As the GOP House majority implodes …
And a plaintive cry arises from a distant outpost:
Yeah, that didn’t work.
"what digby sez..."
Month: January 2023
Now they’re eating their own…
Owning the libs is all that matters
As we watch the unfolding dumpster fire in Washington, keep in mind that this is what these people are doing to their own constituents. There is no good reason for this other than a deep and abiding belief that they must kill people rather than have the government help pay for their health insurance. This is who they are:
Mississippi’s health-care crisis is worsening, and an overhaul of the state’s “current system of care is unmistakably essential,” a leading medical group warned hours before the State Legislature was set to begin its 2023 session at noon Monday.
“The lack of access to healthcare for many Mississippians is currently a crisis, not a new crisis, but one that has been fermenting—and is getting worse,” the Mississippi State Medical Association said in a press release this morning. “As hospitals close across Mississippi, access to life-saving medical care becomes a real threat to all Mississippi. While the debate rages on as to why our hospitals are closing, the immediate crisis progressively engulfs us.”
Across the state, several hospitals have closed or cut services in recent months. During a hearing with lawmakers in November, Mississippi State Health Officer Dr. Daniel Edney warned that 38 of Mississippi’s rural hospitals, or about 54%, could close. Mississippi is already the poorest state with some of the worst health outcomes, including during the pandemic.
“That is a situation that is intolerable from an economic standpoint—to lose 54% of our hospitals in the state—much less from an access to care perspective,” PBS reported Edney saying in November.
For years, health-care professionals, including those at MSMA, have said that the State’s refusal to expand Medicaid to more working Mississippians has contributed significantly to hospital closures. Medicaid expansion was part of former Democratic President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law, giving states funds to expand Medicaid access to people who make too much money for traditional Medicaid, but who do not earn enough to afford private insurance and are not eligible for ACA subsidies.
“Again, the healthcare crisis Mississippi now faces has been foreseeable for years and was indeed predicted,” MSMA said in its statement. “The fact is, there is a sizable gap that exists for working Mississippians who cannot afford private insurance, yet whose income is too much to qualify for Mississippi Medicaid. When these individuals need healthcare, hospitals are required to treat them regardless of their inability to pay. And because these individuals are uninsured, the hospital is not compensated for necessary care. Such an economical strain on hospitals is not one that even the most successful private business could not endure.”
‘Hospitals Are Overrun’
Since 2013, Mississippi’s Republican leaders have rejected more than $10 billion from the federal government that could have been used to expand Medicaid, even with the federal government offering to pay between 90% and 100% of the cost.
As it sought a buyer last year, the struggling Singing River Health System in Jackson County said the lack of Medicaid expansion was a primary driver of its financial troubles and those of other hospitals that “provide significant care for underinsured and uninsured populations.” Singing River employs about 3,500 people across three hospitals and three-dozen clinics.
Gov. Tate Reeves has long opposed expanding Medicaid, dating back to his time leading the Mississippi Senate as lieutenant governor when he dismissed it as “Obamacare expansion.” The current Republican lieutenant governor, Delbert Hosemann, has expressed interest in expanding Medicaid, but Reeves and GOP leaders in the Mississippi House have continued to oppose the idea.
Mississippi is one of just a dozen states that have declined to expand Medicaid. Despite representing less than a quarter of the country, states that refused to expand Medicaid accounted for 74% of all rural hospital closures between 2010 and 2021, an American Hospital Association report found last year.
Owning the libs is all that matters.
This is who the rump faction represent — hardcore, red state nihilists. If they have power to make it happen nationally, they will use it. They can’t be allowed to have that power.
If anyone still labors under the impression that Donald Trump invented the shitshow that is the modern Republican Party, Tuesday’s performance on Capitol Hill will have disabused them of that notion. It was déjà vu all over again, just like in 2015 when Kevin McCarthy was humiliated by far right bomb-throwers simply because he was so easy to humiliate, thus giving them leverage and pleasure in equal measure. Poor McCarthy spent the next seven years groveling and genuflecting to these extremists under the foolish impression that they would reward him for his fealty. As Salon’s Rae Hodge lays out in detail, on Tuesday afternoon they simply laughed in his face and humiliated him again.
