It was a lot like watching Tucker Carlson getting kicked off of Fox News. It was a joyous thing in itself, and cause for wild celebration, but you knew that nobody better was going to fill his chair. Fox surpassed all gloomy expectations by choosing the execrable Jesse Watters for the 9PM slot. God knows who the GOP will pick to replace Kevin. Jim Jordan? Steve Scalise? Marjorie Taylor Greene? There’s even talk of drafting Donald – no, really – which is technically possible, since, bizarrely, the Speaker doesn’t have to come from the pool of elected Representatives, though they’d have to change the rules to permit an indicted ne’er do well to fill the slot (also possible). It almost doesn’t matter.
Now settle down, you can relax about the Donald thing. There’s no way Orange Idi would take a job that involves real work, and sitting still for hours at a time, any more than he’d ever forgo running around to all those rallies, where he soaks up desperately needed positive reinforcement from his adoring MAGA cultists.
I think.
Kevin McCarthy’s ouster marks the first time in the whole history of the Republic that a governing party has given the boot to its own Speaker. Others have quit, like John Boehner and Paul Ryan (both because the Freedom Caucus yahoos made the job impossible), but nobody had ever been sent packing by formal resolution of the rank and file. Thus McCarthy’s tenure ended with an even bigger humiliation than the 15-ballot shit show that kicked it off. Even worse, he was fired for having more guts than I thought, and reaching a temporary budget deal, in the form of a “continuing resolution”, to avert a government shutdown at almost literally the last minute. Cast out for keeping the lights on! Excoriated and then stripped of his rank for the sin of reaching across the aisle to achieve something sensible! But of course! It’s today’s GOP!
You know, I figured he’d never do anything to jeopardize his coveted Speakership, especially if it involved the indignity of being shit-canned by the intolerable Matt Gaetz, but whaddayaknow, he went and did it. He was then promptly shit-canned by the intolerable Matt Gaetz.
True to form, various Republicans, including Kevin himself, ran to the cameras to blame the Democrats for not saving the Speaker from his own party. I’m not making that up. AOC, likewise true to form, offered the appropriate response:
It’s true, of course, that the Dems could have saved Kevin, but why would they have wanted to? The man was a career squirrel who broke his promises. He denounced Trump in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, then took a look at the wind sock and ran to Mar-a-Lago to beg forgiveness and pledge fealty. He sent a minion to negotiate the terms of a January 6 Select Committee, then tried pulling out of the deal, cutting his own guy off at the knees, after which he refused to participate in the committee that finally emerged (a huge tactical blunder). He let the Freedom Caucus take the nation to the very brink of a debt default, and reneged on the budget deal he made with the President as part of the bargain to raise the debt ceiling. He then mocked Joe Biden in public for being borderline senile, while privately telling his confidantes that you had to watch out when negotiating with the President, because Joe was sharp as a tack. He launched an impeachment inquiry to placate the moonbats, and worse, did so without taking a vote, which he’d promised, and which was probably a constitutional requirement. Just after he fostered the continuing resolution that averted a shutdown, which was only possible because the Democrats, naturally, supported it, he went on the Sunday shows to blame those same Democrats for taking the country to the brink. It was all too much. If he’d ever once been an honest, good-faith broker, he could have gone to the Dems, offered them something valuable (like support for Ukraine), and asked them to save his hide, and they probably would have done it. As it happened, he didn’t approach the Dems – he was complaining, therefore, that they hadn’t saved his pale ass in return for giving them nothing – but by that point they wouldn’t have wanted to strike a deal anyway, because Kevin could only be counted upon to break it, thus placating, once again, the nut-bars and chowderheads in his own caucus. So no, no salvation for Kevin, and no boo-hoos while his nameplate was removed from over the office door.
Absolutely goddam right.
The deal that got Kevin’s head handed to him wasn’t even much of a concession to the Dems. It wasn’t the budget deal he’d already made with Biden, because it wasn’t a budget. It was just a continuing resolution, kicking the can down the road for a mere 45 days. He even stripped out aid for Ukraine, apparently hoping to mollify the Putin Wing of his party, as if delivering anything less than utter chaos could have saved him.
So there goes the briefest stint of gavel-banging in something like 140 years. All that grovelling, all that pleading on his knees, and all he got for his debasement was 269 lousy days in the chair before they ran a pole through him, using, just to rub salt in it, a rule change he’d accepted as part of the bad bargain to get the job in the first place. It’s like a Greek f’ing tragedy.
Does Kevin’s sorry exit change anything? No, not really. The Republicans will now go ‘round and ‘round the mulberry bush trying to elect a new Speaker. It’s possible that a consensus candidate will emerge quickly. It’s equally possible we’re in for another extended goat rodeo, just like last time. From where I sit it’s difficult to give a flying fuck. The eventual winner is all but guaranteed to be somebody awful, with the only variable being whether he (or god help us she, given the existing female possibilities) has half a brain, or lacks the wit that God gave geese. McCarthy says he won’t run again, though he could. Scalise and Jordan are the current favourites, the latter being much, much dumber than the former, while both are dreadful. I’m wondering whether Elise Stefanick, craven opportunist that she is, will take a run at it, a prospect that shouldn’t give anybody comfort. We’ll be lucky if it isn’t Paul Gosar or Lauren Boebert.
Meanwhile, the sand runs out on the continuing resolution. In 44 days, the government will again be out of money. We’ll be back in the same old bind, and there’s no sign that the GOP bomb-throwers are going to be any more reasonable than they’ve been to date. They’ll demand the defunding of Donald’s prosecution. They’ll insist upon cutting off aid to Ukraine. They’ll promise not to budge unless all discretionary spending on social programs is slashed to the bone. They’ll try to make a vote to impeach Biden a condition of any deal. They might even have the votes in the House to approve their nasty agenda, but anything of the sort will be DOA in the Democrat-controlled Senate. Congress will be grid-locked, and nobody has a solution, save a compromise deal, which would probably require the next Speaker to throw himself under the same bus that just ran over Kevin. Don’t look at me. I’m fresh out of bright ideas.
At least I can assure you that the next Speaker won’t be Donald.
I think.
the needlefish 