McCarthy refused to nominate non-controversial GOP legislators into the January 6 House Select Committee investigating the mayhem
By Tiko Okoye
It hardly surprised anyone conversant with the modus operandi of the remade Republican Party that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s days were numbered right from when he was forced to give away stock, lock and barrel to the ‘GOP garrulous 8’ just so he could groggily wobble and stumble across the finishing line at the 15th round of voting! Soon after, a weird grifter like Green – one of the eight – transformed into the unofficial second most powerful member of the House.
Although details of the deals he made to the mutinous members of his party united by their intense dislike for him have been remained secret, it was said that they included a provision for any single member to be able to move a ‘motion to vacate’ that would then mandate the House to vote whether or not to dethrone McCarthy. At the end of that very long night of voting, McCarthy expressed profuse thanks to former-President Donald Trump who he acknowledged as ‘the leader’ who finally came true for him by instructing bomb throwers beholden to him (Trump) to back off.
Be that as it may, it was an open secret that it was a question of when, not if, a significantly weakened McCarthy would be pushed under the bus. Truth is that since the Grand Old Party (GOP) was completely remade in the image of Trump – and establishment Republicans, who weren’t too enthused with the new direction the party was headed, were bullied out of the party or rendered redundant by Trump’s viciously intimidating tweets and taunts. He contemptuously called them Republicans in name only (RINOs).
Starting with Trump’s tenure in the Oval Office in 2016, the greatly storied party of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan began to be serially convulsed by a multiplicity of controversies, causing it to lose the House of Representatives in 2018 as well as the Senate and the White House in 2020. In the 2022 mid-term elections, the excess baggage still being carried by Trump and the election deniers turned the expected red wave into a mirage, as the GOP could only muster a razor-thin majority of five in the House and couldn’t retake the Senate.
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The desire of McCarthy to expand the GOP razor-thin majority made him to openly declare quite early in the day that he had no interest in commencing impeachment proceedings against President Joe Biden in the absence of ‘high crimes and misdemeanours,’ as provided for in the Constitution, because of the accompanying bad optics that would turn voters against the party’s candidates in the impending 2024 elections.
But his electoral strategy was totally at variance with that of Trump, as McCarthy was to shortly painfully discover. The twice-impeached and four-time indicted former president, who is equally facing as many as 91 criminal cases so far in various courts, oddly concluded that the impeachment of his successor by the GOP-controlled House would create a whataboutism level playing field in the build-up to the 2024 presidential election, in which he is the presumptive GOP hopeful.
The main thrust of Trump’s strategic plan is to considerably distract attention from his own misdeeds by tainting Biden ‘just as corrupt.’ To underscore how seriously his opinion must be taken cognisance of, the undisputed leader of the modern-day GOP went as far as vowing to primary any Congressman or woman who failed to actively join the impeachment bandwagon. If you fail to immediately identify the nexus for this strategy it means that you didn’t follow the events leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Recall that the Republican majority ridiculously conducted a nearly-three-year investigation into the 2012 Benghazi terrorists-led mob attack that killed the ambassador, an information officer and two CIA operatives who were defending the US consulate.
At the end of it all, Hillary Clinton, then-Secretary of State, who had become the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, wasn’t indicted for any crime, causing journalists to continually pester leading GOP congressmen to provide justifications for the very wasteful, highly partisan probe. That was when McCarthy, then a shoo-in to fill the vacant Speakership position, stepped up to the microphones to say: “What do you mean? Can’t you see how we strategically tanked her (Hillary’s) poll numbers?”
So, the entire saga wasn’t really about finding out what factually transpired in Benghazi but to checkmate Hillary’s electoral momentum! GOP congressmen punished McCarthy for his indiscretion by electing Paul Ryan as Speaker in his place. The same thing happened when, contrary to the extant electoral law, then-FBI Director James Comey announced, under enormous “lock her up” singsong pressure at Trump’s campaign rallies, with just days to go to the election, that an investigation had been opened into the handling of Hillary’s personal laptop. There are still many who swear that Hillary would’ve easily won the election if these manipulations aimed at portraying her as a politician who cannot be trusted hadn’t seen the light of day.
The ongoing impeachment public hearings have so far been farcical and shambolic. Evidence so far ventilated point to the high probability that Hunter Biden – the president’s son – conducted some shady businesses abroad, such as the unrecorded $25 million commission he allegedly received. But the target is his father since the son cannot be impeached. In a quixotic effort to wriggle out of the hole they hastily pushed themselves into, GOP members in the House Oversight Committee handling the case have been mealy-mouthing the nebulous catch phrase of “the Biden family.”
But if Biden is to be roasted because his son collected a $25 million commission, why haven’t the GOP inquisitors moved against “the Trump family,” given that Jared Krushner, Trump’s son-in-law, collected a whopping sum of $2 billion from the Saudi Crown Prince for an under-the-table deal, and Ivanka, his only official daughter, transacted a mouth-watering biliion-dollar fashion business deal with the Chinese, both of which happened while Trump was in the White House?
Since they purport to be Bible-espousing white evangelicals, didn’t read the scriptural verse that admonishes us to first remove the log of wood impairing our vision in order to see clearly when attempting to remove the relatively tiny speck in the eye of another fellow? Who exactly is fooling who?
But McCarthy is essentially the victim of his own character defects. In the immediate aftermath of the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol by MAGA insurgents, then-Minority Leader McCarthy unequivocally called out President Trump as the master puppeteer orchestrating the unfolding civilian coup d’etat. But after noticing that an overwhelming majority of the GOP conference voted in line with Trump’s call to abruptly stop the Electoral College vote count, and that his long-running ambition to be House Speaker was again in serious jeopardy, he immediately flew to Mar-a-Lago to genuflect and kiss the ring of the emperor-wannabe and pledge his fealty.
McCarthy refused to nominate non-controversial GOP legislators into the January 6 House Select Committee investigating the mayhem, and refused to testify before the committee when requested to do so. But it didn’t stop him from single-handedly handing over the committee’s report to the now-disgraced ultra-conservative Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson to revise and whitewash to the benefit of Trump and his gang of marauders.
The wages if sin, as the Scripture avers, is death; and McCarthy ultimately signed his political death warrant when he bucked Trump’s clarion call to shutdown the US Government. It didn’t matter that McCarthy chose not to set the family house on fire not so much out of love for Biden as out of a certainty that a shutdown would make GOP Congressional candidates suffer massive defeats in 2024, thereby imperilling his position as Speaker.
But his nemesis – Gaetz – pounced on the opportunity to accuse McCarthy of carousing and hobnobbing with the enemy – the Democrats – to gift a temporary 45-day budgetary relief to the White House, culminating in yesterday’s historic ousting of McCarthy – the first ever House Speaker to be voted out. In the end, House Democrats refused to extend a lifeline to him because they concluded he was too chameleonic to be trusted. Not even the Godfather who was simultaneously grappling with his own survival battle at a New York Court on the same day could come to McCarthy’s assistance when he needed him most.
35th US President John F. Kennedy once intoned that “Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.” And that’s the tragic lot that has befallen McCarthy as the hunter transformed into the hunted. He tried to unilaterally dismount from the tiger he rode to the Speakership, only to end up in the tiger’s stomach. Truly, truly, it’s indisputable that Oga still get master!