McCarthy’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day… Was Scheduled A Long Time Ago.

Kevin McCarthy, a nakedly ambitious and unprincipled Republican Congressman, made history yesterday—kinda. He now enjoys the distinction of being the first Speaker of the United States House of Representatives to be removed from that position.

It was the culmination of an utterly predictable sequence of events.

McCarthy, who eagerly sought the Speakership back in 2015 but was passed over for Paul Ryan, joined Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and other establishment Republicans in unscrupulously prostrating themselves before Donald Trump as MAGA metastasized within the GOP.

After Trump fomented the January 6th insurrection, McCarthy briefly publicly condemned Trump—but ignominiously slunk back to Mar-A-Lago to kiss the proverbial ring rather than do the hard work of trying to excise MAGA’s influence from the GOP and reorient the party back to principled loyal opposition to President Biden and Speaker Pelosi.

McCarthy got his wish—or so he thought—in 2022, after Republicans narrowly eked out a majority in the House (not without botching what was otherwise an enormously favorable political context against an unpopular incumbent president).

After several days and 14 humiliating false starts in January 2023, McCarthy made a sufficient number of debasing concessions to far-right holdouts in the Trump-aligned Freedom Caucus to be handed the gavel.

Little did he seem to realize, this started the clock on his painfully borrowed time: he made it 269 days, the third shortest tenure as Speaker in U.S. history.

McCarthy was reportedly on thin ice with dozens of his conference members after his debt ceiling negotiations with President Biden in May. Though McCarthy’s willingness to risk global economic meltdown brought the President to the table at last, it was widely agreed—even by conservative commentators—that Biden won the day by conceding relatively little.

The final straw snapped at the end of September when, after once again indulging in needless brinkmanship, McCarthy backed a continuing resolution which allowed the federal government to be fully funded for 45 days—without forcing any real concession from President Biden that was sought by the Freedom Caucus.

This in turn triggered Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida to deliver on his repeated public threats to McCarthy. Gaetz invoked a one-man motion to vacate, exploiting what was perhaps the most extraordinary concession McCarthy made to his conference back in January in exchange for the Speakership.

When McCarthy loyalists in the Republican conference attempted to table the motion in a last ditch effort to save McCarthy, House Democrats voted en masse to thwart it, allowing Gaetz to take his shot.

The full vote which decided the fate of McCarthy’s Speakership came in the late afternoon. In the end, eight Republicans joined with every House Democrat to bring McCarthy’s Speakership to an embarrassing end.

Afterwards, an agitated McCarthy railed against his Republican critics and Democrats, proclaimed he would not seek the Speakership again, and even hinted that he may resign from Congress.

Unsurprisingly, he took no time or words to reflect on his own actions, which contributed to his defeat on October 3rd as much as anybody else’s. But the facts are plain: Kevin McCarthy sought power over principle, refused to exercise his moral obligation and seize the opportunity to return the GOP to a state of loyal opposition to the Democrats, empowered MAGA Republicans like Matt Gaetz in exchange for an increasingly-meaningless title, and alienated House Democrats when he was most vulnerable.

Who could’ve seen this coming? Everyone, apparently, except Kevin McCarthy.