Republicans suck so bad, some mainstream media outlets are even getting McCarthy’s ouster right

In a refreshing turn of events, House Republicans are putting on such a dazzling display of self-immolation that many mainstream media outlets have been forced to accurately portray the level of pandemonium these so-called lawmakers have unleashed on the institution they supposedly govern and the country they purportedly serve.

A Wednesday morning Politico piece opened with, “There’s no House speaker, Republicans are tearing each other to shreds over Kevin McCarthy’s ouster and another shutdown deadline is less than six weeks away — with no leader in a strong enough position to guide the party through.”

While the reports, analyses, and opinion pieces almost always note that a small band of Republicans "voted with Democrats" to oust Rep. Kevin McCarthy from his post, they still deride Republicans and McCarthy as the root of the problem. After all, it's on the majority party to elect a speaker of the House, not the minority party.  

As The Washington Post’s Paul Kane quipped about McCarthy, “There’s a price to pay for helping set fire to an institution and then asking the fire department to come save your office.”

In a piece satisfyingly titled, "Republicans cut off their own heads," The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that the eight rogue Republicans led by Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida toppled McCarthy "without a plan, a replacement, or even a policy goal in mind."

[T]he House is essentially frozen. The putative GOP majority is weaker, and its ability to gain any policy victories has been undermined. Oversight of the Biden Administration will slow or stop. Republicans in swing districts who are vulnerable in 2024 will be especially wary of trusting the Gaetz faction, and regaining any unity of purpose will be that much harder.

A Politico Magazine piece by editor John Harris declared, "The House GOP is a failed State."

McCarthy’s ouster is dramatic evidence, if redundant, about the state of the modern GOP. A party that used to have an instinctual orientation toward authority and order — Democrats fall in love, went the old chestnut, while Republicans fall in line — is now animated by something akin to nihilism. The politics of contempt so skillfully exploited by Donald Trump is turned inward on hapless would-be leaders like McCarthy with no less ferocity than it is turned outward on liberals and the media.

In a Washington Post analysis titled, "McCarthy ouster exposes the Republican Party's destructive tendencies," Dan Balz wrote that Republicans had "brought the legislative body to a halt" and "now risk being returned to minority status by voters in next year’s election."

And NBC News' First Read cut to the chase in a report titled, "Republicans struggle to govern—and McCarthy paid the price."

It all underscores a fundamental point about today’s political dysfunction in Washington: Republicans have had a difficult — if not impossible — time governing, especially when they control at least one legislative chamber but not the White House. And that difficulty has only gotten worse.

Arguably, Republicans have had a tough time governing recently, even when they had unified control of government. For instance, starting in late 2018, then-President Donald Trump presided over the longest government shutdown in history.

But quibbles aside, by and large, these mainstream pieces got it right: Republicans are a menace to good governance and should never be in charge.

Sign the petition: No to shutdowns, no to Biden impeachment, no to Republicans

Brooks and Capehart on why a government shutdown could last a long time

New York Times columnist David Brooks and Washington Post associate editor Jonathan Capehart join Amna Nawaz to discuss the week in politics, including the country barreling toward a government shutdown and the first hearings in House Republicans' impeachment inquiry of President Biden.

What happened during the first hearing of the Biden impeachment inquiry

House Republicans held their first impeachment hearing into President Biden. The Republicans argue there is a real concern about the Biden family, but Democrats say it's an attempt to distract from the criminal charges against former President Trump. Amna Nawaz discussed the hearing and the legal basis for the impeachment inquiry with Frank Bowman.

Motion to vacate: Should Democrats help or laugh?

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is in a Catch-22, and he has only himself to blame for it. He’s got until the end of next week to figure out how to keep the government from shutting down—and save his own political skin. So far, he has proven incapable of doing either and created a dynamic in which one of two things is inevitable: a shutdown or a vote calling for his ouster as speaker. At this point, it seems both are likely.

