“Bring it on.”
“Just did.”
These aren’t lines from a cheesy teen flick.
They’re what two members of the U.S. House of Representatives said to each other before embarking on one of the dumbest, most self-destructive and utterly embarrassing kamikaze missions in modern American politics.
On Tuesday, after threatening to do it for weeks, Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz called the House Republican majority to vote its own Speaker Kevin McCarthy out of power.
Seemingly assured he’d survive, McCarthy goaded Gaetz into trying the arcane motion to vacate procedure — “bring it on.” But Gaetz called his bluff and did just that. McCarthy was ousted with the votes of every Democrat and just eight Republicans, and for the first time in U.S. history.
In some ways, it’s a fitting end to a chaotic, unproductive and tumultuous eight-month tenure as the Republican House cat-herder, with McCarthy’s ultimate fate in the hands of Gaetz, just as it was when he ran for the job in January.
Gaetz’s antics then forced an exhausting and humiliating 15 rounds of votes before he finally relented and McCarthy won the position.
But not without making some absurd, self-sabotaging and foreshadowing concessions to Gaetz, including — yep — a rule to allow a single House member to introduce a vote to remove the speaker.
McCarthy has spoken often about his childhood dream of becoming speaker. As some have described it to me over the years, he ran for Congress with this goal in mind.
His ambitions outweighing his dignity, apparently, McCarthy so desperately wanted to be speaker that he agreed to essentially sign his own death certificate.
So now, 269 days later, he’s leaving with little to show for his brief time in power, other than perhaps Gaetz’s palm prints on his backside.
As for Gaetz, renowned for his unserious theatrics — he once “stormed” a secure facility at the Capitol to demand “transparency” at hearings that a full quarter of House Republicans were already invited to — add this unprecedented stunt to the list.
A GOP that’s completely unable to govern
While both Gaetz and McCarthy come out of this looking pretty terrible, one for his penchant for chaos and the other for his incompetence, it’s also a very bad look for the Republican Party.
Despite having the majority in the House, it is completely unable to govern — not just in a bipartisan fashion with Democrats, but worse, inside its own conference.
To pile on, House Republicans don’t have a McCarthy replacement yet, and the speaker pro tempore, Rep. Patrick McHenry, just dismissed the conference until next week.
Gaetz has already gone to the airwaves to slam McHenry — so the new McCarthy-less era is off to a great start.
Add this embarrassing failure of leadership to the party’s other big problems, the biggest being Donald Trump, the former president and current GOP front runner who is facing 91 criminal counts.
On the same day that Gaetz kicked McCarthy to the curb, Trump was handed a gag order by a judge in one of the cases he’s facing. Even when looking at significant fines and jail time, Trump can’t help himself but to ill-advisedly lash out at the judicial process. If he keeps this up, he could be running for president from prison.
While this all looks bad to most of us, the MAGA base couldn’t be happier with where things stand for the Republican Party: unable to govern, unwilling to compromise and out for total destruction.
With the childish antics in the House, and Trump’s childish tantrums, we’re a far cry from the Republican Party and conservative movement that were animated by rigorous intellectualism, enduring principles and a competition of ideas.
Gone are the conservative conferences where important problems like the debt, deficit and poverty were vigorously debated and Ronald Reagan was the keynote, replaced now by CPAC panels called “Lock Her Up!” and where Hungary authoritarian Viktor Orban is the special guest.
Gone are the intellectual heavyweights like Irving Kristol, Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley Jr, and Ayn Rand.
It’s nearly impossible to reconcile the conservative philosophies laid out by F.A. Hayek, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Milton Friedman with the unserious hijinks and fraternity pranks of Matt Gaetz & Co.
While I’m sure no one expects or believes that today’s GOP will ever return to its intellectual beginnings, or even rediscover its conservative principles, is it too much to hope that it can simply return to governing?
If we can judge anything by the pro tem speaker’s first act of business — emailing Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi to vacate her office immediately — the answer is decidedly and sadly yes.
S.E. Cupp is the host of “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered” on CNN.
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