Kevin McCarthy

Dumb is dumb. Among the dumbest is a political strategy that harms your own side and infuriates your normal allies, the ones who stand with you on most issues. That describes Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a master of both bad ideas and bad strategies. She’s a bomb-thrower who lights the fuse, gathers her friends around her and then drops the bomb on her own toes. She illustrated those qualities last week, not once but twice. First, she opposed a House bill on antisemitism, which passed easily with bipartisan support. Her reason was that the resolution could be used to attack believing Christians. To prove it, she dredged up medieval calumnies against the Jews as “Christ-killers,” who handed Jesus over to the Roman authorities.

President Joe Biden said the quiet part out loud Tuesday, telling donors at a campaign event that he might not be running for re-election if former president Donald Trump were not in the 2024 race. It’s just bad optics for any presidential candidate, let alone a highly unpopular one, to admit that they aren’t super excited about what they’re doing. Senator Rand Paul had a similar moment on the 2016 trail when he was asked if he was still running for president. His response? “I don’t know; I wouldn’t be doing this dumbass live streaming if I weren’t.” Hilarious, but doesn’t exactly strike confidence in the voting base.

Fight Club is so back — and this time it’s in the halls of Congress. First rule of congressional fight club: throw down in front of the media. Representative Tim Burchett exploded onto the national scene when he joined with seven House Republicans and every House Democrat in throwing Speaker Kevin McCarthy out of his leadership position. Now, he’s claiming that McCarthy sucker-punched him in the kidneys. Representative Matt Gaetz in turn lodged an ethics complaint against McCarthy for “assaulting” Burchett.  McCarthy claims Burchett is making it up and that any contact was unintentional and merely the result of tight hallways.

The Florida Man had a plan. It was obvious from the beginning, but this being Washington, despite all the bizarre outcomes of the post-Cold War political scene — interns, scandals, impeachments, Donald Trump in the White House and out of it, the Cheneys surrounded by cheering Democrats — normalcy remains the assumed status quo. Normalcy does not encompass a plan to vacate the speaker’s chair with the unanimous help of the other party. In fact, prior to 2019, anyone could have used the same tool the Florida Man would deploy to unseat a speaker. They just never tried it officially, because to do so would be crazy, risking handing control of the House to the minority. And it was that audacity which kept the Florida Man’s plan alive.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where after three long weeks, the Republicans in the House finally found their path toward a speaker — and boy is it a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto of a choice. Louisiana’s Mike Johnson, known for his kinglike dominance of the green line meme, is your new speaker of the House. He is eminently difficult to categorize, a cipher, an ardent social conservative with little in the way of fiscal conservative instincts but with a lot in favor of Zionist support for Israel. If you are a Squad member, this guy’s your nightmare. But he’s also likely to drive the media crazy, because he’s basically an unupdated social conservative from 2004. Perhaps not exactly what the Democrats had in mind when they helped Matt Gaetz knife Kevin McCarthy.

At long last, House Republicans finally selected their new speaker: Mike Johnson, the Shreveport native who resembles nothing so much as the pale casseroles ubiquitous to Baptist fellowship halls across the American South. They could be white cheddar cheese and boiled potatoes, they could be whipped cream and banana with Nilla wafers — you won't know 'til you take a scoop, but you won't have to chew very much to enjoy it. Mike Johnson is perhaps the furthest thing from Kevin McCarthy in experience. He has no record as a fundraiser. He is a strong social conservative, a version that has not been updated since the mid-2000s.

Will today be the day we get a permanent speaker of the House? It’s tough to say. House Republicans huddled this morning to figure out who they will put forward as their speaker-designee in the hopes that someone — perhaps, anyone! — can steer the rowdy House at a time of growing international strife. They eventually settled on Minnesota representative Tom Emmer. There’s no guarantee that Emmer will even get the required votes from the full House, however. To minimize that possibility, Representative Mike Flood circulated a “loyalty pledge” of sorts that all current speaker candidates signed, which requires them to support whoever the conference selects. Flood noted to me, though, that even Jesus Christ would struggle to get to 217 votes in this House GOP conference.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where a week and a half after the chilling attacks on Israel, the American people have had time to digest the scenes from across the world — from the Middle East and fiery scenes at embassies, to protests on campuses and now on Capitol Hill, fueled by lies from progressive Democrats — and their concern is enormous. The polls show 85 percent of Americans are concerned the Israel-Gaza conflict will erupt into a wider war in the Middle East. And while supermajorities of Republicans, Democrats and Independents still believe it's important to support Israel, Republicans approve of sending Israel weapons by a roughly twenty points more than other factions. (The Quinnipiac numbers are here.

