We Need to Talk About Kevin

There were three separate altercations between members of Congress on Tuesday. Somehow Matt Gaetz wasn’t involved in any of them.

If you’d asked me beforehand to guess which Republicans would be assaulted, almost assaulted, or publicly belittled by their colleagues, I would have guessed, “Matt Gaetz, Matt Gaetz, and Matt Gaetz.”

It would have been a safe bet in light of recent history. But I would have lost.

The tamest incident occurred between Republican James Comer and Democrat Jared Moskowitz during a hearing of the House Oversight Committee. Moskowitz wanted to know why Comer finds it suspicious that Joe Biden once received $200,000 from his brother in repayment of a loan when, allegedly, Comer has done business with his own siblings.

That touched off a shouting match in which Comer called Moskowitz’s claim “bulls–t” and compared him to a Smurf.

Things weren’t as cordial over in the Senate.

In June, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien derided Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin as a “clown” and a “fraud” in a social media post because of the bravado Mullin had displayed during a previous committee hearing. “You know where to find me. Anyplace, Anytime cowboy,” O’Brien continued, mocking the senator’s height by attaching a photo of him standing on a pedestal behind a podium.

When O’Brien appeared again before the committee on Tuesday, Mullin decided that “anyplace” was right there and “anytime” was right now.

Mullin turned up on Sean Hannity’s show later to dismiss criticism of him wanting to throw hands during a Senate hearing as “political correctness.” Elsewhere, he reminisced about the age of dueling. At last check he was telling an interviewer that he’s willing to bite during a fight—and that no body parts are off-limits.

Still, a near-assault isn’t an actual assault. For that, we return to the House.

Rep. Tim Burchett was in a Capitol hallway being interviewed by an NPR correspondent when none other than Kevin McCarthy sauntered by. Burchett was one of the eight Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy as speaker last month. McCarthy is keenly aware of that, needless to say.

The reporter described what happened next.

That wasn’t the end. Burchett turned around, gave chase, and berated McCarthy as a “pathetic” coward and “jerk.” He claimed afterward that he had taken “a clean shot to the kidneys.” A complaint against the former speaker was promptly filed with the House Ethics Committee by (ta da) Matt Gaetz.

When McCarthy was asked about the incident, he pleaded innocence—with a touch of bravado of his own thrown in.

“If I hit you, you’ll know it” should be the inscription on the plaque accompanying his official portrait as speaker.

“He’s on a downhill spiral,” Burchett said of McCarthy when the interview with NPR resumed. That turns out to be true, as we’re about to see.

But why?

You might think being relieved from the worst job in politics would have Kevin McCarthy feeling grateful.

There’s a bright future ahead of him, after all. As a fundraiser, he has few equals. Apart from Nancy Pelosi, probably no one in the House has a bigger Rolodex of well-connected friends. He achieved his life’s ambition and now he’s primed for an exorbitantly lucrative career as a lobbyist.

His predecessors as speaker seem reasonably happy in retirement. Paul Ryan landed a cushy job on the board of Fox News’ parent company and is sufficiently carefree about the state of his old party that he once urged Mitt Romney to roll over for Trump. Lately he spends his days blissfully pretending that Trump can’t be reelected. It must be nice.

John Boehner’s life seems positively delightful, an easy stroll of golf, lobbying, lawn care, and cannabis enthusiasm. Whenever the House GOP bogs down in some new morass of drama and dysfunction, a photo of Boehner raising a glass of wine circulates on social media. It’s a portrait of a man who no longer has to satisfy the unsatisfiable demands of the House Freedom Caucus and whose Cheshire Cat smile betrays his joy at that fact.

I don’t think lawn care will fill the void in Kevin McCarthy’s soul, though. For months, culminating in yesterday’s apparent cheap shot at Burchett, his behavior suggests a man in denial about his own dispensability and failing to come to grips with reality in increasingly embarrassing ways.

