That’s not to say Kevin McCarthy doesn’t deserve what he’s getting.
That’s not to say Kevin McCarthy doesn’t deserve what he’s getting.
K evin McCarthy and Donald Trump deserve each other. It is poetic justice that each could be the other’s undoing.
It is priceless — classic Trump, in fact — to find the former president suddenly grousing that McCarthy, the House minority leader, was “foolish” in failing to ensure that mainstream House Republicans were seated on the January 6 committee.
Technically, there are two Republican representatives on the committee: Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), the committee’s vice chairwoman, and Adam Kinzinger (R., Ill.). But they were not Republican appointees. Indeed, they were hand-picked over McCarthy’s objection by Speaker Nancy Pelosi precisely because they are anti-Trump, hostile to McCarthy, and not representative of the mainstream GOP position on the former president — which ranges from blind loyalty to grudging tolerance.
Principally at fault for the lack of Republicans on the committee is Trump. The feckless McCarthy is culpable mainly because he does Trump’s bidding, out of mortal fear of offending Trump’s base — which he calculates would scotch his ambition to be speaker if Republicans retake the House. There was a moment in time, right after the Capitol riot, when McCarthy seemed to grasp the enormity of Trump’s January 6 derelictions. Being under siege by a mob can concentrate the mind. But McCarthy was, and is, a feather in the wind — supposedly done with Trump (“I’ve had it with this guy”) until it quickly became clear that Trump fanatics were sticking with their man rather than joining most of the country in condemnation. Next thing you knew, McCarthy went a-groveling down to Mar-a-Lago to lick the boots once more.
Over the last year, as I have written and discussed many times on the podcast, there were two possible ways for House Republicans to handle the January 6 committee. McCarthy chose the wrong one.
But in so doing, he was simply following Trump’s lead.
To rewind the tape, the need to have a full-blown investigation of the Capitol riot and what led to it was prompted by the House’s failure to conduct a thorough, competent, bipartisan impeachment investigation — the kind the January 6 committee is purporting to conduct now, albeit without real bipartisanship. After that default, Democrats proposed a 9/11 Commission–style bipartisan panel of experts. As I’ve pointed out, this gambit remains beloved by those who either don’t recall or choose not to recall what a politicized circus that grossly overrated commission was; and who don’t know or choose not to mention that, for all the ostensible bipartisanship of a commission (five panelists from each side, etc.), the real work is done by staff, which is chosen by the majority. Democrats would have named such a commission’s chair and overseen its final report.
In any event, once the commission concept collapsed, Pelosi moved to Plan B: a House select committee. Remember, the House is a majority-rules institution (i.e., the minority rights that obtain in the Senate are absent), so the majority always holds the whip hand. Here, in addition, House rules give the speaker complete discretion over the make-up of special purpose select committees (as opposed to standing committees). Under a two-century House tradition, the speaker defers to the minority leader’s choices to fill the minority’s allotment of seats on select committees. But this is a norm, not a requirement. Democrats, I believe, will rue the day Pelosi torched this norm for the short-term, illusory advantage of politicizing the January 6 committee, but there is no doubt that she had the power to do what she did. The House rule authorizing the committee called for Pelosi merely to “consult” with McCarthy, not accede to his desired appointees.
McCarthy was huddling with Trump while he was jousting with Pelosi. That was a big reason why he attempted to name ardent pro-Trumpers Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) and Jim Banks (R., Ind.) to the committee: They were to take on the role of aggressive defense counsel for the former president (although, as the committee proceedings have unfolded, it appears that Jordan would also have had to devote time to defending himself). Upon “consulting” with McCarthy, however, Pelosi imprudently exercised her prerogative not to seat Jordan and Banks.
This left McCarthy with his two choices: either (a) use Pelosi’s refusal to seat Jordan and Banks as a rationale to decline any authorized House Republican participation in the panel and thus publicly frame the committee as wholly illegitimate; or (b) accept the comparatively minor setback of not having Jordan and Banks on the committee, seat the full complement of five Republicans, and therefore have allies on the panel who could conduct cross-examination and present alternative perspectives at the committee’s sessions — which would make them more akin to real hearings.
