Kevin McCarthy has begun just his third full week as Speaker of the House of Representatives, and he’s already had a pretty successful run, despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth you see and hear in legacy media. Even those Kevin haters online that were fearing doom and gloom upon his election as Speaker after 15 votes have had to show some respect in how the McCarthy Congress is taking shape and in their messaging. Let’s focus on last week alone.
For the first time since the pandemic, proxy voting thankfully went by the wayside in the House. If you’re a member and wish to cast a vote on an issue, you have to be in congress with your fellow representatives at the Congress in order to have your vote count. No more letting someone cast a vote on your behalf while you’re God knows where doing who knows what. Votes taken last week were from people that actually bothered to show up. That’s a very welcome and long overdue development.
Committee assignments were doled out by the majority party. Now if you solely get your news from legacy media, you will be misled into thinking that every committee is personally staffed by the Speaker, and that the only committees that matter are ones to which Marjorie Taylor Greene and George Santos have been assigned. That’s just not how any of this works. The GOP Steering Committee, and then ratified by the conference itself, not the Speaker, makes the committee assignments for virtually every committee in the House. The Speaker’s privilege only extends to Select Committees, like the China and Weaponization committees that were also staffed this past week.
It’s not rocket science to see what media is doing, and it’s disingenuous as hell. McCarthy has a four-seat cushion in the House. Media knows that as well. Their goal? Find the four craziest, most controversial Republicans, and methodically make every story about those four, one or two at a time, and try to convince the Republicans through negative press coverage and bogus polling to oust their own bad apples, weakening the GOP majority further until there’s utter paralysis or a coup that Democrats can use to their advantage for operational control. Media will never touch the cranks on the Democratic side, of which there are legion. In fact, whenever a crazy lefty in the House is mentioned, it’s all of a sudden time to go to a commercial break and end the interview.
Case in point: Margaret Brennan on CBS’ Face the Nation Sunday only seemed to have time on her question set for Speaker McCarthy, when the topic shifted to committee assignments, for MTG and Santos. She, for some reason, apparently knows these two individuals really well and wanted to spend all her time on these two, and these two only. Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, and Ilhan Omar? Not so much. That’s not where she wanted to go at all. But that’s where McCarthy went. And he ran out her clock with a smile on his face. He simply wouldn’t give in to Brennan’s DNC talking points.
Try as she might, Brennan couldn’t get McCarthy to play her game on her Democratic Party terms. Committee assignments? That’s not his thing. Steering committees do that. McCarthy’s responsibility is Select Committees, and more importantly, who’s not going to be on them, like Fang Fang’s boyfriend. Well played. And it bookended McCarthy earlier in the week when responding to a Congressional reporter who tried to steamroll McCarthy, claiming he wasn’t answering her question. McCarthy said with all due respect, I am answering your question. He continued by saying you may not like the answer you’re getting because it’s about how much of a creep Swalwell is and that no security firm in the world would give him a clearance, but you’re getting an answer, and more importantly, you don’t get to decide what constitutes an answer to your question. This is not the wishy-washy Kevin McCarthy his detractors feared. This is a Kevin McCarthy that is reflecting the views of his conference, knows the hostility and bias the party faces in the liberal media, and is tackling them head on.
With regard to staffing the Select committees, which actually is in his portfolio as Speaker, one name really stood out to me when the roster for Jim Jordan’s Select Committee on the Weaponization of Government was posted. Wyoming’s at-large Congresswoman, Harriet Hageman, a freshman who just replaced Liz Cheney, was selected by McCarthy without a lot of attention being paid to the selection’s irony and poetic justice. Cheney, of course, was selected not by the Republicans, but by Nancy Pelosi’s personal prerogative to represent the Republicans on the January 6th Select Committee, which during their tenure overlooked a lot of the weaponization of government issues (that will now be investigated by Jordan’s committee) so long as going after Donald Trump was the underlying focus. Cheney was crushed in her primary, Hageman won the general election going away, and now the Cowboy State’s lone representative is watching the detectives, with apologies to Elvis Costello. That’s spectacular.
Lastly, let’s look at the progression over the looming debt ceiling talks. Joe Biden began last week by taking a firm ‘we will not negotiate’ stance. As late as Thursday night, the President and his flailing press flunkies promised that Biden would not meet with McCarthy to negotiate on the nation’s debt limit. It’s now Monday. The President is meeting at the White House with Kevin McCarthy on Wednesday. Contrast that to McCarthy’s stance from this past week.
McCarthy stated last Monday in a press gaggle that we have to rein in spending, but we’re not going to default. He said the GOP would not go after Social Security or Medicare, but that there’s always money to be found in the budget to cut. By Sunday on Face the Nation, let’s see where McCarthy had moved on the subject.
We’re not going to default, which he has said all week, but whether we do this the easy way and go for a longer extension, meaning you give us something on spending cuts in return, or we do this the hard way, meaning a shorter extension and having to go through this again in September, that’s up to the President. But make no mistake, we are negotiating on spending cuts.
McCarthy’s position hasn’t changed. Biden has already capitulated. He wasn’t even going to meet with McCarthy on spending issues, and now he is. To be fair, Biden’s position on this, like it is on virtually every other national issue of importance, was, and remains, unsustainable. Of course, he has to negotiate with a Republican-led House. It was silly to bluster and say he wouldn’t have to. And now that he’s moved off of that, McCarthy is going in with some cards to play.
Look, I’m not going to tell you that McCarthy will be our unwavering champion for the next two years. I’m not saying the House GOP conference isn’t capable of stepping on a landmine at any moment. Lord knows a political nightmare is one vote or one press conference away, and that could happen at any moment. But so far, the early indications are Speaker Kevin McCarthy may just be the right guy for the job after all.