Even in the best of times, he’s allegedly been prone to getting physical with antagonists or threatening to do so. This past summer, after the Republican House majority voted to censure Adam Schiff, fellow Democrat Eric Swalwell attacked McCarthy in a floor speech as a “weak man.” The next day McCarthy reportedly confronted him and warned, “If you ever say something like that to me again, I’m gonna kick the sh-t out of you.”

Supposedly Swalwell replied by calling the then-speaker a word I can’t reproduce in the virtual pages of The Dispatch. Hint: It’s a body part Donald Trump once boasted of grabbing.

There was no fight with Swalwell that day, but Adam Kinzinger claims McCarthy did make contact with him—twice—after he became one of the GOP’s most outspoken Trump critics. What Kinzinger described as being “shoulder-checked” sounds suspiciously like the elbow Burchett took in the back inasmuch as both seem designed to be plausibly deniable as accidents.

Perhaps they were, although it’s strange that such accidents keep happening to McCarthy and keep being misunderstood by the victims.

Remembering how he coped with being ousted as speaker, though, I’m inclined to think the (alleged) shot at Burchett was deliberate.

Recall how McCarthy held court with reporters in a long press conference hours after the House voted to yank the gavel from his hand. There was no shame or visible anger at his unprecedented humiliation; if anything, he seemed as cheerful as he would have in a gaggle discussing government funding. He was no longer speaker—but it felt like he was speaker.

And it kept on feeling that way for most of the next three weeks.

When Steve Scalise won the first vote of the Republican conference to succeed McCarthy, McCarthy’s allies reportedly undercut him behind the scenes. The former speaker went on holding press conferences, sounding every inch a leader of his party on October 9 when he denounced Hamas’ pogrom in Israel. He was asked that night whether he thought he might get his job back and pointedly declined to rule it out.

He continued to occupy the speaker’s office. The sign above the door featuring his name remained in place for weeks. He said he wouldn’t retire from Congress, an unusual move for someone who’d been dumped ignominiously in the brightest of media spotlights.

All the while, his cronies in the House GOP vowed to do whatever they could to see him renominated and reelected as speaker. It’s unclear how involved McCarthy was in that effort but as late as October 24—the day Mike Johnson was ultimately chosen by the Republican conference—he was pushing a plan that would have seen him take back the gavel with Jim Jordan deputized as his “assistant speaker.”

Then, suddenly, Johnson won. And that dream went up in smoke.

What happened here, in other words, seems plain as day. McCarthy believed the endless (and frankly not unreasonable) hype that he alone was capable of mustering 217 Republican votes, the one indispensable man who could govern a fractious, ungovernable group. The speaker follies of October were destined to end in a stalemate, he likely assumed, forcing even his weary detractors to come crawling back to him in the end.

When they didn’t, he was forced to confront the unthinkable: that he was dispensable after all.

And so the “downhill spiral” began.

Imagine being Kevin McCarthy in this moment.

Boehner and Ryan each got to depart on their own terms, sort of. Boehner threw in the towel in 2015 after the Freedom Caucus threatened to bring a motion to vacate against him, but he had nearly five years as speaker by then. Ryan also held the gavel for multiple years, and at a moment when Republicans controlled the entire government. Eventually he left of his own accord when he decided he had better things to do than midwife the GOP’s transition from conservatism to Trumpism.

Each man was respected in the conference too, Ryan for his policy acumen and Boehner for his old-guard managerial leadership. And each was spared the burden that McCarthy bore of owing his position to Donald Trump’s patronage.

McCarthy spent decades building bridges to get ahead, prostrated himself before a despicable demagogue, volunteered for a thankless job holding together a majority that now consists of two different de facto parties, and his reward was disgrace as the first speaker in American history to be toppled.

Not even toppled by a formidable foe, either. By Matt Gaetz.

I suspect Johnson’s surprise election and McCarthy’s realization that he wouldn’t get a second chance at the gavel after all brought all of this crashing down on him. His tone has shifted in the last few weeks, you may have noticed. He now sounds ambivalent about retiring and admits that he misses having a seat “at the table.” He doesn’t hide his bitterness toward the eight Republican “disruptors” who voted to remove him as speaker, accusing them of not being conservatives and predicting that some will lose reelection because of it.