The second option was the only sensible option. There is only one explanation for McCarthy’s failure to choose it: Trump. The “stable genius” strategist thought he could delegitimize Pelosi’s panel by labeling it the “un-select committee.” And, of course, as the “witch hunt,” the rebuke he figures worked against Special Counsel Robert Mueller and would work here as well. (Of course, it only “worked” against the Mueller probe because, as a matter of fact, Trump hadn’t colluded with Russia, and as a matter of communication, he still held the bully pulpit — the Capitol riot situation is inapposite in both regards.)
Nearly a year ago, on July 15, 2021, I wrote a column explaining that it was “ridiculous for McCarthy to consider sitting this out” — i.e., having Republicans boycott the January committee. It could not have been clearer that Congress had a legitimate interest in investigating an attack on itself. Even if McCarthy rightly concluded Pelosi was playing hardball, that is what Democrats do, so the Republican leader must deal with it. In this instance, the GOP could not afford to be AWOL in connection with a high-profile committee to which Democrats had assigned some of their most partisan and most effective members — a committee that was going to have subpoena power and the support of the media.
It was already clear that Democrats planned to use the committee as a theater to project the Democratic narrative of Trump supporters, and Republicans in general, as the party of white-supremacist insurrectionists. Ergo, I contended, “hiding under his desk is not a solution” for McCarthy. He needed five solid Republicans in the committee tent, not 200 Republicans on the outside looking in as they carped about the whole thing on cable TV. The point was not to act as Trump’s defense lawyers — although you had to figure there’d be some of that. The point was to push back on Democratic rubbish about how the riot came within a hair of ending American democracy. It was to prevent Democrats from myopically focusing on the riot by Trump supporters as if the more lethal and extensive rioting by the radical Left in 2020 had not occurred. It was to explore the security lapses absent which the Capitol riot either would not have happened or would have been quickly contained.
Yet, as I further observed, McCarthy was not just dithering about what to do; he was resisting the patent right thing to do out of fear of Trump’s wrath. The column noted that, instead of negotiating with Pelosi, McCarthy was instead hightailing it to the Trump summer compound in Bedminster, N.J. The topic for this pilgrimage, the press reported, was “whether to appoint Republicans to the select congressional committee charged with investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.”
It was only after meeting with Trump that McCarthy announced he was pulling all authorized House Republican participation from the committee.
The time for former president Trump to advise the House minority leader that it would be better to participate and shape the direction of the committee than to bank on sullying the panel in the public mind was a year ago. Plainly, Trump is smoldering now because his strategy — not that of his factotum, McCarthy — was dumb: The committee is hammering the former president on national television, in scripted, slickly produced, tightly thematic performances, because there is no Republican counterpoint.
But it didn’t just become obvious that the decision to boycott the committee was witless; it was obvious at the time. As for McCarthy, the likelihood is that he will end up cooperating with the committee anyway . . . as a witness. He has been subpoenaed to testify about a heated conversation during the riot, in which McCarthy implored Trump to call on the rioters to stand down and Trump responded by rebuking the minority leader, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” Like Jordan and other congressional Republicans with information relevant to the committee investigation, McCarthy has indicated that he will resist. We’ll see how firm he is about this if the committee threatens a contempt citation or asks a court to rule that his non-compliance is illegal.
Meanwhile, what has McCarthy’s servility gotten him? In yet more classic Trump, the former president is not only blaming McCarthy for his own miscalculation; he is admonishing his supporters that he has not endorsed McCarthy to become speaker if Republicans retake the House in the midterms.
In the end, McCarthy’s spinelessness may help the January 6 committee make a damning case that harpoons Trump’s ambition to return to the Oval Office, while Trump’s now-familiar use-’em-and-burn-’em treatment of sycophants may harpoon McCarthy’s ambition to be House speaker. But at least they still have each other, right?