After years in which McCarthy has condoned a race to the political bottom, there is some poetic justice in watching him, at what should have been the climactic moment of his long, opportunistic trek to the speakership, now hoisted by his own petard.
For the first time in a century, the majority party in Congress has been unable to rally around its leading candidate for speaker. Having twisted himself in moral knots to avoid antagonizing the hard right, McCarthy now finds that hard right empowered rather than appeased, its members eager to turn him into a political piñata. With each vote that he loses, McCarthy looks more brittle, his jaw that much more clenched.
Even if McCarthy is, somehow, eventually elected speaker after this episode of all-too-public self-flagellation, his ability to be anything other than a figurehead for a party in hock to extremists who would rather stalemate government than actually do the hard work of governance, has been entirely denuded.
There was, to be sure, never really an expectation that the incoming GOP majority would be able to govern effectively. There was, at best, the assumption that they would pass extremist, symbolic bills that would routinely go down to defeat in the Senate, and would be able to muster the numbers to episodically make it difficult for Biden and the Senate to keep the government fully funded.
After years in which McCarthy has condoned a race to the political bottom, there is, surely, some poetic justice in watching him, at what should have been the climactic moment of his long, opportunistic trek to the speakership, now hoisted by his own petard.
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