Five Quick Things: It’s the End of the McCarthy Speakership, and I Feel Fine – The

All week long I’ve been watching conservative pundits screech and rend their clothing while opportunistic Democrats belly-laugh and make clearly dishonest statements about D.C. dysfunction in the wake of Kevin McCarthy’s conversion — at the hands of, perhaps, Florida’s next governor, Matt Gaetz — to ex-speaker.

Ex-speaker is actually a thing, it turns out, because based on that designation Nancy Pelosi had a hideaway office at the Capitol. But when Pelosi’s pals on the Democrat side unanimously backed Gaetz’s play, something they did out of pure partisan spite despite the fact that McCarthy cut a bipartisan deal with them on a budget continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown last week, it cost her that office.

Patrick McHenry, the North Carolina Republican formerly serving as speaker pro tempore and now most famous for his very loud gaveling, sent a terse eviction message to Pelosi’s staff virtually as soon as he became acting speaker upon McCarthy’s ouster. It later came out that McCarthy had asked McHenry to boot Pelosi — because now McCarthy inherits the hideaway office as ex-speaker.

It isn’t much of a consolation prize for McCarthy, and he has lots of allies howling about his ouster.

But is this the disaster they’re making it out to be?

1. Kevin McCarthy Was Not an Indispensable Man

It took 15 ballots to make Kevin McCarthy the speaker of the House back in January. Why? Two reasons.

First, McCarthy’s House GOP midterm campaign effort was an underachieving, slack affair. They backed some pretty weak candidates in primaries, they didn’t spend money all that effectively, the messaging was uninspiring, and, frankly, the public didn’t have a whole lot of interest in seeing Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House.

And second, McCarthy didn’t embrace the conditions by which he could become speaker until the humiliation of his inability to get to 218 votes was nearly complete. It was clear at the outset of his election ordeal that what was available to him was a very traditional role as speaker; namely, he wasn’t going to be able to call the shots from on high, but had to be a consensus-builder within his caucus and find ways to split off Democrats in swing districts to supplement his majority on key votes.

Instead, he wanted to govern according to the same power principles Pelosi had. That wasn’t realistic.

Ultimately, the members of the House Freedom Caucus and others who were holding out secured the kinds of promises McCarthy should have made to them in the first place, but none of them trusted him to keep them.

And his record of doing so was … pretty spotty.

McCarthy’s resort to a CR to fund the government was really a last straw. The principal demand made of him was that Congress would return to regular order, and he acceded to that demand. But he didn’t enforce it. His job as speaker was to force the 12 spending bills onto the floor and move them across the Capitol to the Senate well before the end of the fiscal year, and he didn’t do it. It might not have been popular, but perhaps his fatal mistake was in not canceling the August recess and demanding that those bills come out of committee before Oct. 1.

Because once you’re back in the CR game and you’re playing the shutdown political roulette, you’re in trouble. The bulk of the Republican voting base is fine with a government shutdown as an alternative to funding lots of the things their tax dollars are being used for, like paying Planned Parenthood to distribute puberty blockers to kids or funding government agencies attempting to stop people from having water heaters that work. Knowing this, doing deals with Democrats to move a CR to the Senate is a loser’s game.

And McCarthy played it, and he lost. Largely because he simply didn’t have enough credibility with his own team.

Everybody is talking about Gaetz and the other seven Republicans who went with him on dumping McCarthy. There were lots of others who would have done it as well, but their votes weren’t needed so they hid in the 210 who voted against the motion to vacate. They don’t exactly get badges of honor for that, but it doesn’t matter.

And neither, really, does McCarthy’s ouster.

Rasmussen polled the issue among likely voters, and the numbers reflect a giant “meh” about McCarthy going away. Some 24 percent of the respondents said it would be good for Congress, 26 percent said it would be bad, and 40 percent said “no difference.”

Plenty of nothing.

With McCarthy out of the way, the next House speaker might be Steve Scalise. I’m biased, because Scalise is a personal friend and someone whom I can attest is as honest, loyal, and forthright a politician as I know, but I would be shocked if Scalise didn’t have considerably more success as speaker than McCarthy.

Or if it isn’t Scalise, it might be Jim Jordan. Who doesn’t love Jim Jordan? Other than the Democrats, that is.

Or it could be Mike Johnson, somebody else I can attest, as a personal friend of his, is a consummate public servant and a legitimate conservative who doesn’t shine on the Republican base.

Nothing is guaranteed, but from where your author sits, we’re going to have a new speaker in a week and it’ll be somebody who makes us happier than McCarthy did.

Does that mean what Gaetz and the gang did was heroic? Not necessarily. Gaetz made that motion for two main reasons: first, he and McCarthy became enemies, and second, he saw political advantage in popping the latch on the speaker. Gaetz is now Mr. Anti-Washington, and back home in Florida that absolutely works politically. In 2026, when the gubernatorial seat opens up again and he runs for it, it would not be very smart to bet against him.

At the end of the day, McCarthy is your team’s coach who has you hovering around .500. You maybe make the playoffs, but you’re not winning a championship, and you can’t understand why you’re not better. That coach will always have the fans at each other’s throats over whether he needs to be fired, and then eventually management does step in because ticket sales and the take at the concession stands have begun to decline.

But the team doesn’t fold. It simply hires a new coach. Let’s hope this one is a Bill Belichick or a John Wooden.

2. The Climate Morons of September (And the Volcano That Made It Hot)

You might have noticed this on X Thursday morning…

We are in a climate emergency. https://t.co/2A1xvZd66c

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 5, 2023

The climate screeching has gone on all summer because it’s been hot this year.

Wanna know why it’s been hot? Hint: it’s not because of “climate change,” at least not how the climate nuts describe it.

It was this…

When the Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha’apai volcano blew up last year, it belched water vapor all the way up into the mesosphere — that’s the atmospheric layer sitting above the stratosphere. The plume went all the way up to 35 miles high.

Water vapor is the most prominent greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, and the estimates of exactly how much of it the volcano put into the air range from five to 10 percent more atmospheric water vapor now than before the eruption.

It’s going to take a while — probably another year or two — for all that water vapor to rain back out of the sky. Until then, the weather is likely to be warmer.

Not that AOC or the rest of the climate nuts who are hell-bent on taking away your Tahoe and forcing you to eat ze bugz to save the planet give a damn, but the volcano is why it was hotter this year.

3. VDH to Tucker: We’re in a Revolution, and Hold On to Your Hat

Earlier this week, Tucker Carlson posted a terrific interview with one of the greats. Victor Davis Hanson didn’t disappoint.

The subject was the immediate aftermath of that horrendous footage of the courtroom in New York where Letitia James, the demagogic and utterly lawless attorney general of that state, is attempting through a civil action to take away all of the assets Donald Trump owns there because he supposedly committed “fraud” in overvaluing collateral he pledged for bank loans.

To big banks with giant underwriting departments. For loans that Trump paid off on time.

Hanson noted that this is nakedly political and that what it signifies — on top of lots of other things that also signify this — is that there is a movement on the left in this country aimed at breaking us completely free of the constitutional and moral structure we were founded on, and what we’re involved in now is an attempt at a counterrevolution to reestablish at least some of that structure through the ballot box in 2024.

Hanson thinks the public generally does want that, but with all of the states where election laws have been corrupted and the process has been compromised, it’s anybody’s guess whether the counterrevolution can…