Back in 2015, the newly formed Freedom Caucus, born out of the Tea Party class that came into Congress five years before in the 2010 “shellacking,” managed to force then-Speaker John Boehner to resign for having the temerity to make deals with the Democrats in the Senate and the White House in order to keep the government functioning. They were a rump caucus that didn’t have the power to stop bipartisan legislation, but they had the leverage to both force Boehner out and prevent the ascension of McCarthy, his anointed successor.
At the time, McCarthy made it easier for them by telling the press that the congressional Benghazi hearings were a set-up to destroy Hillary Clinton (which was obviously true, and wouldn’t even raise eyebrows in today’s political environment). He also saw the whip count and knew he didn’t have the votes of all those Freedom Caucus kooks, and abruptly decided to bow out. After all, the superstar GOP dreamboat and former vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan was waiting in the wings and McCarthy knew he couldn’t compete with those baby blues. Ryan took the job for four years but decided not to run for re-election in 2018, largely because those same people made his life as miserable as they’d made his predecessor’s.
So this behavior was going on in the Republican Party before Donald Trump had ever uttered the words “Make America Great Again.” He didn’t invent this lunacy — he just watched it unfold and saw the opportunity to use it. After all, Trump had already done a test run with his birther nonsense, and liked the vibe. In effect, the GOP has been heading down this anarchic path for decades. Trump undoubtedly made it worse, but he didn’t create it. Right now, in fact, he seems almost irrelevant to its descent into further madness.
Trump supposedly whipped votes for McCarthy and it did no good with the diehards. It remains to be seen if he still has the loyalty of the 30 to 40 percent of Republican voters he will need to remain viable in the presidential race, but he clearly has no pull in Congress. In truth, he didn’t have much when he was president — his personal attacks on the late Sen. John McCain cost Republicans their most cherished policy objective, repealing the Affordable Care Act.
McCarthy’s catering to the far-right faction hasn’t done him a damn good either. In fact, the only people who anyone thinks might have some sway with this group are the real leaders of the Republican Party:
Tuesday night on Fox News, Sean Hannity evoked Ronald Reagan saying something about being loyal to the party, which will have zero effect on people who think of Reagan with the same reverence they have for Grover Cleveland or Calvin Coolidge. They are more likely to pay attention to Tucker Carlson, who had this to say:
That’s paranoid nonsense that even the Republican House majority thinks is nuts, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the crazies end up extracting this promise from whoever finally wins the gavel. Carlson is their intellectual guru, after all. And I think we know how this new “Church Committee” (as well as the “Laptop From Hell” committee and the “Lock Up Dr. Fauci” committee and all the rest) will actually unfold. These are not serious people dedicated to good-faith oversight. They’re a nihilistic carnival act run by folks who are desperate for attention. We’re in for a gruesome train wreck of a congressional session.
The problem with having insurrectionists within your own caucus is that they care nothing for the party, much less the country. They looked at the last three losing elections and now feel liberated to do their worst. All the anti-McCarthy members come from deep-red districts that voted for Trump by double digits. They have nothing personally to lose by acting out their darkest political fantasies. They didn’t come to Congress to do anything but wreck the place and if that means taking their own party down with it, they couldn’t care less.
As CNN’s Ron Brownstein points out, Republicans consolidated their hold on red states in the last few elections. In 2022 they nailed down places like Florida, Texas, Iowa and Tennessee for the foreseeable future. But they also won 18 seats in districts that voted for Joe Biden, half of which are in New York and California, blue states which will see much higher turnout in a presidential-election year. They can’t afford to lose any of those, but this House circus is going to put every one of those members on the chopping block.
If the last three elections have shown anything, it’s that swing-state voters are decisively rejecting the far-right crusade that has so many people in red states spellbound. According to Brownstein, a new analysis of the midterms shows that “in the key House, Senate and gubernatorial races across the 15 states with the most competitive statewide contests involving candidates clearly identified with a Trump-style agenda, Democrats largely matched or even exceeded their 2020 margins — a remarkable showing during the first midterm election for the party holding the White House.”
It’s not hard to see why. In the last few years we’ve had one “historic” political crisis after another. Just since 2019 there have been two impeachments, a president refusing to honor election results, a violent insurrection and now, on the very first day of the new Congress, clear evidence that the most radical “Trump-style” officials in the GOP are pulling the strings and the larger majority in the party is helpless to stop them.
