Opinion Is Kevin McCarthy okay?
The letters were meant to signify “Only Kevin,” CNN’s Melanie Zanona reported, as a rejoinder to the Never-McCarthy hard-liners on the right. But the message had an unfortunate double meaning that highlighted the doubts about the always-a-bridesmaid-never-a-bride candidate for speaker. McCarthy is just that: Okay. As in: not great. Not even above average. Just okay. One can anticipate future pro-McCarthy slogans as the Jan. 3 speaker election approaches:
“McCarthy is adequate.”
“Meh.”
“He’s the best we’ve got.”
“[Shrug emoji].”
The “O.K.” buttons may have been the biggest messaging misfire since McCarthy, called a “moron” by Speaker Nancy Pelosi over his resistance to pandemic safety measures, removed all doubt about the charge by selling T-shirts with large letters proudly announcing: “Moron.”
The “O.K.” buttons fared no better than the “Moron” T-shirts. I watched members vote on the House floor soon after the distribution of the buttons. I couldn’t spot a single member wearing one.
**
McCarthy has a knack for garbled messages. If he does succeed in his speakership quest (which is likely, if only for the lack of an alternative), he will earn the distinction of being the first speaker in U.S. history not to speak fluent English.
For eight years, I have been attempting to make sense of his sentences and mostly come up empty. Deep in his brain there seems to be a syntax scrambler (I’m guessing it was put there by Hunter Biden, or perhaps the Chinese) that causes violent clashes between subjects and objects, nouns and verbs, singular and plural, and past and present.
In 2014, I wrote that “his words come out as if they have been translated by Google from a foreign language.” Revisiting his “valiant but often unsuccessful struggles with the English language” a year later, I concluded: “The speaker-apparent apparently still can’t speak.”
Now he’s making another lunge for the top job, and words continue to bedevil him. “We’re Christmas season,” he announced this week. We are? He continued: “A talk of the majority right now who wants to put a small continuing resolution to bump all the members up two days before Christmas, to try to vote on a package they cannot read, written by two individuals who will not be here, on spending for the entire government.”
Do not even attempt to diagram that sentence. Nor these:
“Did they learn nothing in the last month election? Did they learn nothing with the American public being harmed? And to walk through to pass the largest bill that we passed throughout the year in the last days before Christmas, where they won’t even tell you what the baseline is now, the two people who will not be here are held accountable to their constituents, that they’re going to determine this?”
Have I answers no to questions pose you, Speaker Mister.
Out tumbled clauses and phrases cruelly severed from their intended meaning: “Now they want to jam the American public in exactly what they want to do … stop the fentanyl coming for killing our children … we wouldn’t have a border that’s run away … we do much stronger in the majority … What argument did I propose that have anything to do with the speaker? … And if two people who are who deciding it aren’t going to be held up to the voters, do you feel good about that as an American, not about as a reporter?”
**
In fairness, the zaniness in McCarthy’s caucus would be enough to scramble the most orderly mind. Consider just a few examples from recent days.
Russia’s release of basketball star Brittney Griner in a prisoner exchange prompted the usual denunciations by Republicans and (of course!) calls for President Biden’s impeachment. But Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas saw a conspiracy afoot. “I find the timing of this interesting,” he told the right-wing outlet Newsmax. “We pass this Marriage Equality Act and it’s interesting — Brittney Griner comes home that day.” So Vladimir Putin and Biden were secretly in cahoots to promote same-sex marriage by sending Griner home to her wife?
Not to be outdone, Rep. James Comer (Ky.), who will chair the House Oversight Committee, suggested the WNBA star’s release was tied to … Hunter Biden. “We fear that this administration’s compromised because of the millions of dollars that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden have received from Russia and China,” he told Fox News. “You look at just what happened yesterday. This bizarre prisoner swap that clearly was in the benefit of Russia is another example of why we need to investigate to see if, in fact, this administration is compromised.”
But the secret Hunter Biden-Brittney Griner nexus had to compete with many other outrages identified by House Republicans. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, speaking at a New York Republican dinner, announced that “you can pick up a butt plug or a dildo at Target and CVS nowadays.” She further informed the group that if she and Steve Bannon had organized the Jan. 6 insurrection, “we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.”
