It’s the type of stuff that late-night comedians dream about — the delicious schadenfreude of watching Kevin McCarthy so desperately wanting to be House speaker that he would publicly fall flat on his face seven, eight, nine, 10 times without reaching his goal.
“Let it go,” Stephen Colbert advised McCarthy in his monologue Wednesday night. “Don’t you know that one of the most important things about dreams is sometimes they die? Except for my dream where you keep losing over and over again.”
“The last time a Kevin felt this abandoned in his own house,” quipped Jimmy Kimmel, “was in the movie ‘Home Alone’.”
And Seth Meyers noted that President Joe Biden doesn’t plan to get involved in McCarthy’s speaker quest, “at least not until it stops being hilarious.”
It is shockingly entertaining.
California Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu brought a bag of popcorn with him for the first day of voting. As Day 3 wrapped up, he has probably eaten so much popcorn that he’s parched, but still grinning.
It gets a little less funny when we consider that, while we revel in McCarthy’s Charlie Brown-ish misadventures, his persistent defeat comes to the benefit of the 20 members of the Freedom Caucus who keep yanking the football away.
And this brings me to one of my Robert’s Rules: If you’re siding with Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert, you’re doing it all wrong.
Ultimately, all the circus of the last several days has done is empower what one Republican referred to as the “Taliban 20.”
It’s why, according to University of Utah associate professor of political science James Curry, Republicans have been willing to stick with McCarthy longer than they otherwise might.
“There’s a subset who do not want to signal to the Freedom Caucus that they can get what they want by acting out like this,” Curry, who studies Congress, told me Thursday.
At this point, my best bet is that McCarthy has to move his stuff out of the speaker’s office and someone else — like Louisiana GOP Rep. Steve Scalise — who is acceptable to the fringes of the party, ends up in charge. That is significantly less funny.
Even if McCarthy does persevere, he does it at the expense of letting the Gaetz-Boebert axis extort numerous concessions, giving them unwarranted procedural clout and, more importantly, the knowledge that they have the real, practical power to shut down the House any time they want.
Either way, they come out emboldened, Curry acknowledges.
This is a group of people who will use that power, not in the interest of governing and solving problems, but because they’re interested in taking a sledgehammer to the institution every chance they get.
None of this is to say that McCarthy would have been a visionary speaker who was going to focus on solving problems for the good of the country. Even if he was, how could he possibly negotiate with the Senate when there’s no way he could be relied on to deliver Republican votes when it counts? Maybe that means he has to work with moderate Democrats, but he does that at the risk of losing his own members.
Any way this GOP standoff ends — whether with an impotent McCarthy held hostage by the radical factions in his own caucus or with an entirely different speaker eager to do the right wing’s bidding — does not bode well.
We are entering a legislative desert, where tackling climate change, standing up to Russian aggression, controlling health care costs, passing a budget and fending off a potential recession are off the table, leaving us with overzealous investigations, grandstanding antics, gridlock and government shutdowns.
It will be messy, but at least there will be plenty of good fodder for the late-night talk shows.
