House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had a steep learning curve when he got hold of the gavel in January and so far, he seems to have learned nothing about negotiating. Specifically, he seems clueless about the most important lesson: Don't negotiate with terrorists.
Whatever he does to appease the extremist members, it’s not enough. They simply come back with more demands. A strong leader might recognize that he would have numbers on his side if he chose not to let a dozen or so House members dictate what the rest of the 435 can do, and that he could work with the majority to shut the Freedom Caucus down. Kevin McCarthy, however, is not a strong leader.
At the moment, the biggest challenge he faces is finding a way to keep the government from shutting down, which at this point seems nearly impossible. McCarthy bowed to the extremists on government funding levels, reneging on the deal he made with President Joe Biden to resolve the debt ceiling crisis. He and his leadership team agreed to make sharp cuts to the previously agreed-upon numbers, and the Freedom Caucus came back with a demand for more cuts, leading to a delay in committee work on the spending bills that are required to fund the government.
With the House ready to attempt passage of two of those appropriations bills this week, Freedom Caucus ringleader Chip Roy of Texas is upping the ante. The congressman’s demands: “1) Return Federal Bureaucracy to Pre-COVID, 2) End Border Invasion & fed attack on Texas, 3) End FBI Weaponization, 4) End Racist DEI Govt Policies, 5) Make Europe Handle Ukraine, 6) End War on Reliable Energy.”
There’s so much nonsense to sift through, but don’t miss the part where he’s threatening continued U.S. aid to Ukraine.
That would be on top of the wide-ranging culture war matters the extremists are forcing into every spending bill, with a particular focus on abortion. It’s just like what they did with the National Defense Authorization Act after McCarthy insisted to the rest of the Republican conference he was going to make sure they had a clean bill and not a “Christmas tree” of a bill, chock-full of poison pill amendments on every branch. He didn’t stop the extremists from adding extraneous amendments to that bill, so now they’re proliferating through every appropriations bill.
While the Freedom Caucus is itching for a showdown in order to get what they want, McCarthy’s trying to keep his head above water on these spending bills and he’s fighting the hard-right wing of his party over a promise he may or may not have made to expunge Donald Trump's two impeachments. This just might be the lamest thing McCarthy has done to date, all to appease Trump’s fury after mentioning that the indicted former guy might not be the strongest presidential candidate.
McCarthy denied making that promise, which only gave the story more legs and also made the MAGA crowd in the conference even more intent on forcing that expungement vote. For what it’s worth, expunging an impeachment isn’t a real thing. Trump was impeached—twice. There were votes. They were recorded. They were put in the Congressional Record. There are no take-backs. There aren’t going to be thousands of people hired to go through every copy of the Record with their bottles of Wite-Out, erasing the evidence. But here’s McCarthy, setting up what is quite possibly the most absurd legislative push ever, and getting himself in a jam over it.
Whatever McCarthy does, it will not be enough to appease the extremists. They have no reason to back down—not when they’re getting what they want and being rewarded mightily for it. Now the Club for Growth is backing all the rabble-rousers who have opposed McCarthy all these months. The conservative organization says it is planning to spend millions to reelect the 20 members who opposed McCarthy’s bid to be speaker through 15 rounds of balloting. That, the group insinuated, is to keep McCarthy and his allies from backing any of their primary opponents.
McCarthy is going to bumble the country into a shutdown, making the House of Representatives look more ridiculous and dysfunctional along the way. Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi nailed it this weekend on CNN when she said, “These people look pathetic.”
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