#WTH "Never Kevin"??
Chad Pergram joins us to talk the great GOP speaker debacle
Three things from this week’s pod with Fox News’ Chad Pergram:
What did McCarthy give away to become Speaker? We don’t know.
Is the House GOP caucus serious about governing, or will five naysayers call the shots? We don’t know.
Will the House GOP cut funding for defense and Ukraine? We don’t know.
Yeah, we don’t know a lot. Because despite railing against the lack of transparency in government for the last umpteen years, the truth is that there was very little transparency in the machinations over the Speaker’s race. Not only that, but the rules package that will govern how the House of Representatives works for two years told us even less.
Certainly, some of the demands made by the NeverKevinites were reasonable: regular order and actual appropriations bills; three days to read a bill before a vote. Some were less reasonable. But no one can argue the election of the Speaker reflected the functioning of a fine-tuned machine.
Who’s to blame for the GOP House debacle? Depends who you think is to blame for the disaster of the 2022 midterms that reposed vast power in the hands of a few… strong personalities. If you thought Donald Trump was at fault for blessing a series of candidates based solely on whether they signed up to his “stop the steal” narrative — candidates who went on to lose their elections for the most part — then you’ll be surprised to hear that the first person Speaker Kevin McCarthy thanked was… Donald Trump.
If you’re a Reagan Republican and you’re worried about American leadership and fiscal irresponsibility, you’re probably pretty unhappy right now. Because the way to work towards a more serious federal budget isn’t to cut defense, a mere few percent of the GDP. It’s to take on entitlements. But no one seems to want to do that…
And then there’s the weird hostility to helping Ukraine, something that can only benefit the United States in the short, medium and long term. But there’s a growing unholy marriage of far left and far right in the House that may well succeed in undercutting U.S. support for Ukraine. Will Kevin McCarthy stand up to them? Will he want to? No idea.
The next two years are a giant black box when it comes to the GOP. Who will carry the banner in 2024? What will the only GOP-led national body stand for? Will government actually function, or will it be a series of virtue-signaling gestures like the empty defunding of the IRS? Will there be a government shut down? Will there be a crisis over the debt ceiling? Does anyone care about the safety, security and prosperity of the American people any more, or are our legislators and leaders all about pwning the enemy (who also happens to be an American)? Who the hell knows.
As Bette Davis might have warned… fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.
HIGHLIGHTS
After all that happened in the Speaker race, why didn’t McCarthy just exit, stage left?
CP: Another time, another place, that probably would've happened. And the one thing I kept saying is that maybe this is the fight that Republicans are having over the Kevin McCarthy Speakership that never happened in 2015. Remember, he was supposed to be the Speaker of the House when John Boehner stepped aside in October of 2015, and Kevin McCarthy simply did not have the votes and knew it, and that's one of the reasons he bowed out. The problem then was were it not for Paul Ryan, who was kind of Switzerland, kind of everybody could agree upon Paul Ryan coming in from the wings here.
The problem in 2022 and 2023 is that there was no Paul Ryan, or a Paul Ryan type figure who could step into the breach, that everybody could agree upon. And so this was the doomsday scenario. At what point did they say, "Okay, look Kevin, you don't have the votes. Let's go with Steve's Scalise." And it was probably maybe just as dicey about Steve Scalise because you had a number of moderate Republicans who said that they were not going to vote for anybody other than McCarthy.
Have Republicans forgotten who they’re fighting for, and what they’re against?
CP: [W]hat I thought was interesting is you had Republicans criticizing Democrats for sticking together. You even had Dan Bishop, Republican of North Carolina on Meet the Press over the weekend saying that this was something from leader Xi in China or something sticking behind Hakeem Jeffries. Well, I understand why Republicans, and for that matter, Democrats don't think much of leader Xi in China, but they would die on the Republican side of the aisle to have the resolve of the Democrats, that Xi-like resolve or however you want to determine, call it, to stay behind their person.
There was the old Will Rogers statement where he would say, "I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat." And this is kind of what people used to say about the Democrats. But when it came to Pelosi's leadership, whether you like her or not, she was really good about leading her people and getting people to where they needed to be.
Her former Chief of Staff, John Lawrence used to tell me, and he would quote Mick Jagger to me. He said, "She's not going to give you what you want, but she will give you what you need."
So what did McCarthy give away to “the rebels” to win?
