How funny that Kevin McCarthy, who used to be the Whip of the Republican House (the person whose job it is to keep everyone in line), can’t get his rowdy caucus to vote for him as Speaker.
While many in the chattering classes are outraged by the “obstinate 20” who won’t vote for the California Republican, millions of Americans are wondering: What’s so bad about Kevin McCarthy?
McCarthy is being opposed by a group of hard-line conservatives, many of whom are in the Freedom Caucus. They think that McCarthy will do whatever it takes to advance his career, even if that means going against his political beliefs. They don’t believe in him.
For some, it’s also personal because they say that McCarthy backed House candidates based on how likely it was that they would vote for him as Speaker, not on how they felt about his ideas. Some of the candidates McCarthy chose ran against conservatives from the Freedom Caucus in the primaries.
It’s a hard decision to make for someone who just helped the Republicans regain control of the House.
It’s also surprising for a GOP leader who may have been instrumental in reviving the conservative movement in the early 2000s.McCarthy and fellow young Republicans Eric Cantor (R-VA) and Paul Ryan (R-WI) started the House Republican Economic Recovery Working Group in 2009 to fight against the Democrats’ $800 stimulus bill.
This much-criticized and unprecedented spending spree was meant to help the country get back on its feet after the financial crisis of 2007–2008. In reality, like most big government spending sprees, it was full of waste and fraud. This, along with a flood of new rules, led to a few years of slow growth.
Mccarthy and others criticised President Obama’s plan to spend a lot of money and proposed an alternative plan that focused on encouraging small businesses to hire more people by lowering taxes, providing more assistance to people who lost their jobs, and putting a floor under the housing industry, which had been hard hit by the recession .
Mike Pence and Kevin Brady, two conservative Republicans, are among the 30 Republicans who joined the House Group.
The plan devised by Ryan, Cantor, and Mccarthy became part of the Republican platform in 2010.Also, the three congressmen published “Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders” just a few weeks before the midterm elections that year.
That book said that the GOP had “lost sight of the ideals it believes in, like economic freedom, limited government, the sanctity of life, and putting families first.”
The “Young Guns,” which include Mccarthy, helped the GOP win one of the best midterm elections in history. Obama’s Democrats lost seven Senate seats and a total of 63 House seats, which is the biggest change in power since 1948.
The three also made a list of requirements for other “young guns” in Congress, such as being willing to “be proactive and go on the offensive to change this house.” More irony: Today, people who don’t like McCarthy say they want to “change the house” in the same way.
In “Young Guns,” Mccarthy, Ryan, and Cantor criticise the GOP for being “arrogant and out of touch” and for “failures from high-profile ethical lapses to the inability to rein in spending or even slow the growth of government,” which some people still think are true today.
How did it happen that conservatives in his own party turned against Young Gun McCarthy? The Heritage Foundation gives hints.
In the most recent session of Congress, the Conservative Organization gave Mccarthy a score of 88 percent, but in the 15th Congress (2017–2018), Mccarthy only got a score of 41 percent. His average rating from the conservative group is 53%, which is lower than the average rating for House Republicans, which is 89%.
McCarthy has been chastised by Heritage in recent years for voting for large bills to spend money on the government and for failing to fight for significant changes.
For example, in 2018, McCarthy voted for a farm bill that, according to a conservative think tank, “does not strengthen work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents and does not include any meaningful or even minor subsidy reforms.”
In the same year, Mccarthy also voted for the $855 billion “cromnibus” spending bill, which President Trump threatened to veto because it didn’t have enough money for border security and important conservative policy riders.
McCarthy has also been criticised for giving money to some primary candidates because he thought they would vote for him as Speaker. In some cases, this made the GOP winner so weak that they couldn’t beat vulnerable Democrats who were already in office.
In New Hampshire, for example, Politico reported that money from PACs run by McCarty seemed to have gone to GOP candidate Matt Mowers instead of hard-right candidate Karoline Leavitt. In the primary, they fought over who would take on Democratic Rep.
Chris Pappas, who was thought to be one of the easiest people to beat in November. Leavitt won the primary but ended up losing the race because he was hurt.
That wasn’t the only election in which McCarthy was said to have interfered and possibly cost the Republicans a seat. So, one of the things that the group that is trying to stop McCarthy’s election is asking for is for the House leadership to stop getting involved in primary fights and let the candidates fight it out on their own.
McCarthy raised and spent $100 million to make sure that the Republicans would have a majority in November. He gave a lot of money to the campaigns of many of the Representatives, who are now working hard to stop him from becoming Speaker.
That sounds rude and individual. For some, it’s a no-brainer. As I write this, the leader of the minority party just lost a ninth vote; he seems to have stopped moving. His disagreements don’t change.
It’s possible that McCarthy will have to step down and lose his chance to be Speaker of the House for the second time. Maybe the California Dreamer will get another chance someday.
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