Actually, Jan. 6 insurrectionists were armed. Perhaps the Georgia Republican would have supplied the mob with drugstore sex toys?
We also learned this week that, 11 days after the insurrection, and three days before Biden’s inauguration, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) was still trying to get President Donald Trump to declare martial law. His only problem was he didn’t know how to spell it. In a text to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows just published by Talking Points Memo, Norman wrote: “Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!!”
If this weren’t evidence enough that McCarthy’s incoming majority has gone to the dogs, Politico’s Daniel Lippman reports that incoming Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) hired as his chief of staff one Brandon Phillips, who was arrested last month on a charge of animal cruelty for allegedly kicking a dog and cutting its belly. The would-be staffer had resigned as Trump’s Georgia director in 2016 after his prior criminal history came out.
Congressman, please: Let go Brandon.
**
McCarthy’s lead tormentor is Rep. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), who is mounting a symbolic candidacy for speaker and is part of a bloc of five Never-McCarthy Republicans vowing to deny Mr. O.K. the job. McCarthy doesn’t have five votes to spare, so he is cutting backroom deals with Republican holdouts that would effectively surrender to right-wingers the power to paralyze the chamber for the next two years.
The latest demand from the holdouts? Immediate impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s secretary of homeland security.
This week, I listened for more than 40 minutes as Biggs and his colleagues (16 White men and two White women, by my count) took turns denouncing Mayorkas. Standing behind a campaign-style Impeach Mayorkas yard sign, they were strikingly personal in their attacks: “Regularly lies.” “Malice against the people of the United States.” “Intentional and knowing disregard for human life.” “Disgusting.” “Despicable.” “Purposefully endangering the American people … for crass political purposes.”
But they didn’t have much in the way of high crimes and misdemeanors. Mostly, they objected to the border policies of Mayorkas’s boss. For example, Norman, of “Marshall Law” fame, claimed that Biden had said the border “is not a problem.” (Biden said no such thing.)
Rep. Brian Babin (R-Tex.) complained that “16,000 illegal aliens were apprehended crossing the southern border in the last 48 hours. Also in the last 48 hours, $97 million worth of narcotics were seized.” Umm, doesn’t that mean that border laws are being enforced?
Before the election, McCarthy said he didn’t think anybody in the Biden administration deserved impeachment. But the Biggs band has forced a U-turn. Two weeks after the election, McCarthy threatened Mayorkas with impeachment. Biggs boasted to me and other reporters that it happened only “after he knew that he was facing somebody who was gonna possibly deny him the speakership.”
**
McCarthy’s flip-flop on the Mayorkas impeachment is just one of many concessions hard-liners are extorting. Some are parliamentary. Others are oddly specific, such as cuts to food stamps. (Take food from hungry people or kiss your speakership goodbye!) Members of the far-right Freedom Caucus have demanded McCarthy include right-wing poison pills in future debt ceiling increases and must-pass bills — an almost certain prescription for defaults and shutdowns.
Fearing just such an outcome from the House radicals, Senate Republicans have reached out to House Democrats to negotiate an omnibus spending bill for 2023 (an “omni-bill” in McCarthy-speak) before the GOP takeover of the House on Jan. 3. Why? They don’t think McCarthy will be up to the task.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) told Politico “it’s too much to ask” of McCarthy to fund the government. Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) told Semafor that “for Kevin’s sake … some Republicans just feel like we should relieve him of that burden.”
McCarthy initially agreed with his would-be Senate saviors, and encouraged negotiators to reach a deal. But (recurring theme alert) he reversed himself under pressure from hard-liners and now says the matter should wait until Republicans take control.
A band of Senate conservatives this week tried to rally support behind McCarthy’s latest position, urging GOP colleagues to postpone the negotiations.
Sen. Mike Lee of Utah said he disagreed with the several Republicans who told him “it’ll be too hard for Kevin McCarthy.”
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) urged a postponement to give “House Republican leadership opportunity to … come up with a plan.”
But the Senate band was small: only four lawmakers. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), billed as a participant, was a no-show. A reporter asked if the sparse attendance meant that Senate Republicans are “tacitly admitting that House Republicans just aren’t ready.”
“Umm,” replied Lee, “those who are making that point are not doing so tacitly. They’re doing so explicitly.”
And they’re doing so because they know that an O.K. speaker of the House is not good enough.
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