Kevin McCarthy’s ouster is dramatic evidence, if redundant, about the state of the modern GOP.
At the start, Kevin McCarthy's speakership was effectively an optical illusion. At the end, it was an exercise in self-abasement. | Francis Chung/POLITICOJohn Harris is founding editor and global editor-in-chief of POLITICO. His Altitude column offers a regular perspective on politics in a moment of radical disruption.
For nine months, McCarthy had the title and the gavel and a Capitol suite with a nice view. But he never really held the office of speaker in anything like the historic meaning of that job. He never inspired fear. He sought favor from GOP colleagues — 210 of whom actually stayed with him until the end — but he had scant influence to bestow favors in return. He wasn’t associated with any particular governing idea.
A lot about the times in general, and the GOP in particular, has changed in the decades since Gingrich and his self-proclaimed “revolutionaries” roared into power in the 1994 elections. He was shooed from the speakership four years later by GOP colleagues who had grown tired of his rap and mounting evidence that voters felt the same way. But a pattern was set that has endured long past Gingrich.
And, yet, in the nihilistic spirit of the age, it is worth asking of these intraparty feuds: Who cares? Certainly, in McCarthy’s case, it is far from obvious that anyone should care that much. He simply never made the case for being consequential. “I’ve had it with this guy,” McCarthy sputtered to colleagues after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, saying he would push Trump to resign immediately. McCarthy denied news reports that he had ever said this, until my colleagues Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin revealed in their book,, that they had the moment unambiguously on tape.
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