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All right, friends. Lets play Jeopardy!

Forgettable Losers for $200, you say? Very well! The answer is: Theodore Pomeroy and Michael Kerr.

Players? Anyone?

Oh, so sorry. The correct question is, Who are the only two House speakers in U.S. history whose tenures were shorter than Kevin McCarthys?

Yes, readers, this is true. Pomeroy, by all accounts a reasonably impressive and quite well-liked politician, was an accidental speaker, serving for only one day in 1869, as a kind of bouquet thrown to the retiring New Yorker by his admiring colleagues. Kerrs speakership ended in 1876 after a mere 258 days, but not because of scandal or weakness. Rather, he up and died in office, at the tender age of 49.

So you can put asterisks next to both of those, if you ask me. Which leaves McCarthy, at 270 days, as the shortest-serving House speaker in American history owing solely to his own incompetence, ineffectiveness, and emptiness.

For what will history remember Kevin McCarthy? A few things. But lets not complicate matters. First and foremost, and by far, he will go down in history for that photograph. You know the one I mean. The Mar-a-Lago one, standing next to Donald Trump. It was a week after Trumps presidency ended in January 2021, and three weeks and a day after McCarthy got into a screaming match with Trump over the phone on January 6, about the rioters Trump had sent Hill-ward to hang Mike Pence. Your insurrectionists, McCarthy said, were trying to fucking kill me. Trump retorted: Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.

Heres what the photo symbolizes. McCarthy was furious at Trump on January 6. Ive had it with this guy, he said shortly afterward, in a taped call famously obtained by two New York Times reporters. He was steeling himself to call on Trump to resign.

Then something changed. We dont know exactly what. He started talking to his GOP colleagues. They cautioned against confronting Trump. And soon enough, he was on a plane down to Florida. He later complained that he didnt know they were going to take a picture. Well, look at it. It sure looks like he knows a picture is being taken.

Could McCarthy have single-handedly moved the Republican Party into a post-Trump world? Lets not be nave. He could not have. Trump would still be contesting for control of the GOP. But maybe, just maybe, McCarthywho was, after all, the leader of the House Republican conference and the minority leader of the House of Representativescould have started something.

Maybe others would have been emboldened to follow him. Maybe that group would have gained the backing of a few GOP senators. Bill Barr would have joined them, and John Kelly, and a number of other prominent Republicans. And they could have coalesced around a still-conservative but non-MAGA potential candidate, and instead of the coronation we are watching today, wed be watching an actual fightmaybe not a particularly close one, but a fight all the samefor the soul (if they can be said to have such a thing anymore) of the Republican Party.

But no. Shortly after Joe Bidens inauguration, McCarthy had decided: He had to stay leader. He had to be speaker one day. And that meant staying with Trump. And thats what history will remember about him. He was the one maneven more than the superannuated Mitch McConnellwho could have defied Trump. He deified him instead. And if Trump wins next fall and returns to the White House and does all the things he promises hes going to do, and future historians are one day compiling a list of those complicit in the collapse of American democracy, Kevin McCarthys name will be in the top 10 on that list, and maybe the top five.

There are a couple other things hell be remembered for. That joke of a speakership vote. Finally elected on the fifteenth ballot. It was so obvious that his colleagues did not respect him. And so obvious that he was desperate for their approvalso desperate that he handed them the tool, the famous one-person motion to vacate, that sealed his fate from the day he was handed the gavel.

And finally there is the utter lack of achievement in behalf of the American people that he oversaw. The week before McCarthy was ousted as speaker, one study found that the current Congress had enacted into law only 12 billsa full 40 fewer than your average Congress going back to 1973. The House had passed 224 bills, which sounds respectable, but that was actually the second-lowest number in the last 50 years. That ignominious record was held by the 113th Congress, also a Republican House, obsessed with tying Barack Obama in knots and making sure that he could not, for example, raise the minimum wage.

McCarthys pulverizing failure as a legislative leader stems from two truths: One, he cared little about policy; two, his word was no good. Hed say anything to anyone. If youve read enough political biographies, you know that he was always as good as his word is a common form of high praise that can be delivered across partisan lines. McCarthy was as useless and malleable as his word.

So off he goes, back to Bakersfield as the new year dawns, or more likely off to K Street. Because that too is now expected of people like McCarthyto go cash in on one of those lavish lobbyists salaries. And then, if Trump wins, maybe hell join the administration. Then, with luck, well all get to watch him be indicted and convicted. Something tells me God is not finished with Kevin McCarthy.

Read the original:
The Most Pathetic Republican Leader of 2023 - The New Republic