And things might soon turn grimmer for him, assuming Burchett isn’t guilty of pure innuendo here:

It’s been hard lately being Kevin McCarthy. But as bad as things have been, he must have found what happened yesterday to be outright unbearable.

On Tuesday Johnson picked up where McCarthy had left off by introducing a bill to fund the government for a few months while House Republicans work to reach a consensus on long-term spending. That was precisely what sank McCarthy’s speakership: Because the conference couldn’t agree on which demands to make of Democrats, he chose to pass a “clean” stopgap funding bill with Democratic help that would keep the government running through mid-November.

That bill passed 335-91, with 209 Democrats and 126 Republicans voting in favor. For Gaetz and the other seven “disruptors,” McCarthy’s willingness to move legislation more palatable to the minority than to his own conference was the last straw. Less than a week later, he was out.

The bill Johnson introduced on Tuesday was also a “clean” stopgap, albeit with some government departments funded through mid-January and others through early February. It passed … 336-95, with 209 Democrats and 127 Republicans voting in favor.

Two speakers committed identical ideological sins six weeks apart and got (almost) identical numbers of votes for their trouble. Yet one has been cast off as a RINO and sellout while the other, for now, is secure in his job and may well remain that way for the rest of the term. “I think if you’re going to oust a speaker of the House from your conference, the red line should remain the same for the next speaker,” Marjorie Taylor Greene complained afterward, one of several McCarthy allies to do so. “What’s the point in throwing out one speaker if nothing changes?”

Imagine being Kevin McCarthy in this moment, on the short end of a breathtaking double standard that effectively ended his career. There’s no excuse for him taking out his anger on Burchett with a furtive kidney punch. But in context, is it surprising?

I wonder if he hasn’t given up the ghost just yet.

The conference’s fatigue after weeks of trying to choose a leader makes it unlikely that Johnson will be ousted anytime soon. He enjoys enough goodwill within the House GOP for now to have gotten Tuesday’s funding bill through with no calls for a motion to vacate afterward.

But if you’re paying attention to the news, you know that all the signs of Republican dysfunction are still there. They might even be getting worse.

On Wednesday Johnson tried to pass a rule that would allow the House to take up the  Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations Act. For decades, passing a rule has been perfunctory for the House majority; every member votes yes and then the tough vote on the bill itself happens.

This time the vote on the rule went down in flames, not even close to passage.

Any funding bill that does eventually pass will be met with resistance in the Senate and the White House and will end up being overhauled in the name of compromise. House Republicans know that, of course; in a case like that, normally the majority would simply vote yes on the initial bill as a sort of opening bid, signaling confidence in the speaker to negotiate a productive final deal with the other side.

Johnson’s members won’t even do that for him—and this is his so-called “honeymoon period” as leader. Where will he be two months from now, when the next deadline for funding the government runs out?

How sure are we that the rejectionist wing in the conference won’t run his speakership off the rails faster than they did the last guy’s?

A figure like McCarthy who spent the past five years believing he’s the last indispensable man in the House GOP might not relinquish that conviction if Johnson continues to struggle. Unlikely political comebacks do happen, as we were reminded a few days ago across the Atlantic. And Johnson’s eventual ouster would vindicate McCarthy’s leadership in a way, “proving” that the cause of Republican dysfunction lies with irreconcilable interests among the members, not with poor management.

McCarthy remains one of the best fundraisers in the party. If the election prognosis for the GOP turns gloomier, House Republicans might reason that bringing him back as speaker is a good way to motivate him and his donor network to try to save the majority. Even if that effort fails, having him preside over the House next year as a sort of “caretaker” until the term ends might be a way to offload blame for the majority’s glaring underperformance going forward.

There’s only one indispensable man in the Republican Party—and it ain’t Kevin McCarthy. But feeding McCarthy’s illusions about that for another year might be the most productive way for House Republicans to finish out the miserable term that their miserable bifurcated coalition has delivered. If nothing else, it might at least keep him from punching anyone else.

Except Gaetz. You know it’s coming.