Let’s hope that all those swing-state voters who came out in 2018, 2020 and again in 2022 will now understand that this isn’t just about stopping Donald Trump, as worthy as that is. They need to make sure that Republicans are kept out of power until they demobilize this destructive faction and reinvent themselves as responsible, patriotic participants in the political process. They certainly aren’t there yet, and maybe it’s just a lost cause. It wouldn’t be their first one.
With no room at the pediatric ICU, or no pediatric ICU
A friend is a retired neonatal ICU doctor. It’s a tough gig watching premies struggle for life. Even tougher when she lost one. Tougher still for the parents.
Alexander Stockton and Lucy King produced a video diary for the New York Times about how COVID, RSV and flu are hitting young kids especially hard this winter. My connection to RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) is modest but memorable. So when it pops up in the news I notice. This year it’s a tripledemic (Yale Medicine):
“What we are seeing is record levels of RSV in young children. Usually, we see a spike in December or January, but it’s earlier this year,” says Scott Roberts, MD, a Yale Medicine infectious diseases specialist.
Meanwhile, as of early December, RSV cases reported by Yale were beginning to go down and COVID-19 and flu cases were increasing. A big part of the flu increase, he explains, is our lack of immunity from having not been exposed to the virus for several seasons due to masking and other precautions, many of which have fallen to the wayside.
[…]
RSV is a common and highly contagious respiratory virus that causes cold-like symptoms. Most kids are exposed to the virus by their second birthday and therefore develop a degree of immunity that makes future cases less troublesome.
But for the very young it can be deadly. Even more so because the flood of young patients has hospitals streched thin. The number of hospitals properly equipped to treat very young children is also limited. Especially in rural America.
Scientific American from November:
In California, the Orange County health department declared a state of emergency in early November 2022 due to record numbers of pediatric hospitalizations for respiratory infections. In Maryland, emergency rooms have run out of beds because of the unusually high number of severe respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, infections. So emergency departments there are having to refer patients across state lines for care.
In the U.S., the winter respiratory virus season started earlier than usual this year. Since peak infections usually occur in late December or January, this uncharacteristic early wave suggests that the situation could get much worse for people of all ages, particularly children.
The New York Times examines the problem:
As the Opinion video above argues, this crisis is not simply the result of a sharp rise in case numbers. The wave of respiratory illnesses in recent months has revealed a health care industry ill equipped to care for critically ill children.
Profit-driven management has eroded pediatric health care in America. Health care providers make more money treating adults than they do children. As a result, the number of hospitals offering pediatric care has decreased dramatically over the past two decades.
So when the number of R.S.V. cases skyrocketed in late 2022, the American health care system wasn’t prepared. Hospitals were overwhelmed, and families struggled to find appropriate care. And once again, the nation’s health care workers have shouldered much of the burden, going to extraordinary lengths to care for society’s most vulnerable.
The “world’s finest” system is a mess. A recent study by the American Hospital Association examined rural hospital closings:
1. Seventy-four percent of rural closures between 2010 and 2021 occurred in states where Medicaid expansion was not in place or had been so for less than a year.
2. Nineteen rural hospitals closed in 2020 — the most of any year in the past decade.
3. Ten percent of U.S. physicians practice in rural areas dispute those areas accounting for 14 percent of the country’s population.
4. Hospitals accounted for one in every 12 rural jobs in 2020.
5. About half of the hospitals that closed between 2010 and 2020 were independent.
6. AHA said rural hospitals require increased attention from state and federal governments to address barriers and invest in new resources. It called on Congress to extend the Medicare-dependent Hospital program and the Low-Volume Hospital program, which are set to expire Oct. 1.
“This is our pediatric pandemic,” says Erika Setzer, pediatric critical care provider. “The floodgates have opened. They’re coming. They’re coming in droves.”
Pray your child or grandchild can get needed care without going begging.
Not to sound like an old Carson joke setup, but….
It is a mystery just how much of their own BS the hardest right among the Republican House caucus believes. They really, really dislike their own party establishment. That’s something activists on both sides of the aisle can appreciate. What they do about it is something else. Especially with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia is now backing Rep. Kevin McCarthy in his failing bid for Speaker. McCarthy failed to secure the votes to win three times on Tuesday. There is more fun to come this afternoon.
