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After House members voted to strip Kevin McCarthy of his gavel, the ousted speaker spoke to reporters at some length about his perspective. It wasn’t long, of course, before the California Republican turned his focus to Democrats. NBC News reported:
McCarthy blamed Democrats for his ouster as speaker — arguing that they should have supported his remaining in the top role for institutional reasons. ... McCarthy then argued that by joining Gaetz and other Republicans, Democrats picked politics over the institution.
The former GOP leader used the word several times in recent days. If Democrats would only prioritize “the institution,” and rescue his career for “institutional reasons,” it would offer evidence of the House minority being responsible.
That Democrats failed to look out for “the institution,” the argument went, meant that they deserve the blame for this historic fiasco.
There’s quite a bit wrong with this argument, but let’s take a minute to review the basics.
Right off the bat, it’s important to emphasize that McCarthy was a poor House speaker, and that’s not something he can blame on the minority conference. For that matter, his preoccupation with arguments about the House as an institution are belied by his own record. Was McCarthy prioritizing the institution when he asked the Supreme Court to help overturn the 2020 election results and voted not to certify the outcome? How about when he launched a debt ceiling crisis? Or when he launched an evidence-free impeachment inquiry? Or when he threatened a government shutdown? Or when he made sensitive security footage available to a far-right media personality as part of a campaign to rewrite the story of the Jan. 6 attack?
I can think of members who can credibly claim to be institutionalists. McCarthy isn’t one of them.
What’s more, McCarthy is blaming Democrats, despite the fact that he spent 10 months alienating them; he never reached out to ask Democrats for their backing, and he ultimately offered them nothing in exchange for their support.
Even if the ousted GOP leader had made a real effort ahead of Tuesday’s dramatic events, it probably wouldn’t have mattered because he’d clearly lost Democrats’ respect and trust, after having lied to and about them.
But let’s not miss the forest for the trees: The biggest problem with blaming Democrats for McCarthy’s downfall is that none of this was Democrats’ idea. It’s not as if House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was the one who filed a motion to vacate the chair.
McCarthy spent months struggling with many of his most radical members. They threatened to try to oust him. Then they did. If Republicans are looking for who was responsible, they need only to look around at their next conference meeting.
Imagine this same scenario, but reverse the party labels and names. Imagine House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was struggling to lead the House Democratic conference — an impossibility, to be sure, but this is a thought experiment — and a group of far-left members plotted to take her gavel away.
Then imagine those far-left rebels followed through on their threats and called the question. At that point, in this hypothetical, Pelosi made no effort to contact Republicans and offered them nothing in exchange for their support.
Then imagine Pelosi lost her gavel as a result of the far-left effort — at which point she blamed the GOP minority.
Would anyone take such an argument seriously?