There’s an easy way out of the chaos in the House, led by a Florida man who’s leaning on lessons learned in his decades as a firefighter and basketball player: Representative Carlos Giménez, the general leading the Only Kevin charge. For some in Congress, the literal Only Kevin pins they wore back in January were as ephemeral as a Nancy Mace promise. But for Giménez, it’s about refusing to reward bad behavior and about loyalty to the man who recruited him to run for his current job. “There was an injustice done” in Giménez’s eyes, he tells me in his Capitol Hill office. “I think that the 96 percent [of House Republicans who voted to keep McCarthy last week] bent to rule of the 4 [percent]. Everybody talks about the majority here.

After the US House stole the spotlight last week, sources on the Hill say a similar, yet more “behind-closed-doors” brouhaha is brewing within the Senate. In the face of a government shutdown, conservatives have been in “constant” cross-chamber communication. For instance, when the Schumer-McConnell bill, with its $6 billion of funding for Ukraine, was on the table the weekend before last, Senate Republicans were apprised that House Democrats were filibustering to get it passed. As the House convened on Saturday September 30, and the Senate convened at noon for a 1 p.m.

As the 2024 presidential election approaches, a Newsweek exclusive claims that the FBI is targeting presidential candidate Donald Trump’s followers. As the agency believes that the election may elevate domestic terrorism among MAGA sympathizers. The report indicates that the Bureau has silently fixated on the former president’s followers by creating a new category of “anti-government” extremism. Although the institution was set to be non-partisan, classified data obtained by Newsweek indicates a majority of the ongoing “anti-government” investigations are of Trump supporters. An FBI official who requested anonymity claims that the agency is “in an almost impossible position” as the agency is set to deter a second January 6 breach of the Capitol.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where for once the number one story in the political world barely involves Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Instead, the only story anyone’s talking about revolves around Kevin McCarthy and Matt Gaetz, and an act of political assassination that saw eight Republicans cross party lines to join with unanimous Democrats to lop off the head of the party’s speaker and greatest fundraiser. McCarthy as Ned Stark and Gaetz as Joffrey doesn’t track, exactly, since the boy from Bakersfield wanted that job and gave up enormous leverage to get it — but from the moment Gaetz brought the motion, people in Washington assumed that McCarthy would cut a deal with Democrats to survive. But that proved a bridge too far.

In Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, a posse of violent ne’er-do-wells forced by circumstance into a house together descend, through duplicity, avarice and lies, into bloody chaos which leaves everyone dead. The title is a fitting one for the eight Republicans who crossed party lines to vote with House Democrats, unanimous in their belief that they are better off without Kevin McCarthy as speaker. In doing so, they ensured the House is controlled by Democrats in all but name. As the speaker race begins, the odds favor Steve Scalise or Jim Jordan — both more satisfying to the right wing than McCarthy, but far less capable of fundraising as he did to protect the tenuous hold of moderates in blue states.

Et tu, Nancy Mace? The iconoclastic congresswoman from South Carolina put one of eight nails in Kevin McCarthy’s speakership — prompting a series of cascading events beyond any one person’s control and total uncertainty in the continuity of America’s government. Mace, first elected to Congress with support to the tune of over $4 million from McCarthy’s Congressional Leadership Fund, undertook quite a heel-turn from January, where she labeled her partner-in-chaos Matt Gaetz a “fraud” to today, when she teamed up with Gaetz and every single House Democrat to jettison McCarthy, leaving the country in uncharted waters and the House without a speaker.