CNN’s Jake Tapper offered some praise for Greene’s willingness to back the majority of her caucus, while contributor Jonah Goldberg condemned the holdouts (Mediaite):
“They’re nihilists,” he said before ripping Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a leading anti-McCarthy voice. “Most of these guys are performative people. Matt Gaetz is an illiterate.”
Dana Bash asked Goldberg if the speakership drama speaks to a broader problem with the Republican Party.
“Isn’t this actually an illustration and indicative of what is happening more broadly nationally with the Republican Party?” she queried. “Not that there aren’t true conservatives and authentic Republicans who believe in that credo, but that they are being hijacked time and time again, election after election by this minority because that’s who comes out and votes in primaries and so forth.”
They are so fringe that Tapper commented, “Taylor Greene is the voice of reason here.”
That alone should be enough to make you question which side of the looking glass you woke up on.
Without a Speaker, nothing else can happen. No one was sworn in Tuesday, no matter what the press release from Representative-elect George Santos said. At least he wasn’t the only incoming freshman issuing premature announcements of taking office.
Other Republicans piled on the Never Kevin faction, reports Jim Newell at Slate:
Some members are charlatans who just want to raise money and extort McCarthy into giving them committee slots they don’t deserve. Others genuinely do want rules changes that they believe would make it easier to rein in government spending. What makes this difficult for McCarthy, though, is that a core bloc of the 20 rebels just don’t trust the guy. McCarthy has served in leadership with Speakers Boehner and Ryan, who were often in conflict with the far-right elements of their caucus.
“I will not support anyone for speaker that has played a part in the leadership team over the last 10 years, that has managed the demise of our country, over the last 10 years,” Montana Rep. Matt Rosendale, a staunch holdout, told reporters Tuesday.
Bottom line? They don’t trust McCarthy. He’s “someone who has sold shares of himself for more than a decade” in seeking the Speakership, said Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz in a nominating speech for Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. Jordan does not want the job. He gave a nominating speech for McCarthy in the second round.
The hard-line holdouts made demands, to which McCarthy would only agree in limited fashion. But with each compromise, he simply proves to the them he is not worthy of the job. And if the holdouts agree to compromise, they prove themselves insufficiently rigid to carry forward the antidemocratic MAGA faith.
The circus restarts at noon ET today.
This time the insurrection will be coming from inside the House — and they’ll be armed:
The incoming Republican majority in the House of Representatives removed metal detectors outside of the chamber floor on Tuesday, just three days before the second anniversary of the deadly Jan. 6 riot.
Why it matters: The magnetometers were installed outside the House chamber in January 2021 to beef up security after the attack, but some Republicans have vocally opposed the increased security checks.
Eight Republicans and one Democrat were fined thousands of dollars for not passing through magnetometers required to enter the House chamber, the New York Times reported in 2021.
Driving the news: A rules package for the new Congress removes “Democrat fines for failure of Members to comply with unscientific mask mandates and security screenings before entering the House floor,” Republicans on the House Rules Committee said.
“Members should not face unnecessary disruptions as they carry out their constitutional duties,” they added.
Though members have yet to vote on the rules package, it’s part of a broader effort by House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) to win over party holdouts to his bid for the speaker’s gavel.
What they’re saying: A spokesperson for Republicans on the House Rules Committee did not immediately respond to a question regarding the removal of the metal detectors.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), who previously inquired about carrying guns into the Capitol, said Tuesday that Republicans were turning the House chamber back “into the people’s House” by removing the scanners.
I just don’t know what to say. Who would want to work in this nuthouse?
Not bloody likely
OPPONENTS OF Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid for the House speakership are digging in after a tense discussion on the House floor between Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
The pair’s conspicuous exchange in the back of the chamber on the first day of the 118th Congress was caught on C-SPAN — and noted by many members in the building. Thanks to Gaetz and his far-right allies, McCarthy, a California Republican, failed to win the speakership on the first round of voting.
Gaetz told Ocasio-Cortez that McCarthy has been telling Republicans that he’ll be able to cut a deal with Democrats to vote present, enabling him to win a majority of those present and voting, according to Ocasio-Cortez. She told Gaetz that wasn’t happening, and also double-checked with Democratic party leadership, confirming there’d be no side deal.
