McCarthy's Terrible Tuesday

By Rich Kozlovich

 Well, today's the day of McCarthy's reckoning, and the amount of CO2 emitted over who will be, or should be, the Speaker of the House has been amazing, and this piece outlines just how amazing that rhetoric is.  Will McCarthy get chosen? Will he get chosen on the first ballot?  He failed to get the votes needed in the Republican's closed session, but what will happen when the entire House votes? 

The Speaker of the House is a Constitutionally mandated position, so the entire House votes for the Speaker, unlike the Senate, where they make their own rules for leadership positions, and the rhetoric over this has been interesting, from doom and gloom to claims of mental illness of those who refuse to vote for McCarthy.  We even have good Ole Newt Gingrich wading in on this claiming  ‘Never McCarthy’ House Republicans have a psychological problem.  Wow!  Really?  

So those who stand firm for the conservative values they ran on have psychological problems but those who want to keep doing what's failed over and over again are sane?  Did I get that right?  Did I miss something? 

So that's what happened when Good Ole Newtie got on that couch with Nancy Pelosi and promoted global warming initiatives?  Did he had a mental breakdown? A psychological problem?  Or maybe, just maybe, he had a values problem?  I go for the latter.  Now, the man is a smooth talker giving the impression of great intelligence.  However, perhaps this is an illusion, because, believe it or not, he is a greenie!  Which makes him irrational and misanthropic and morally defective, and we already know he has the moral fiber of a goat. 

The fact is, Ole Newtie can tell you the sun is shining on Tuesday, and then claim on Wednesday it didn't shine at all. And do it with equally convincing zeal.  I wouldn't trust him to tell me day was light and night was dark.

It's being claimed chaos awaits a party that can’t unify itself, and I agree, but the Republicans are unlike the Democrats.  They're not unified, and this vote merely shows what everyone already knows to be true.  The Democrats are totally committed leftists who are working to destroy America, and vote in unity, and a frighteningly large number of Republicans are willing to help them, and all of those RINO's are voting for McCarthy.  

For weeks he's refused to make concessions to the conservatives in the House.   But now in the eleventh hour he's bending and now agreeing....sort of..... to some rule changes, such as making it easier to have a no-confidence vote to remove him from the Speakership, which has been limited to members of the leadership only.  

Normally there's no do overs for the Speakership, but while the position is Constitutionally mandated, the person isn't, and conservatives want to open that up to all the membership.   He's now willing to look at longer periods of time to read bills, not like this last minute vote for this 4000 page omnibus spending bill of 1.7 trillion dollars.  They also want "rules forbidding House GOP leadership from getting involved in primaries, and greater limitations on spending."   

If he'd agreed to these things before this would probably have been resolved by now, but he didn't and there must be a reason why.  And that reason is he's the weak leader conservatives fear he is and if he'd agreed to all this his days as Speaker would be numbered, or he'd have to grow a backbone and fight the good fight.  Not his cup of tea. 

At this point there are five members who claim they will absolutely not vote for McCarthy, Congressmen Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Bob Good (R-Va.), Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), and Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), who has been striving to be Speaker of the House since John Boehner was ousted, and he wasn't chosen by the Republicans then.  It went to Paul Ryan, who turned out to be a disaster, he even raved about the intellect, character and integrity of Ketanji Brown Jackson, which showed  just how flawed Paul Ryan is. 

Until there's a Speaker in place nothing can be done in the House.  No rules nor any business can be adopted or acted upon.  And he wants to be Speaker, and he wants it badly.  But even if he wins, he's already damaged goods as a leader, and if it goes to a second ballot, or more, he's no leader at all, and with each successive vote he'll most likely lose votes, and as I see it, there are four things that play into this. 

One, as I've stated, the Speaker of the House is a Constitutionally mandated position and the entire House votes for the Speaker.  

Two, hard line conservatives in the House will absolutely not vote for McCarthy because they know he will cave in on important issues, which is clear that's what he wants to do or he wouldn't have been so adamant about the changes conservatives wanted. 

Three, he will not remove himself from contention for the good of the party or the nation because that takes character he doesn't possess in my opinion, which I outline in my article, You Can't Handle the Truth!  

And fourth, it seems clear McCarthy will be elected because, no matter what they're saying publicly, I think Democrats will cross over and vote for him because they know he's "Cav-in McCarthy", and that's good politics, and if I was the Democrat leader, that's what I would do.  And the reason for that is conservatives are urging Jim Jordan to challenge McCarthy and the last person they would want in the Speaker's Chair is Jordan, or someone like Jordan, versus Cav-in McCarthy.   

No matter how this plays out, McCarthy loses, even if he's chosen as Speaker.