America elected a new guy because they were sick of the old guy. This is also the most basic and obvious explanation for the crap show that's happening at the other end of this building right now.
Ben Sasses, January 3, 2023. Speech on departing Congress.
The other explanation is this. When you offer yourself up for sale, sooner or later, the buyer is going to haggle over the price, particularly in a buyer's market.
McCarthy doesn't deserve to be speaker. The alternatives the hard right want don't deserve it either.
The irony of this all is that the very wind that he adjusted his sails for, now threatens to overturn him.
McCarthy has sought to be the Speaker of the House for a long time, and he's gauged his actions, by all appearances, accordingly. Immediately after the November 2020 General Election, he backed the stolen election line being advanced by Trump. After the insurrection, in the brief moment that it looked like the GOP was going to free itself of the caudillo, he stated, however, “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters, . . . He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding. These facts require immediate action by President Trump.”
He got over that quickly, however, and went down to Mar-a-Lago to make peace with Trump, and has been his backer ever since. Trying to bridge the gap between Trumpites and the rest of the GOP, he's taken the official line that the 2020 election is in the past and shouldn't really be looked at. The mainstream GOP in general took that view, hoping against hope that Trump would just go away and things return to normal.
They did not, and not everyone in Congress was willing to allow the shades to be drawn. That fact caused McCarthy to make Cheney a persona non grata, something the Trumpite heads of the Wyoming GOP followed and endorsed. McCarthy was, by November 2022, planning on a "red wave".
It didn't materialize.
Ironically, now, his supporters are the more moderate members of the GOP and the complaint ones. Harriet Hageman, elected in no small part on the election lie, has been supporting McCarthy, which given the Wyoming GOP at present makes utterly no sense whatsoever, but which might offer some slight hope that she never really believed the crap she was putting out.
But at least nineteen members of the "Freedom Caucus" really do, and they're not having McCarthy, as they know that he'll go the way the wind blows.
More ironically, the current pro McCarthy lien is "we don't know what they want" about the Freedom Caucus. Yes, they very much do. They want the stuff that the GOP has been shoveling to be its actual policy. This mostly shows that the party really has no intentions of doing that, and actually does hope to return to politics as normal.
McCarthy is getting exactly what he deserves.
For the red dyed in the wool members of the Wyoming GOP, the question is, why aren't they urging Hageman to vote for somebody other than McCarthy? This is a sincere question. Hageman came into office as part of the "freedom caucus" branch of the GOP that is now seeking to terminate McCarthy's career. She's voting for him. Her Wyoming critics, not all of them Cheney fans, claimed she was just another Washington insider. And now she's voting like one.
Not that I'd like a speaker from the far right. But contrary to their critics, you can tell what they want. They don't want McCarthy as he'll run away from them as the winds change, they fear, and probably with good reason. And they may legitimately sense that they have to strike while the iron is hot, with whatever little they have left to strike with.
Painted into a corner.
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