“McCarthy was suggesting he could get Dems to walk away to lower his threshold,” Ocasio-Cortez told The Intercept of her conversation with Gaetz on McCarthy’s failed ploy. “And I fact checked and said absolutely not.”
Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York won all 212 of his party’s votes, a show of unity that, if it holds, requires McCarthy to win over all but four of his colleagues.
Gaetz, who has shown a willingness to break with the GOP establishment, said that his crew of McCarthy opponents was dug in and would continue to resist him, adding that McCarthy has been threatening opponents with loss of committee assignments. A private gathering of Republicans ahead of the vote had been heated, multiple sources said. (Gaetz did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
McCarthy and Gaetz presented their positions in dueling press conferences Tuesday morning. McCarthy said that Gaetz and his allies had requested plum committee assignments in exchange for supporting his speaker bid. McCarthy also accused Gaetz of telling Republican members that he was willing to elect Jeffries as speaker rather than accede to McCarthy. Gaetz told reporters that he and his allies didn’t trust McCarthy.
I might have thought the Democrats were putting out the word that they would vote present just to screw up McCarthy’s whip count but it appears that they aren’t playing games. This is McCarthy trying to spook the rebels into changing. I guess he thought they wouldn’t check.
I thought I would share this piece about Jim Jordan from 2016 just in case anyone forgets that this House circus started long before they invited their superstar clown Donald Trump into the tent:
Jordan won his House seat in 2006, the year Democrats took the majority, but he didn’t emerge as a force until five years later. Republicans reclaimed the House and elected him to lead the Republican Study Committee, a powerful faction within the GOP Conference focused on crafting policy. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) remembers turning to Ryan at the time and asking who he should vote for. “Jim Jordan, of course!” Ryan responded, according to Gowdy.
Jordan that year also befriended a bunch of firebrand freshmen who rode the 2010 tea party wave to Washington but didn’t quite fit in with their establishment colleagues. They admired Jordan for his conservative purity and they quickly formed an alliance.
Within six months atop the study committee, Jordan began to divide the Republican Conference. He and his new allies pushed Boehner to hold out for more spending cuts from Democrats before agreeing to raise the debt ceiling — even if it meant flirting with default — a ploy broadly viewed as a kamikaze mission. But Jordan felt Republicans could win, pointing to the anti-government spending sentiment pulsing through the country that year.
Boehner ignored Jordan and cut a deal with Democrats. But the episode established Jordan as a rising champion of the far right. And Boehner’s allies sensed a threat. The late Ohio Rep. Steve LaTourette encouraged Boehner at the time to draw Jordan out of his seat through redistricting. Boehner declined, a decision that may have ultimately cost him his job.
The Freedom Caucus was born in 2015 after Jordan’s close friend, Rep. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, lost his bid for Republican Study Committee chairman, an election some conservatives believed was rigged by leadership. Conservatives banded together in a bid to force leadership to pay attention to them. And who better to lead the charge than someone who’d shown he had no compunction about taking on Republican brass.
Boehner was immediately in their bull’s-eye. Within about nine months, the Freedom Caucus pulled off the unthinkable: Driving the most powerful Republican in the country to resign mid-term.
“John Boehner had a tough job — one of the toughest jobs a person could have,” said Jordan, who never criticized Boehner publicly and even begged Freedom Caucus member Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina not to force Boehner out mid-session. “He had to deal with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barack Obama and people like me, so that is not easy. “
Jordan and his followers haven’t given Ryan much breathing room. Among other things, they blocked him from passing a budget, the speaker’s top priority this year, because it didn’t cut spending enough; and tanked leadership’s response to the Orlando massacre because it wasn’t hawkish enough on terrorism.
“Leadership is definitely a little afraid of him,” said another senior Republican who asked not to be named.
Shortly after Ryan took over, Jordan said he encouraged him to “demonstrate that there is a new team in town now” by linking a bill halting Obama’s Syrian refugee program to must-pass government funding. Polls showed Americans were worried following an Islamic State-inspired mass shooting in California, and Jordan believed Republicans could leverage that advantage.
It was the kind of go-for-broke Freedom Caucus tactic that failed many times before. The difference between Jordan and the bulk of the GOP Conference is that he actually believes Republicans can win such a fight and that Democrats will blink if Republicans hold firm.
