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Kevin McCarthy Just Used His Eight-Hour Speech to Campaign For House Speaker – Opinion

Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader set a new record last night. He took to the House floor to protest the incredibly reckless and profligate “Build Back Better” boondoggle at 8:38 p.m. on Thursday and finished at 5:11 a.m. today. He held the House floor for eight hours and 33 minutes, surpassing Nancy Pelosi’s record speech of 8:07, which she used to hawk an amnesty program for illegals.

McCarthy died from exhaustion and the Democrats passed this bill.

He was absolutely correct.

While the Biden bill will bankrupt America, it federalizes child care and makes a mockery out of immigration laws. The IRS, however, will receive increased funding as it is charged with finding all the funds.

All of this serves as a fitting metaphor for McCarthy’s term as minority leader: style-over-substance and ineffectual.

I’d be the last guy to claim that being minority leader in the House is an easy job. It’s not. What we’ve seen from McCarthy since Joe Biden was selected to be president is not the leadership required to resist an administration and House majority hellbent on rendering the US Constitution irrelevant. We can go back to his coddling of Liz Cheney’s actions during the bogus “impeachment” of President Trump. Under McCarthy’s leadership, Biden’s infrastructure bill passed on the strength of GOP cross-over votes.

Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill passed late Friday night and is headed for his signature after months of intense wrangling over the details — particularly whether it would be tied to a larger spending plan that progressives insisted upon passing alongside it. But in the end it wasn’t really those progressives who provided the key votes, but rather the 13 Republicans (the full list is at the bottom of this post). The final vote count was 228 to 206, meaning if no Republicans had voted for the bill, it wouldn’t have passed.

It isn’t how a leader of a minority party in trouble acts.

McCarthy also has failed to defend his colleagues from being targeted by Democrats for retaliation. Paul Gosar had his committee assignments revoked two days earlier after AOC got her pants all wriggled up in protest at an absurd, almost impossible to understand take-off of an animated cartoon. Marjorie Taylor Greene suffered the same treatment because her opinions were not in line with “right thinking” members of the media and the Democrat majority. This is not to say that McCarthy could have prevented the Democrats from collecting scalps, but he didn’t bother to try to extract any kind of a price. His flaccid and disinterested reactions are not what is required of a “wartime consigliere.”

Let’s speak frankly about what is going on here. Kevin McCarthy, like most rational people, expects that the GOP will take over the House of Representatives by January 2023. He wants to become Speaker. He’s done nothing “Speaker-worthy” as the minority leader, but he’s also aware that he’s not offensive to most of his caucus. To grasp the microphone, he must appear active.

Kevin McCarthy is part the problem and not the solution. If he becomes Speaker, he’s going to do nothing to bring the Democrat mob to heel. He’s going to do nothing to inflict payback for their targeting Taylor Greene and Gosar to ensure such crap never happens again; see Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, 2022, and the Chicago Way. He is a go-along-to-get-along type who will sell out his caucus in a minute to curry favor with the Democrats.

McCarthy may very well end up as Speaker, and there might be valid reasons for installing him as such, but don’t fall for the bullsh** being slung by the House GOP that Kevin McCarthy cares enough about anything to fight for it other than his career.

This post was last modified on November 19, 2021 4:32 pm

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Published by
Pluralist
5 years ago

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