At first blush, it seems like the most pointless political move ever.
When Rep. Matt Gaetz (R.-Fla.) moved to oust Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R.-Cal.) from his role as Speaker of the House, lots of eyebrows were raised, and at least one pair of lips was licked. But did it make any sense?
This has never happened before, a House Speaker ousted by his own party mid-session.
That’s not an argument against the move, though. It was Gaetz who had blocked McCarthy back in January, through more than a dozen votes, allowing the moderate Republican to serve only with explicit conditions. Gaetz now says that McCarthy has failed to meet those conditions. Arguably, that’s accountability in action. Good?
Or mere revenge? After all, McCarthy had just made a deal with a sizable number of minority Democrats to fund the government and prevent a federal shutdown — thus kicking the overspending/insolvency can down the road again. Gaetz and his closest colleagues in the House made the same deal with the opposition party, ousting McCarthy.
It’s a game of kick the can, however you look at it.
Gaetz argues that McCarthy did not do what was required to bring fiscal responsibility, such as un-package spending bills. “We told you how to use the power of the purse: individual, single-subject spending bills that would allow us to have specific review, programmatic analysis and,” explained Gaetz, “that would allow us to zero out the salaries of the bureaucrats who have broken bad, targeted President Trump or cut sweetheart deals for Hunter Biden.”
But the deed is done. McCarthy’s out. Now, who to replace him?
Funny that no one mentions the wild plan to put Trump into the job — you know, the plan first floated after Election 2020?
It was such a snickered-at notion, just a goofy way of taking 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue from Joe Biden.
Still, it was a plan. Only in the next few days and weeks will we learn if Gaetz really has one.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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1 reply on “Kick the Can”
I’m not a conservative, and I couldn’t have brought myself to vote for any of the Republican candidates for either chamber nor for the Presidency.
But America cannot survive if it has just two major parties and those parties are, respectively, an openly “progressive” party and a party of opportunists and pragmatists who cross-dress as conservatives but behave as “Me too, but Slower!” “progressives”. (I don’t know whether America can survive with neither party being liberal.)
Gaetz &alii are behaving as an intransigent minority of conservatives, to compel the Republicans to offer a choice different from “Slower!”
The fate of Arlen Spector showed what would happen to Republicans who crossed the aisle. Now the fate of McCarthy shows what happens to Republicans who cut deals with Democrats without crossing the aisle. In Spector’s hour of need and in McCarthy’s hour of need, the Democrats abandoned them. (Gaetz, on the other hand, did not and does not count on future support from Democrats.)
Now the “Me too but Slower!” Republicans face a simple choice: yield to the intransigent minority and vote as would genuine conservatives, or face sure political destruction. If more than two rounds of voting are required for the election of a new Speaker, then these Republicans are idiots.
The Democrats might try to wrong-foot Gaetz in the coming election by throwing their support behind a pliable Republican candidate, but doing so would damage their brand and require a humility that they do not posses. And any Republican caught in such a coalition would have his-or-her own brand savaged.