The solution for averting a shutdown is pretty simple: McCarthy has to accept the reality that the Senate and the White House are in Democratic hands, and there is no way that the demands the hard-liners are making on funding will be enacted. If he doesn’t find a compromise and get Democrats in the House to help him pass a stopgap funding bill by the end of next week, the government shuts down and Republicans will get the blame. Because he’s in charge (at least nominally), McCarthy will get the lion’s share of it.

If he does get Democratic help and manage to keep the nation from looking like a banana republic, the nihilists will try to oust him via Rep. Matt Gaetz’s motion to vacate the chair. Someone wanted to make that threat abundantly clear, leaving a copy of that resolution in a restroom near the House chamber, where a reporter would be likely to find it—and did find it.

“The thing that would force the motion to vacate is if Kevin has to rely on Democrat votes to pass a CR,” Freedom Caucus Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado told Punchbowl News Tuesday. “I don’t think it has legs until Kevin relies on Democrats.” On the other hand, he said, “I don’t see how we can pass the bill [a CR] without Democrat votes.”

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Wheeee!

Where does that leave Democrats? In a position to let McCarthy dangle.

Since the last time House Republicans took the nation to the brink of disaster on the debt ceiling, a group of conservative Democrats in the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus offered to help out by providing enough votes to protect McCarthy from a move to boot him.

That offer is off the table now, Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips told reporters, thanks to McCarthy’s capitulation to the worst people in his conference and his greenlighting a toxic impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. There’s no condoning or rewarding that, even from the most conservative of Democrats.

As of now, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries is meeting with his various Democratic groups, including the Problem Solvers, and seeing what it is they want. But that will not include capitulating to Republicans. “Leader Jeffries has been very clear,” Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar reiterated Tuesday morning. “They have to get rid of these ideological riders [on appropriations,] they have to fund the government at existing … levels and we need to meet the needs of the Ukrainian people fighting for freedom and the urgent disasters that we have had across this country.”

That’s where Democrats are and that’s where they need to stay so that McCarthy comes to them. They need to leave him stranded and friendless unless and until they extract concessions, like a commitment to realistically fund the government and put any impeachment nonsense on the back burner. McCarthy has a lot more to lose than Democrats do.

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What do you do if you're associated with one of the biggest election fraud scandals in recent memory? If you're Republican Mark Harris, you try running for office again! On this week's episode of "The Downballot," we revisit the absolutely wild story of Harris' 2018 campaign for Congress, when one of his consultants orchestrated a conspiracy to illegally collect blank absentee ballots from voters and then had his team fill them out before "casting" them. Officials wound up tossing the results of this almost-stolen election, but now Harris is back with a new bid for the House—and he won't shut up about his last race, even blaming Democrats for the debacle.

The New York Times gives impeachment the both-sides treatment

House Republicans are engaging in a completely partisan, evidence-free impeachment inquiry—but Peter Baker of The New York Times wants to talk about how the White House is treating this as a political issue. And just to get this out of the way right off the bat, the paragraph count before Baker acknowledges that Republicans have no evidence against Biden is seven.

In paragraph eight, he gets around to, “The Republican investigation so far has not produced concrete evidence of a crime by the president, as even some Republicans have conceded.” Even there, the implication is that the Republican investigation has produced some evidence, and they just need to make it concrete. In reality, the Republican investigation has produced no evidence that the president has engaged in any misconduct, let alone a crime.

Before the reader gets to that halfhearted admission, though, they’ve had to plow through a great deal of fretting about how the White House is treating this as political:

Forget the weighty legal arguments over the meaning of high crimes and misdemeanors or the constitutional history of the removal process. Mr. Biden’s defense team has chosen to take on the Republican threat by convincing Americans that it is nothing more than base partisanship driven by a radical opposition.

How exactly would Baker propose the White House make weighty legal arguments when there is no legal case against Biden? When after months of fruitless investigations into Biden, Republicans have simply decided to go ahead with claiming to have found the things they looked for and didn’t find? What would he have the White House or any other Democrats do in response?

