Some politicians are more ambitious than others.
This is very true about Kevin McCarthy, a meretricious pol who led his Republican Party to victory in the House in the 2022 midterms, but with only a few votes to spare.
McCarthy is the third McCarthy we have written about recently. We wrote about senator Joe McCarthy, the demagogue from Wisconsin and a Republican who aroused the ire of President Eisenhower, and Senator Eugene McCarthy, a courageous Democrat from Minnesota; and about Kevin McCarthy, the highly opportunistic Republican congressman from California who has been striving to be Speaker of the House for many years, since 2015 when he lost out to Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan. And earlier today, in the wee hours, he achieved his lifetime goal of becoming Speaker after finally getting the support of twenty hardline republican members, nearly engaging in fisticuffs with congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida. Gaetz was one of twenty republicans in the House who forced McCarthy to be nominated fifteen times in four days before his fellow republicans said yes (https://www.apocryphalpress.com/2023/01/05/boebert-resigns-because-of-today-s-mccarthyism/.)
McCarthy got their votes by caving in to the demands of Gaetz, the most belligerent member of Congress; rep. Lauren Boebert; Chip Roy, and other members of the anti-government Freedom Caucus. As the Times’ David Brooks said yesterday during the PBS NewsHour, those twenty want to tear down the House and the federal government. Other Republicans in the House pretended to like Donald Trump until they realized that Trump was the main instigator of the insurrection of January 6, 2021 (https://www.politico.com/news/2023/01/07/how-kevin-mccarthy-got-to-house-speaker-00076874 and https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/07/politics/kevin-mccarthy-path-to-speakership/index.html).
So now that McCarthy has achieved his goal by doing a total cave-in to the Trumpistic Right, and substantially weakening the Speakership in the process, we can all look forward to McCarthy trying his best to walk the tightrope between Gaetz and Boebert and their ilk, when they will refuse, during the summer, to vote to increase the federal debt limit, thus causing total financial ruin all over the world.
And Trump will lose to President Biden for the second time, and Trump will retreat to Mar-a-Lago, and he won’t attend Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2025, all according to associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones, who hears all and sees all, and also according to our Chief International Correspondent, associate solitary reporter Larry Theis.