[The secret deals may be juicy, but the real threats to the
republic are the public positions of his party.]
[[link removed]]

HOW KEVIN DID IT  
[[link removed]]


 

Harold Meyerson
January 9, 2023
The American Prospect
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The secret deals may be juicy, but the real threats to the republic
are the public positions of his party. _

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) takes the gavel after
securing the Speakership on the 15th ballot early Saturday, January 7,
2023., Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images

 

Kevin McCarthy is one lucky guy that George Santos lied his way into
Congress, because McCarthy needed every last vote to attain the
Speakership in the wee hours of last Saturday morning.

We do not know all the deals McCarthy had to cut to realize his
life’s ambition, which include not just those cut with 20
Anti-Kevinoids, but also those he had to make to win over those
“Freedom Caucusers” who voted for him all along. Suffice it to say
that when the House Armed Services Committee authorizes a new
antimissile system specifically designed to shoot down Jewish space
lasers, at least one of those bargains will come to light.
Has there ever been a decline in leadership as precipitous as that
between Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy? In the annals of American
history, the only one that comes to mind is that between Abraham
Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. The passing of the Danish throne from
Hamlet’s father to his uncle Claudius also appears to have ended
badly. McCarthy’s ascent was nowhere near so bloody, though it did
feature one outraged McCarthy supporter, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL),
being forcibly restrained from punching Matt Gaetz in the snoot after
Gaetz and the Six reneged on their pledge to allow McCarthy to prevail
on the 14th ballot.

When McCarthy was finally able to clamber to the rostrum and deliver
his long-prepared inaugural remarks, it was roughly 1 a.m. (Eastern)
on Saturday morning. The elders among us harked back to the acceptance
speech of George McGovern, who claimed the Democratic presidential
nomination on the final night of the party’s 1972 convention, which,
because the session had been allowed to run too long, wasn’t
delivered until three in the morning. Neither of those speeches did
their speakers much good.

The striking thing about McCarthy’s speech, at least to those
who’d managed to stay awake, was how it could have been delivered at
any time since 1964, when, with Barry Goldwater at the helm, the
Republicans first sought to roll back the New Deal. Its only allusions
to contemporary particulars came when McCarthy listed the targets of
coming GOP inquisitions (though the inclusion of the FBI on the
GOP’s target list did mark an evolution in Republican thinking,
which now appears to support right-wing insurrections so threatening
that even the FBI has been compelled to check them out). Otherwise,
McCarthy served up the time-honored Republican chestnuts of stopping
spending, diminishing the debt, turning away immigrants, rejecting
regulations, and going after wastefraudandabuse (it’s one word).
Nowhere did he acknowledge that Americans could use some relief from
medical expenses or the costs of child care and college educations, or
that changes to the climate imperil us all.

McCarthy did pledge that Republicans would work to bring back the
“hundreds of thousands of jobs that went to China,” tactfully
neglecting to note that just a few months ago, House Republicans voted
against the CHIPS Act, which was largely devised to do just that, by a
187-24 vote margin. Nor, for that matter, did he recall that 23 years
ago, House Republicans voted to extend permanent normal trade
relations to China, which permitted U.S. corporations to decimate
American manufacturing and move the work across the Pacific, by a
164-57 vote margin
[[link removed]],
even as nearly two out of three House Democrats voted against the
bill.

 
McCarthy was simply enunciating the radical, turn-back-the-clock,
revanchist consensus within today’s Republican Party.

The new Speaker also vowed to hold the nation’s pledge to honor its
debts hostage to reductions in spending, promising, in effect, a war
on New Deal and post–New Deal government that neither Goldwater nor
Ronald Reagan thought it responsible to wage, so potentially
catastrophic to the world’s economy were its consequences. But to be
concerned about such matters requires at least a rudimentary sense of
cause and effect, and if House Republicans demonstrated anything last
week, it’s that their capacity to foresee the results of their
actions is completely nonexistent.

Nor was McCarthy’s declaration that he’d hold the debt hostage the
outcome of furtive midnight deals with the Gaetzes of the caucus. To
the contrary, he was simply enunciating the radical,
turn-back-the-clock, revanchist consensus within today’s Republican
Party. Every House GOPnik who seeks to lead the House Budget
Committee, for instance, has already publicly proclaimed they’ll
only support honoring our debts if we roll back our social safety net,
comparatively threadbare though it may be. And McCarthy himself
promised the same thing over two months ago
[[link removed]].
That’s sticking it to the libs, and if millions of non-libs, not
least millions of pre-political kids, fall through the holes, well,
some of them may in time be able to clamber back up. That’s the
American way.

“Foul deeds will rise,” Hamlet predicts as he discovers his uncle
has seized the throne by murdering his father, “though all the earth
o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.” Whatever foul deeds McCarthy
committed, or committed _to_, in the course of attaining the perch he
has coveted for so long, they pale alongside the positions which his
party has made plain to all. Those are the real foul deeds we will all
have to battle.

===

Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect.

* Kevin McCarthy; Republican Party; Speaker of the House;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]