The magnitude of the dissent against McCarthy — 20 defectors — masks that it only takes a few to hold it up indefinitely. Norman and four of his friends are enough.
75 percent of the Never Kevins could switch their votes to him tomorrow and it still wouldn't be enough. https://t.co/QGZX7af9kH
— Jacob Rubashkin (@JacobRubashkin) January 5, 2023
Tina Nguyen, at Puck, “McCarthy’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold”:
In the weeks leading up to January 3rd, the first day of the new Congress, a small clique of far right hardliners within the House Freedom Caucus—the majority of them freshmen, backbenchers, and members still waiting to be sworn in—were quietly, furiously reading up on the chamber’s arcane rules. They took meetings with the Office of the Parliamentarian, peppering the House’s resident expert with questions about which procedures to abide by on the floor, past precedents to thwart a speakership election, and what sort of motions they could call to grind Kevin McCarthy’s political future into dust. “I guarantee you,” a strategist close to their efforts told me, “that each of those 20 knows vastly more about House procedure than your typical non-leadership, middle-of-the-road member of the Republican conference.”…
On January 3rd, this small, tight-knit posse burst from the shadows. I was standing in a hallway in a Congressional office building, attending a Republican member’s open house, when several Republican lobbyists gasped that Bishop, a congressman entering his second term had, unexpectedly, just voted “no” on McCarthy. By the end of the first round, not one, not ten, but 19 Republicans had voted against McCarthy, fueled by the last-minute addition of several members who were pissed off by McCarthy’s arrogant declaration that morning that he’d “earned” the Speaker title. By the third round of voting on Tuesday, as the anti-Kevin coalition expanded to 20, it was clear that the opposition was driven by more than just political demands. “Borrowing language from the Pro-McCarthy wing, yes, this is not for fame or notoriety, it’s a holy war,” a conservative comms operative familiar with the thinking of the 20 told me. “It’s ideological and principle based objections. It’s about distrusting status quo conservatives.”
The curricula vitae of the group that Don Bacon termed the “Taliban Twenty” are diverse, both politically and biographically: Anna Paulina Luna is a St. Petersburg-based MAGA influencer, Keith Self is a relative moderate (by MAGA terms) from suburban Dallas, Eli Crane is a former Shark Tank entrepreneur who has barely tweeted, the lingua franca of the movement. But the unified opposition of these newcomers, most of whom were elected after 2018, can be subdivided into three broad categories. There are the procedural wonks, who are clamoring for rule changes and reforms to the committee process, like Chip Roy; the MAGA sadists who would simply like to make McCarthy ice fish naked in a Siberian forest in mid-January, like Gaetz; and a larger group who share in the suspicion that McCarthy has no true ideological core…
Selections from a *highly* recommended thread:
— MC Frontalot (@mc_frontalot) January 5, 2023
Repub Stupidity Open Thread: Tales of the Tantrum TalibanPost + Comments (147)