(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo warns don't write off Kevin McCarthy just yet [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-03 Writing at TPM subscriber’s The Back Channel, Josh Marshall has this to say about the move to force Kevin McCarthy out of the Speaker’s chair. Gaetz Threat Already Crumbling Apart Originally Published: October 2, 2023 12:50 p.m. Right after House Republicans went low energy and agreed to a clean 45-day continuing resolution over the weekend, Rep. Matt Gaetz announced he would lower the boom on Speaker McCarthy by filing a so-called “motion to vacate” this week. But that threat already seems shaky at best. There are already almost certainly fanciful threats circulating in right-wing media that Republicans will try to expel Gaetz from Congress if the long-simmering ethics investigation into his druggie, teen-dating past finds evidence of wrongdoing. This report started at Fox and got picked up in the New York Post, Daily Mail, et. al. More significant, very few of the hardliners Gaetz will need are coming to his banner. As far as I can tell only Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona has suggested he might be on board. Don’t hold your breath thinking that Republicans are going to expel Matt Gaetz. That’s BS fed to pliant press. But the attack articles in the right-wing press confirms what is true, which is that a lot of Republicans are seriously pissed at Gaetz for his central role in their latest highwire debacle. To summarize where Marshall goes with this, McCarthy can lose up to four votes and still retain the speakership. If, as Marshall suggests, he loses as many as 6, he’s technically no longer Speaker, normal business is suspended, and nothing else can happen until a new speaker is elected. That’s assuming Democrats don’t step in to give him votes — and McCarthy appears to already have ruled that out because A) he’d have to make huge concessions to get their votes, and B ) that isn’t going to happen because he’d be a walking dead man to the GOP for working with Democrats. As to why Democrats would not/should not throw McCarthy a lifeline, Marshall discusses that in Let It Burn? There’s a lot of discussion now about whether Democrats should directly or indirectly bail out Kevin McCarthy. Many reports say it will be necessary. I thought I should add that nothing I’ve written about this topic in recent days should give the impression that anyone should be rooting for McCarthy over the Freedom Caucus. There are no good guys in this story. But some are more ridiculous than others. Matt Gaetz for one…. ...Second: Why would Democrats bail out McCarthy? The best argument for doing so would be that he’s twice chosen deal-making to fulfill core governmental responsibilities over GOP nihilism. Once in May and again at the end of September. It’s highly questionable whether that’s enough. He’s enabled a thoroughly corrupt impeachment inquiry against President Biden. He’s created a path that leads almost inevitably to the President’s impeachment. He immediately broke the May deal thus setting up the latest crisis. He has enabled ex-President reign of lawlessness and chaos. He’s thoroughly abused his power as Speaker. The political calculus for the Democrats almost certainly dictates allowing the House Republican caucus to drown in its own chaos. He appears set on preventing a vote on Ukraine aid that the great majority of the House supports. emphasis added As for electing a new Republican Speaker, it appears no one else wants the job — and the Freedom Caucus members are not viable candidates, are despised by their colleagues, but can’t be kicked to the curb. Marshall explains the dynamics in another post: the Speaker needs them and vice versa. ...In practice the HFC — made up of four dozen or so members — controls the great majority of the Republican caucus. They will do what the HFC wants, albeit with various levels of whining. But a member of the HFC could never actually become Speaker. They’d be too toxic nationally, too unpresentable for the main stage. Far more importantly, they could never assemble the votes to pass any of their legislation. They’d fail at it infinitely worse than McCarthy has. They’d be saddled with the fact that they are, in fact, the problem. Not Boehner, not McCarthy, not this or that Deep State RINO behind the tree. Them. McCarthy meanwhile could never actually remain plausible both in official D.C. and press circles and with GOP partisans nationwide without his HFC partners. It’s the drama of purportedly being stretched to the limits on the rack of HFC demands that allows him to keep one hand in each place simultaneously. “I’m trying to be the adult in the room,” you might imagine him telling the insiders of polite D.C., “but what would you have me do???” The two sides couldn’t exist without the other. I sometimes imagine that only an anthropologist from a foreign country speaking a different language could ever persuasively explain the intricacies of this quite functional framework to most of official Washington. They give little evidence of really grasping it. emphasis added All the drama in the press about this doesn't account for the political Kabuki Theater taking place here. As Marshall concludes: Big picture: I suspect Gaetz is in the process of having his bluff called. Let’s remember that the real reason to oust McCarthy isn’t that he’s not trustworthy. It’s because he hasn’t solved the magic trick of how to get the whole House to vote for the Freedom Caucus wishlist when they only have a four seat majority. He’s failed to deliver the Freedom Caucus pony. No replacement McCarthy will be able to do that either. It’s hard to imagine McCarthy won’t be making the argument to all two hundred of those members that if you don’t like being kicked around by the Gaetz Gang, ending my Speakership is the one way guaranteed to make it a lot worse. emphasis added Democrats have nothing to gain by helping McCarthy. He can’t be trusted to keep any deals. Republicans have no one better to offer, and no way to rein in the House Freedom Caucus. Letting Republicans repeatedly crash and burn in full public view can only help Democrats — if they are willing to capitalize on it. My own take is that expelling Gaetz or any of the others (no matter how much they’d like to) is something House Republicans don't dare do in fear of what Donald might do. At the end of the day, Kevin McCarthy is the ‘best’ they can do. Expect more dysfunction. Charles P. Pierce wrote the following in 2013, and it’s only gotten worse since then: We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government…. ...This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately... McCarthy and his gang of vandals ain’t goin’ nowhere until Democrats take back the House. The sooner, the better. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/3/2197067/-Josh-Marshall-at-Talking-Points-Memo-warns-don-t-write-off-Kevin-McCarthy-just-yet Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/