Ryan declined Jordan’s advice, however, and Jordan is still a little sour about it: “Why do we think it’s going to be different now if we’re not willing to pick one issue and stand firm for that one issue and win? Right now, [Democrats] think they can win on these negotiations every time!”
Jordan doesn’t look imposing. He’s short but fit — keeping himself in shape with a maniacal routine of push-ups and wide-rimmed pull-ups — and despite his tough-guy reputation, bears some Midwestern humility. He married his grade-school sweetheart, raised four kids in a small farmhouse and ranks among the lowest-net-worth members of Congress. He refuses to trash talk other Republicans, on or off the record. Even those who don’t like him say he’s good for his word.
But in the trenches of debate, he’s a fearsome competitor. When he’s interrogating an opposing witness at a hearing, he’s got a quick retort for everything, and gets so hot and animated that his Oversight colleagues say he’s easily the scariest questioner on the dais.
“He comes straight at you and he expects you to come straight at him,” said Gowdy, a friend of Jordan’s. “He doesn’t have time for games or finesse.”
His constituents love him for it. At a town hall in Amherst, Ohio, this month, one woman told him “we don’t want you to back down on [your investigations] in any way, shape or form.” Another applauded him for being what she called an authentic conservative in the House full of phonies. “Bless you, sir!” she said.
Other Republicans more prone to play ball with GOP leadership say their main beef with Jordan is over tactics, not ideology.
“I like Jim personally, and I respect that he is dedicated and passionate about the things he cares about, but in order to accomplish things, everybody needs to work as a team,” said Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-Pa.), a former federal prosecutor who tried to talk Jordan off the IRS impeachment warpath. “If you take the ball and say ‘my way or the highway,’ nothing gets done.”
Retiring Rep. Reid Ribble (R-Wis.), who resigned from the Freedom Caucus last year, said that while Jordan “does what he does out of a deep sense of conviction,” he should “spend more time persuading the conference to their view as opposed to making everybody capitulate.”
Jordan’s combativeness has even caused him to clash with conservative friends. He and Gowdy were often at odds during the Benghazi Committee investigation, several sources said. Gowdy was determined to show his probe wasn’t about Hillary Clinton; Jordan encouraged him to go for the jugular. The week the report was released, the two were seen engaged in a heated exchange on the House floor. Jordan ultimately released his own report accusing the administration of a political coverup, because Gowdy wouldn’t.
While Jordan says blocking bad legislation counts as a big success for the Freedom Caucus, he acknowledges that his group has made little headway passing its own legislation. “It’s tough to win the policy debate when you’re a 40-member body,” he said.
But instead of ditching his no-holds-barred approach, he’s trying to build a conservative army inside Congress to further boost his clout. Over the summer, he recruited Republican candidates who he thought might join the group if they win, and next year caucus members may make up a larger percentage of a smaller Republican Conference, giving Jordan and the Freedom Caucus more leverage.
His army is small but they are mighty.
He hasn’t changed and he’s been a model for all the nihilist, MAGA chaos agents who are making the GOP look like fools today. And this time he may just be on track to become the speaker, even though the smart money is on him wanting to be the Chairman of Judiciary so he can torture Democrats. Either way, this weirdo is one of the most powerful people in the US government. Good lord.
The descent of MAGA into chaos continues
By the end of what promises to be a very long day Kevin McCarthy will either (1) be narrowly elected with the votes of fabulist and accused felon George Santos, conspiracist MTG, and a handful of dissidents who hate his guts, or (2) he’s going to have to move his stuff out of the Speaker’s Office a day after prematurely moving it in.
Time after time, the man who would be speaker tried to shrink himself into the office, and is ending his bid by offering multiple concessions to the bomb-throwers in the caucus who will hold him hostage if he survives. Even Newt Gingrich is alarmed by the shambles. “The precedent that sets is … any five people can get up and say, ‘Well, I’m now going to screw up the conference, too.’ The choice is Kevin McCarthy or chaos.”
But it’s chaos either way, isn’t it? McCarthy is a hollow man and a weak leader, and his caucus is now in the process of testing just how weak he is. One of the most powerful speakers in House history is about to be replaced by one of the puniest.
So this seems pertinent. (Here’s some context.):
It’s going to be even more personal at the end of this day. Or week. The wounds are deep.