingly, this is the thanks he got.

It may not have mattered. Democrats may have decided to make Republicans put their dysfunction on full display. Assuming they eventually get their House into some sort of rough order within the next week or so I don’t think this will end up playing much of a roll in the 2024 elections, but if it does it will hurt the GOP. The Dems may have just decided that it made no political sense to toss the other guys a lifeline. They were probably right about that.

But back to McCarthy and his soul. In the end, I think the guy was just a standard issue conservative politician with big ambitions. Like Joe Biden, McCarthy was more pragmatic then anything else. He saw what he had to do to gain power and he did it. In his negotiations to become Speaker he gave up everything he had to in order to secure the votes. Then, when he saw that a government shut down over the debt limit was going to hurt his party a lot more than the other guys, he cut a deal to avoid that. When the radicals demanded even more spending cuts than the ones Pres. Biden agreed to in the deal, McCarthy reneged on his own word, again to hold onto power in his own caucus. Then when he saw another government shut down looming over a continuing resolution, he cut a deal with Democrats again. He was acting in the best interests of his party.

But radicals don’t think that way. They don’t want to govern. They want to blow things up and set stuff on fire. And they want the attention that comes with being an arsonist. In this way the hard-right and the hard-left are the same. They both believe that things won’t get much better until they get much worse.

Nine months ago McCarthy did what he had to do to get the Speaker’s office and then, in doing his job, he did what he thought he had to do in the long-run best interests of keeping his majority — and with it his job. But it turned out that what he had to do to get his job and what he had to do to keep it were incompatible. In the end he seemed to just say. “aw, the hell with it.” That was his finest hour.

The most depressing thing about McCarthy’s fate is what it says about the state of our system. Practical politics, governing, doing what’s in the long-term best interests of the county or even of your party — all of that is in peril.

So, while I certainly understand why the Democrats did what they did, what they did, in the end, was empower eight hard-right radicals. I’m still not so sure it was the right decision. Hakeem, if you want to discuss further, just give me a call.