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At one point, Baker quotes Julian Epstein, a Clinton-era lawyer for the Democrats of the House Judiciary Committee. “Overall, this has not been handled well by the White House,” Epstein argued. “The team there has violated the cardinal sin of investigations — allowing new information to trickle out continuously and while being stuck in stale Baghdad Bob-like ‘no evidence’ denials.” But if the White House hadn’t allowed new information to come out organically, the Peter Bakers of the world would have said that Biden was suppressing evidence! And how is the White House supposed to characterize the lack of evidence other than to point out that lack? 

As always, Democrats are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If Democrats were to cede the political fight and allow Republicans to beat the crap out of Biden while the Democratic Party was busy making “weighty legal arguments over the meaning of high crimes and misdemeanors or the constitutional history of the removal process,” it might satisfy Baker for a minute, but it would be a disastrous course of action. As it is, through sheer repetition and relying on lousy media coverage that doesn’t call a lie a lie, Republicans have convinced a substantial fraction of the public that there must be a there there when it comes to Biden and corruption. Imagine if Democrats voluntarily disarmed.

As entries in the Peter Baker oeuvre go, this one is pretty pedestrian and uninspired, nowhere near as creative as the time he wondered at length if it was a problem for Biden that Donald Trump was getting all the attention by being indicted. You didn’t have to be The New York Times Pitchbot to know that the Times would respond to the White House documenting Republican lies about the basis for impeachment and calling on the media to cover it better by fretting about the White House violating norms. As tired and predictable as it is, though, it’s still harmful to have the Times pretending there’s equivalence between a fraudulent impeachment inquiry and attempts to push back on such an inquiry by pointing out that it is fraudulent.

If it feels more like a political campaign than a serious legal proceeding, that is because at this point it is, at least as the White House sees it and would like others to. In the first 24 hours of their inquiry, the House Republicans made no new requests for documents, issued no new subpoenas, demanded no new testimony and laid out no potential articles of impeachment. Instead, they went to the cameras to call Mr. Biden a liar and a crook, so Mr. Biden’s defenders went to the cameras to return fire.

Note the structure here: The White House wants people to see it as political. There’s strong evidence that it is, yet it is always the White House’s pushback efforts that lead Baker’s coverage, as if they came first. Reality is the reverse.

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After House Speaker Kevin McCarthy directed Republicans to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, the White House is urging a more aggressive pushback to the GOP and is dismissing the effort as "extreme politics at its worst." That description came from Ian Sams, a White House advisor working on congressional investigations. Sams joined Amna Nawaz to discuss the inquiry.

It’s time for Democrats to force McCarthy to reap what he has sown

Speaker Kevin McCarthy has been “leading” the House on borrowed time. The Freedom Caucus and allied members have made it clear that he serves at their pleasure. This week, chaos agent and Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz tried to shorten McCarthy’s leash, threatening to force a vote on ousting him.

Now Axios poses the question of “How Democrats could save Kevin McCarthy.” The better question for Democrats is, “Why would you bother?” The assumption—always—is that Democrats will step up to try to make things work, to help clean up messes, and to prop McCarthy up in this fight. That they’ll help save his bacon.

So why would Democrats help him and vote against Gaetz’s motion to oust McCarthy? Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee gives one justification: “If we vacated the chair, I don’t see a better speaker. So I don’t foresee that happening.” That’s a given. There isn’t a better speaker option.

That’s the kind of thinking that McCarthy is counting on from Democrats to help him. But there isn’t really a worse option, not one who’s a viable candidate. There are a lot of truly horrible people in the GOP conference, like Paul Gosar or Marjorie Taylor Greene, but they’re never going to be elected. Worrying about someone worse in the job is pointless.

