Politics

Would-be speaker Kevin McCarthy walked onto the House floor this week with a diminished hand. Before starting the new year, he’d already agreed to restore the motion to vacate the chair in the House rules package. This was a significant win for the House Freedom Caucus, and a major concession for McCarthy. Yet it still wasn’t enough to avoid this week’s floor fight. Cable news pundits have tried to sum up the drama as a tug-of-war between MAGA Republicans and ultra-MAGA Republicans, but this lazy explanation gives Donald Trump too much credit. (In fact, Trump’s recent statements backing McCarthy didn’t move the needle at all.

A scandal-prone president of tepid popularity and questionable health sits in the White House. The Republicans hold a majority in the House of Representatives, but a dissident faction of 20 opposes the establishment candidate for speaker and demands greater powers for the party conference. For the first time in living memory, the favored candidate loses election on the first ballot, then on the second, then the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth. Yes, Washington certainly was a messy place in 1923, exactly a century ago. That was when the GOP was mired in a predicament similar to the one Republican leader Kevin McCarthy finds himself in this week. Back then, the troubled candidate for speaker was Massachusetts Representative Frederick H. Gillett.

Politicians and members of the press love to drone on about bipartisanship, waxing lyrical about the way things used to be. Back in the day, a congressman could debate a member of the opposing party on the House floor, only to grab a beer with him after the work day ended! Isn’t that swell? They used to let bygones be bygones. It was a simpler time — and it’s now a cliché in politics that we should be striving to return to those good old days. But guess what? After seeing Senator Mitch McConnell and President Joe Biden slapping each other’s backs in Kentucky on Wednesday, the only thing both sides of the aisle might be able to agree on is that bipartisanship is overrated. That’s right. The president landed in Covington, Kentucky, to tout the $1.

Katie Porter, darling of the liberal media, is having a rough couple of weeks. The California congresswoman has recently been accused of: firing an employee who allegedly gave her Covid; using racist language, and fostering a hostile workplace. These are explosive allegations to be levied against a high-profile Democrat, yet the general public would never have heard of any of them were it not for an anonymous Instagram account that did the job of the entire DC press corps. “Rep. Katie Porter fires staffer after both test positive for COVID,” Dear White Staffers posted last week, sharing Signal messages purporting to be from Porter’s now-former staffer where the congresswoman berated her employee. “Well you gave me Covid,” Porter’s messages read.

A clown show about nothing Did you have a bad first day back at work in 2023? If so, take solace from the fact that it could be worse: you could be Kevin McCarthy. The California Republican bounded through the Capitol promising a “good day” yesterday morning. What followed was a bad-tempered meeting of House Republicans and three rounds of voting on the floor in which McCarthy wasn’t even close to the tally he needs to secure the speakership. In other words, it was not a good day. In fact, McCarthy ended proceedings with fewer votes than he started. In Tuesday’s final vote, twenty House Republicans voted against him. This leaves, well, more or less everything in doubt.

In the Quaker denomination, they have a term: “bloody-minded objector.” Because the Society of Friends requires consensus on all matters concerning their meetings, they make exceptions for those who are needlessly gumming up the works for personal or wrongheaded reasons. Today, Florida Man Representative Matt Gaetz is leading a band of twenty bloody-minded objectors who refuse to vote for Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House — and that's not all. He and they are also making Donald Trump look like an absolute fool. McCarthy and Trump have a good relationship and Trump has endorsed the GOP leader for the speakership. As a presidential candidate, Trump needs his endorsements to matter; he needs to show that he is still the leader of the MAGA cause.

In two weeks, with great sorrow, our nation will mark the second anniversary of the culmination of an unprecedented self-coup attempt by a sitting president: the January 6 Capitol riot, which resulted in five deaths. The callous barbarism we witnessed that day was nothing less than a brazen assault on the fountainhead of American self-governance, the Constitution. No amount of Tucker Carlson’s documentaries or Revolver News clickbait can change that inconvenient fact. Conservatives who dismiss what happened as nothing more than a false flag operation designed to initiate a “patriot purge” are doing themselves a grave disservice. Since July of last year, the January 6 Committee has been charged with investigating the events of the fateful day and what precipitated it.

New York City mayor Eric Adams’s first day in office started with a call to the NYPD. Waiting for the J train to take him from Brooklyn to City Hall, Adams spied three men beginning to tussle. When punches began flying, he dialed 911. He didn’t offer a name until the end of the call: “Adams, Mayor Adams.” The moment, so perfect as to seem choreographed, epitomized Adams’s agenda. Predecessor Bill de Blasio destroyed his credibility with the police department over his eight years in office. Adams, by contrast, was a former NYPD captain who had run on his pedigree, rejected his opponents’ calls to defund the police and promised to revive the plainclothes anti-gun unit disbanded by de Blasio amid the George Floyd protests. The message worked.

I was recently asked to say a few words about “Globalism and Freedom” at a conference sponsored by Hillsdale College in Boise. Globalism, I said, is the enemy of freedom. Why? Because globalism systematically attacks and undermines the moral and political filiations that make genuine freedom possible. In order to understand why this should be so, we must begin by pondering the word “globalism” and its adjectival personification “globalist.” Neither occurs in my thirteen-volume edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which dates from the early 1960s. What does that tell us? For one thing, it tells us that the term “globalism” and its cognates are neologisms. Neologisms come into being for a couple of different reasons.