It has been said that the House is the more radical and reactionary of the two chambers on the Hill. These are, after all, the people’s representatives, and therefore have a more direct link with their constituents than their brethren in the upper chamber. The Senate, on the other hand, has been described as the most deliberative body in the world. The ABCs of politics play themselves out here. ABC of course means, arcane, byzantine, and complex. Since this is the case, one would think that Leader McConnell would avail himself of these parliamentarian rules for the good of the American people and stall any bill until his cohorts in the House took control.
Now that the President has signed an omnibus spending package weighing in at over 4000 pages, costing the American taxpayer north of one point seven trillion (with a T) dollars, there’s one question that stands out like an errant nail waiting for a hammer. Where were the Republicans in the Senate? They, by strength of numbers alone, could have stood up to this monstrosity and killed it in its tracks. Instead, twelve of them, including their illustrious leader, decided to throw in their lot with their Democrat colleagues and vote for a bill that will saddle future generations with even more debt and most assuredly exacerbate our current level of inflation.
The timing of this move makes no sense since the House was about to wind up in Republican hands, and a slimmed down Continuing Resolution (CR) could have been crafted to keep the lights on for the government through the next quarter while a more fiscally responsible spending package was being negotiated. It all makes sense, of course, if the aim of McConnell and company was to sabotage any chance a Republican House would have of not only getting spending under control but showing official Washington that a populist government insistent on obeying the will of the American people could get things done. Imagine that.
So, let’s work on the assumption that this was indeed an act of sabotage. But why would McConnell and others within the Senate be so inclined to torpedo anything good that could come out of a Republican held House? For starters, we can look at the midterm elections that just concluded (much to the chagrin of the establishment wing of the Republican party) in a stinging defeat in the upper chamber, with the Democrats now in charge with an outright majority. Rather than conduct a little introspection into the “wherefores and whys” that caused this debacle, they blamed the quality of the candidates put forward in their respective races. More to the point, the establishment GOP was heaping scorn on its own voters and blaming them for the party's predicament.
This betrayal wasn’t lost on conservatives in the Senate who blasted the decision to vote with the Democrats. In an effort to throw cold water on any criticism of their actions, Mitt “one and done” Romney, who in my humble opinion has no chance of being re-elected in his home state of Utah, defended his decision claiming that he didn’t trust the House Republicans when it came to crafting a budget. Go figure.
Kevin McCarthy, the odds-on favorite to wield the Speaker’s gavel once the dust has settled, has to contend with five House GOP members who are unwilling to vote for him. Representative Matt Gaetz is one of those individuals. Gaetz and McCarthy have history dating back to the January 6th Capitol riot. Apparently Gaetz and others were considered a little too incendiary in their support for Donald Trump. That rocky relationship continues present day, as evidenced by an Op-ed penned by Gaetz on why McCarthy is not the person Republicans should be choosing as the next Speaker. It would be ideal if House Republicans could bury the hatchet and get on with the business of governing, but I do have to admit that Congressman Gaetz may have a point.
Back in 2013, in the shadow of the aftermath of the horrific events in Benghazi, McCarthy went on television and claimed that the investigation looking into what had occurred was nothing more than a way to keep Hillary Clinton from running for president in 2016 (which she did anyway). Nothing came out of the investigation, except for quite a bit of partisan bickering on the part of the Democrat minority members of the committee, who came out with their own report bolstering McCarthy’s claims. I said nothing came out of the investigation, but that isn’t quite accurate. Buried within the 800 plus page report was an obscure paragraph discussing how the Obama Administration had briefed the leadership of both parties in the House and Senate on its intentions for Libya. House leadership positions can vary, depending on which party holds the majority. In this case, the Republicans were in charge with John Boehner holding the Speaker’s gavel. The Whip is a leadership position named for the individual’s responsibility to ensure party discipline. The Majority Whip at the time of the disaster in Libya was none other than one Kevin McCarthy. What a coincidence. The feigned outrage over an ill-conceived plan that was never run by Congress would all but dissolve if Americans knew what had occurred.
I’ve commented in previous posts about how the GOP establishment was anything but in the tank for Donald Trump, and by virtue of that simple observation, not on the side of Republican voters, or their fellow Americans for that matter. Worse yet was their complicity in the whole Russia collusion narrative. In Part 6 of the Aftermath series, I laid out how the Republicans had the Democrats on the ropes in the run-up to the 2018 mid-term elections. There was enough to shut down the Mueller probe and hold onto the House with a rather nasty October surprise. But nothing happened, why? House leadership had enough to make all of this go away, but chose to relinquish power to the Democrats, effectively hamstringing Donald Trump and his populist agenda. And who were the leaders in the House at the time of this betrayal? Let’s see, there was Paul Ryan as Speaker and Kevin McCarthy as Majority Leader. Things that make you go “hmmm”.
It remains to be seen if Leader McCarthy has truly seen the error of his ways. If he has, and this is not some convenient ploy to cast his lot with a conservative leaning House (i.e., go along to get along), then I wish him the best of luck in his endeavors dealing with his Democrat counterparts in the House and the saboteurs from his own party in the Senate.