CP: Now if you look at that rules package, there is nary a word about [that] in there. The reason being is that there is no such thing in the rules package as a motion to vacate the chair, which is what we always hear. […]
There are suggestions that there are handshake deals and things here. This is something where the Republicans have talked a lot about transparency on this. We'll see how transparent they truly are. We'll see if maybe some people have suggested that McCarthy knows that this is not going to be a long speakership, and so he's going to take it for now and see what they can get done. And if he's able to stick around, great. We don't really know. And the only way that we can find out about this, let's see who gets certain gavels.
Let's see who gets certain committee assignments. Let's see what the promise is and how realistic some of these promises are to cut all of this spending and not hit the debt ceiling. Do they adhere to this business of only doing individual bills, this threat to the Senate? If you don't pass individual appropriations bills, we're not going to touch it. Okay, well, results in the government shutdown, fine. But at what point does the public turn on the Republicans for this? When we've had government shutdowns before dating back to Newt Gingrich, this has never really worked out real hot for the GOP.
Are the House Republicans really going to turn on Ukraine?
CP: [G]enerally most Republicans support Ukraine, but you have this interesting coalition developing of some Republicans who just aren't for this. People who thought that Zelenskyy was here for a photo op when he spoke to a joint meeting of Congress in late December, just before Christmas. There are many skeptical people to that, and Kevin McCarthy has tried to say, well, we have to make sure that all dollars that go to Ukraine are accounted for. Well, I got news for you. It's a war. And war dollars... I mean, it's real. It's not like you have somebody with some green eye shade and say, okay, this many JDAMs, it just doesn't work that way. It's war. And so you're not going to have really great accounting for all this stuff you send. Either you're going to help them or you're not.
And defense?
CP: […] when it comes to defense spending, 53% to 55% of all discretionary dollars that Congress appropriates each year go to the Pentagon. […] Now, for some Republicans, [cuts to defense are] absolutely anathema. That's the first thing. But here's where this gets really interesting. You have a developing coalition, and maybe this is more like a European system right now because we're talking about coalitions, which is what they do abroad all the time. We don't do that as much in the United States. But maybe in an equally divided Congress or this type of House, maybe this is what works. You have a coalition of dovish Democrats and anti-interventionist Republicans who get together and can bring down defense spending. I thought it was interesting in the rules debate to put the omnibus bill on the floor in late December. Jim McGovern rules committee chairman, one of the most liberal members of the House, he said, "I think this annual increase in defense spending is ridiculous." And there's a lot of Democrats who aren't just members of the squad who would agree with him on that front. So that is something to watch for.
But what about balancing the budget?
CP” So we talked about the defense spending. So two-thirds to 70% of every dollar that the federal government spends goes to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, what we call entitlements. This isn't money that Congress appropriates each year, and if you're going to make a dent on federal spending, you're going to have to cut about 7 trillion from those three entitlement programs. That's a staggering amount of money.
You talk about potentially putting the US into a financial shock, not even to address the debt ceiling, by the way. These are just the realities of this. And because most people, once they start finding that out, this is why there has been a resistance on both sides of the aisle to cut entitlement spending. Why? Because it is the third rail of politics.
And all the Democrats have to do is sit back and say, "Can you see what they did?" And if Republicans were to cut all of these things, Democrats would win the House and Senate in 2024 and the presidency, if not the midterms in 2026, and probably everything in 2028. That's how challenging this is.
So is the House going to do anything constructive?
CP: I was struck that Kevin McCarthy talked about this China Competition Committee that he's putting together that actually will have some bipartisan support, and I think that's probably an area where they can get some things done on a bipartisan basis. He was talking about the membership of that. He said, "It's not people to go and get viral clicks and things. This is a serious committee."
Now, I don't know if my back way of interpreting that is that these investigations of Hunter Biden, and laptops, and Mayorkas, and everybody else are not serious investigations. That's me maybe reading between the lines there a little bit. But Republicans have to be very, very careful about not going too far and making these hearings, whatever they do, FBI, weaponization of the federal government, Hunter Biden, into the term that you used a couple of moments ago.
That is the danger that they have because already Republicans have demonstrated that they have chaos on their side of the aisle. People aren't going to remember that you had almost every Republican together in passing the rules package. People are going to remember that they were all watching C-SPAN, and Fox, and CBS, and NBC, and everybody on a Friday night into a Saturday morning because the Republicans could not elect a speaker, even though they had the majority, and they should have had this ironed out since November. That's what they will remember.
