Kevin McCarthy’s struggle to become Speaker obscures the fact that he and his House Freedom Caucus critics share a deeply irresponsible and even frivolous agenda of posturing and nonsense. The fight is mostly about who will steer the clown car.
You may have heard the old saying about academic politics being especially vicious because the stakes are so low. In many respects, that characterization also applies to the bitter fight underway for control of the U.S. House Republican Conference. Whether right-wing rebels succeed or fail in once again derailing Kevin McCarthy’s lifelong ambition to become Speaker, House Republicans will have relatively little power in the current Congress to do much of anything other than cutting demonstrative capers and holding show-trial investigations of various fever-swamp rabbit holes. That’s important to understand before falling prey to the prevailing narrative of McCarthy as a sort of paragon of civilization battling to stave off the vandals of the House Freedom Caucus.
Consider the first absolutely critical priority McCarthy had planned to address had his elevation to Speaker gone as planned: an effort to rescind appropriations made last year to hire 87,000 new IRS personnel — mostly to fill vacancies and anticipate retirements at the beleaguered agency. House Republicans, and not just the ultras challenging McCarthy, are deeply invested in the totally fabricated idea that this constitutes an “army” of auditors prepared to besiege millions of innocent middle-class taxpayers. I mean, they just made it up because it’s such a fine object for anti-Washington demagoguery. The other “urgent” tasks — demanded by “the American people,” as we were constantly told — were laid out by Jim Jordan in his speech nominating McCarthy on January 3. Since Jordan was the unwilling vehicle for the House GOP rebels voting against McCarthy on the second and third ballots, his view of the House agenda might be considered a consensus view for both sides of the Speakership fight.
