The Weakest Speaker

It took fifteen tries.

Kevin McCarthy lost the Speakership vote 14 times, equaling the 0-14 futility of the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Even after a long delay Friday afternoon where he and his allies offered the Freedom Caucus holdouts everything under the sun, he still failed to get over the 218 hurdle of claiming the Speaker's job overseeing the US House of Representatives.

It took one more round of open begging to Matt Gaetz - that he's not under indictment yet after the revelations of the Greenberg scandal still angers me - before McCarthy edged out the count due to several Freedom Caucus holdouts to switch to "Present" to lower that threshold to 216. 

Whatever deal McCarthy offered also triggered an incident where another congresscritter had to be restrained from punching Gaetz in the face. It turned out Rep. Mike Rogers (AL) found out that a committee chair he was set to take was getting offered to Gaetz as a buyoff.

Rogers shouldn't be surprised. In the pursuit of the job title and the glory that comes with it, McCarthy was willing to sacrifice and trade away everything else - including his pride and honor - just so he could wield the gavel. 

So what exactly did McCarthy sacrifice? Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo passes along what he gleaned from CNN: 

• A McCarthy-aligned super PAC agreed to not play in open Republican primaries in safe seats.
• The House will hold votes on key conservative bills, including a balanced budget amendment, congressional term limits and border security.
• Efforts to raise the nation’s debt ceiling must be paired with spending cuts. This could become a major issue in the future when it is time to raise the debt limit to avoid a catastrophic default because Democrats in the Senate and the White House would likely oppose demands for spending cuts. (Personal note: Those spending cuts more than likely attempts to gut Social Security and Medicare)
• Move 12 appropriations bills individually. Instead of passing separate bills to fund government operations, Congress frequently passes a massive year-end spending package known as an “omnibus” that rolls everything into one bill. Conservatives rail against this, arguing that it evades oversight and allows lawmakers to stick in extraneous pet projects.
• More Freedom Caucus representation on committees, including the powerful House Rules Committee.
• Cap discretionary spending at fiscal 2022 levels, which would amount to lower levels for defense and domestic programs.
• Seventy-two hours to review bills before they come to floor.
• Give members the ability to offer more amendments on the House floor.
• Create an investigative committee to probe the “weaponization” of the federal government. (Personal note: This is the committee the MAGA wingnuts want to start to harass the Justice Department and FBI for their investigations of trump and other Far Right leaders)
• Restore the Holman rule, which can be used to reduce the salary of government officials.

To be fair, a handful of these concessions - like the 72 hour review time on bills heading to a floor vote - are reasonable. Others, such as the power to amend bills when they reach the floor and forcing appropriation bills to face separate votes, are likely to slow down the House's operations if not kill legislation outright. The 'Separate Appropriation' requirement is a likely move to cut Food Stamps funding away from Farm Bills, something that's been bugging the hard-line GOP for decades.

Something not mentioned in Sullivan's list but a key element of the powers that McCarthy traded away: The Motion to Vacate requirement dropping all the way down to a single member of Congress able to call that motion to remove a sitting Speaker - which is now McCarthy himself - on any whim. Granted, it would take a full House vote to complete the motion and remove a Speaker, but we're talking about a process that would openly kneecap the leader of the House - and technically the leader of the majority party - without consequence or limit. The one time it had been used back in 2015, it didn't succeed but it undercut the authority of then-Speaker John Boehner and led to his eventual resignation. 

McCarthy is essentially giving the Freedom Caucus a veto power over anything a Speaker brings to the floor of the House, and the means to delay everything and harass everyone as they go on an ideological warpath.

If there's any good news, a lot of the deals McCarthy made are things that will never survive outside the House. The planned Balanced Budget Amendment vote - which would insanely cap annual spending to force draconian spending cuts - requires a two-thirds vote in the House to begin with, and there's no way the Democrats will back it. The US Senate - currently under Democratic control - will never agree to term limits or any House bill demanding harsher immigration policies (or funding that Godless trump Wall). The Senate will block - or at least reduce the damage of - any attempt by the House to undo Biden's infrastructure and budget victories from 2021-22, including the wingnuts' open calls to defund the IRS. The threat of capping discretionary spending - even defense spending at a time the Pentagon wants to support Ukraine's defense against Russia - would raise howls among pro-military supporters even among the GOP House ranks.

The bad news: The Far Right wingnut circus we just endured this past week to vote on a Speaker will now turn into the Far Right wingnut circus recklessly investigating sham conspiracy theories surrounding Hunter Biden's Russian-tampered laptop. Another circus will recklessly investigate the FBI for doing their damn jobs investigating trump, yet another circus will recklessly investigate sham claims of voter fraud in 2020, and I wouldn't be surprised if McCarthy allows Jim Jordan to reopen Benghazi and recklessly investigate Hillary's emails just for nostalgia. 

We will see within the first week of Congressional activity the Freedom Caucus freaks drumming up any excuse to file impeachment against both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Any excuse - from unproven voter fraud of 2020, to anything Biden (didn't) do for his son Hunter, even the excuse of Biden being too old (and Harris too ethnic) - will do.

Any chance of sanity will depend on any number of disgruntled "sane" Republicans - I doubt any moderates have survived - saying "fuck it" and turning on the wingnuts that turned their House into a clown car. Problem is, the "sane" Republicans have yet to lift a finger to stop this madness since the 1990s, and I doubt any of them have grown a spine strong enough to push back against the downward spiral into madness.

There won't be any sanity coming from McCarthy. He's sold that along with any integrity or pride he ever had. And he sold all that on the cheap. He's going to be the weakest Speaker of the House in modern memory - possibly in U.S. history - and he's going to be too busy holding onto the backside of the monster he's unleashed for dear life.