And so it is easier for the Democrats to portray Republicans as quote too extreme, doing things that are too extreme. Marjorie Taylor Green, as soon as the questions came out about President Biden and whether he inappropriately had classified documents when he was vice president, said, "Oh, this is why we need to impeach him. It has to happen this Congress." You don't have the votes for that. You've already had Pat Fallon, a Republican of Texas introduce articles of impeachment for Alejandro Mayorkas. You can see where this starts potentially to spin off the tracks for the GOP if they're not careful.
So Congress isn’t going to do anything serious then…?
CP: John Boehner often talked about when he was the speaker... He said, "Basically, I'm a goalie. I'm trying to keep these things out of the net here." I get the gist of this, but this isn't a great metric to judge Congress on. He said, "Congress should not be judged by how many bills it passes, but by how many bills it repeals, laws it repeals," the idea that we're diminishing federal government here, which is a conservative principle. That's not going to happen a lot, but that was a nice soundbite from John Boehner. It underscored the governing philosophy.
That's not so much what we have now, and that will be a problem for Republicans if they are viewed by the public as being too extreme. Some people have said already they've missed the boat, even though they won the House barely when it was thought they were going to have 40, 50, 60 seats, did not capture the Senate, that they misread the election.
Who's the first person that Kevin McCarthy thanked for the speakership when he exited the chamber? Donald Trump, who is blamed by Republicans who will talk to you privately and sometimes not so privately about why they didn't do better in the election. So that's another thing. A lot of people thought that the midterm elections were a repudiation of that type of governance in politics and Donald Trump being the ring leader of the Republican Party. So those are things that the Republicans have to reckon with because there is the real potential for the voting public to see the Republican majority as what you called it, a &*^% show.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
Concessions:
Kevin McCarthy’s Concessions: Here’s What He Gave Up To Win House Speakership (Forbes, January 7 2023)
GOP overhaul:
McCarthy vows to remove Democrats from committees if Republicans win House (CNN, January 10 2023)
House Republicans Launch Subcommittee to Investigate Covid Origins (National Review, January 10, 2023)
House Rules Package:
House passes rules package – as it happened (The Guardian, January 9, 2023)
Here's how the House GOP majority will try to curb federal spending and taxes (CNN, January 10 2023)
McCarthy tweet: “Congress has been broken for a long time. Over the years, a concentration of power within the Speaker’s Office has kept lawmakers on the legislative sidelines. Lawmaking should be open to all members – not just a select few – so that the best ideas win.”
Pergram tweet about GOP KY Rep Comer on Fox: “I don’t believe that they’ll [sp] ever be any serious threat to Kevin McCarthy’s Speakership. If Kevin McCarthy ever did something so bad that there would be a threat to him vacating the chair, I think we would meet as a conference. We would iron it out and, you know, take action accordingly…But I’m confident Kevin McCarthy will be Speaker for the next two years.”
CNN’s Manu Raju tweet after he asked Lauren Boebert (R-CO) why she voted ‘present’ to help McCarthy “Because we got some amazing concessions…” and if she’d seek to oust him if he didn’t follow concessions, “That’s what vacate is for, but I don’t anticipate using it. I hope I never have to. I hope that he is a great speaker and I’m pulling for his success.”
Biden classified docs:
Classified docs from Biden’s VP days found in private office (Axios, updated January 10 2023)
U.S. Attorney Probing Classified Records from Biden’s VP Tenure Found at Private Office (National Review, January 9 2023)
McCarthy reacts to classified documents discovered from Biden’s time as VP: Dems ‘overplayed their hand’ (Fox News, January 9 2023)
There are clear distinctions between Trump and Biden’s two cases (CNN, January 10 2023)
The Trump and Biden classified-document revelations are not the same (Washington Post, January 10 2023)
Trump responds to Biden classified document discovery, asks when FBI will raid his ‘many homes’ (The Hill, January 9 2023)
Biden border visit:
Can Biden’s new border plan end the migrant crisis? (BBC Jan 6 2023)
Biden’s border visit will showcase a city strained by migration (Anchorage Daily News, January 9 2023)
House Republican files articles of impeachment against DHS Sec. Mayorkas (Fox, January 10 2023)