And why would Democrats help McCarthy when he regularly gives them the middle finger? He just did it again on Tuesday by moving forward on a wholly illegitimate impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. It was the same earlier in the year when some Democrats were trying to reach across the aisle to protect McCarthy in the debt ceiling fight: His staff said that effort was “garbage” and that he had “zero interest” in it.

The other argument is that he’s got to be propped up to avoid chaos. One anonymous Democrat told Axios, “No love for Kevin. But [there is] concern about more chaos, and who might take his place if he is booted.”

Spoiler alert: Right now the House is in chaos. More of it is inevitable, and there’s nothing House Democrats can do about it. Don’t fight it, embrace it. Let them defeat themselves. The No. 1 rule: When Republicans are drowning, throw them an anchor.

Sign the petition: Denounce the baseless impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden.

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Months of Republican allegations and investigations into President Biden have led to the GOP-controlled House of Representatives launching an impeachment inquiry. Republicans have lobbed unsubstantiated allegations against Biden since taking over the House, but have turned up no evidence of wrongdoing so far. Laura Barrón-López discussed the developments with Heather Caygle of Punchbowl News.

Moderate House Republicans: We’re ready to fight back. House Democrats: Sure, Jan

This time they really mean it, swing district House Republicans tell Punchbowl News. They’re ready to start working on bipartisan issues and legislation and beat back the extremist Freedom Caucus so they don’t have to keep taking miserable, unpopular votes that will hurt them.

“There’s a lot of opportunities for bipartisanship,” said Rep. Nick LaLota of New York, Meanwhile, Rep. Mike Garcia of California said his group can have real leverage. “The majority is only five seats, so really every faction has the same amount of power, it’s just a matter of strategy and tactics we choose to deploy as a result of that,” the Republican said. “At some point, we need to ease up some of our positions to get to solutions.”

Both are among the 18 Republicans representing districts where a majority voted for President Joe Biden in 2020.

Moderate House Democrats will believe it when they see it.

“For 11 years I have worked in a bipartisan way on bipartisan bills on important issues,” Democratic Rep. Annie Kuster of New Hampshire, told Punchbowl News. “Now, I find it very difficult because if I try to approach them on a bill that I know we’ve worked on together for years, we get to committee and someone wants to throw a [controversial] amendment on there,” Kuster added.

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RELATED STORY: ‘Centrist’ House GOPers find their line in the sand: Tax cuts for wealthy homeowners

The part she didn’t say is that the so-called moderate Republicans don’t fight to keep those amendments out of bills—and worse: They vote for them.

Consider the traditionally bipartisan National Defense Authorization Act that passed in the House last month. It includes amendments to: ban books in military base school libraries; end the Pentagon’s policy of allowing service members leave to obtain abortions; ban gender-affirming health care for people serving in the military and their families; and ban race, gender, religion, political affiliations, or "any other ideological concepts" as the basis for personnel decisions. Those amendments all passed, with votes from most of these same GOP moderates, known as the Biden 18.

Moderates are also apparently shocked that the Freedom Caucus, the extremist Republican group currently running the show, is “selfish and short-sighted and only care about pushing their own agenda in the media instead of working with us to govern.” That quote is from Republican Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia. He’s mad that the extremists are “taking advantage” of the small Republican House majority to force their will on the rest of the conference.

And it only took him seven months to figure that out. By the time we get through August and Congress is back in session, he might have done the math to figure out 18 is bigger than five, so his team can do the same thing.

He and the rest of the Republican moderates will have a chance to put all that tough talk into action when they return in September. If they really want to help themselves and act like real representatives, they’ll figure out how to leverage that bipartisanship they long for and keep the government from shutting down.

It’s a joyous week in Wisconsin, where Janet Protasiewicz’s swearing-in means that the state Supreme Court now has its first liberal majority in 15 years. We’re talking about that monumental transition on this week’s episode of “The Downballot,” including a brand-new suit that voting rights advocates filed on Protasiewicz’s first full day on the job that asks the court to strike down the GOP’s legislative maps as illegal partisan gerrymanders.