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Now that House Speaker Paul Ryan has decided to jump ship, the jockeying for the speakership between his two primary underlings will really heat up. Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California and Whip Steve Scalise of South Carolina will be quietly at each other's throats for the remainder of the year. So it's a good time to remember this:
A month before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, one of his closest allies in Congress—House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy—made a politically explosive assertion in a private conversation on Capitol Hill with his fellow GOP leaders: that Trump could be the beneficiary of payments from Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"There's two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump," McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016 exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post.
That's not the whole quote, though. Here's what he said in full: "There's … there's two people, I think, Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump […] swear to God."
Swear to God.
And yet, he was totally in the bag for Trump, then as well as now. Lately, he's been working hard at becoming Trump's "guy" in the House, in part by feeding Trump's fever dreams of undoing the spending bill that Trump signed just last month. Worse, he's been encouraging Trump's delusions that he can have a line-item veto, something that's already been deemed unconstitutional.
He apparently thinks toadying to Trump is going to open his path to the speakership, something he's been eyeing for a long time. Remember that after former Speaker John Boehner decided to call it quits, McCarthy took an abbreviated run at the job. But he pretty quickly withdrew as rumors of his affair with then-Rep. Renee Ellmers of North Carolina started swirling out in the public. But Ellmers is gone now, and infidelity as a disqualifier is so 2015, as far as Republicans are concerned, that it's not likely to be an issue any more.
The larger question now is: what does McCarthy know about Trump and Russia? Does he still think Trump is under Putin's control? And what's he going to do about that if he becomes speaker?