GOP Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has his hands full with more than just the reconciliation package currently being debated.
The GOP leadership is bracing for rank-and-file lawmakers to attempt to strip committee assignments from the 13 Republican lawmakers who voted for the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. Several of these lawmakers are also ranking members — top Republicans on committees — and those could be at risk, too.
A number of GOP lawmakers were upset by the fact that several of their Republican colleagues voted early for the infrastructure package, helping Democrats cross the majority threshold on a key piece of President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda and undermining their party strategy.
Much of the anger is directed at Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), who voted early for the legislation. Katko is the ranking member on the Homeland Security Committee. Katko told multiple lawmakers on the House floor that he had seen Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) on television talking about the infrastructure bill, and he was voting early.
This isn’t the first controversy involving Katko this year. Katko reached an agreement with Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 commission. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy later rejected the proposal, but 35 House Republicans ended up voting for the bill.
Katko also voted to impeach former President Donald Trump following the Jan. 6 insurrection, and he supported a criminal contempt referral against former Trump aide Steve Bannon for failing to comply with a subpoena from the select committee investigating the Capitol attack.
Beyond Katko, several of the members who voted for the package hold ranking member posts on full committees or subcommittees. For instance, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), the dean of the House, is the ranking member of Natural Resources. Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and David McKinley (R-W.Va.) hold subcommittee ranking spots.
Three of the 13 are retiring — Reps. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio).
There have been other disputes inside the House GOP Conference this Congress over how members voted. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who was the GOP Conference chair, voted to impeach Trump as well. Cheney was able to fend off the first attempt to oust her by Trump loyalists, but following her continued public criticism of the former president, Cheney was forced out. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York replaced her in the leadership.
The beef here isn’t just that a chunk of the GOP voted for the infrastructure bill, which was inevitable, but how they did it was against McCarthy’s plan. The plan was to not have any GOP votes until after the Democrats had all voted, putting pressure on the progressives that wanted to lodge protests votes once the issue was no longer in doubt. Ignoring McCarthy’s instructions is not the sign of a leader in control of his caucus, and the desire to crackdown on the dissenters is even more so. The tea leaves here are not so much for the forthcoming votes on reconciliation, but McCarthy’s designs on the Speaker’s gavel when/if the GOP takes the house in the 2022 midterms. McCarthy thinks after being denied it the first time — and with the late Walter Jones no longer around to spearhead the kneecapping of his ambitions — glory is within his reach. He can almost taste it it. And he is starting to get defensive about it.
Will Kevin McCarthy get the rebellious GOP reps in line, or will cracking down come back to bite him come leadership elections next year? Stay tuned.
“You have to lodge your protest votes before we lodge ours!”
It’s not about what happens, it’s about who gets to brag about it.
Asinine.Report
Kevin McCarthy is no Mitch McConnel.Report
I mean, say what you want about “How dare you be anything but a mindless partisan”, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.Report
I dunno. People still think Pelosi is a master political manipulator and she got railroaded by fractious party members into impeachment proceedings that she knew weren’t going to go anywhere.Report
So she did impeachment proceedings and got Don in the history books as the first President to be Impeached (and not removed) twice. Was there some big cost downside to throwing the meat to her fractious party members that a master manipulator would have spent capital and effort to avoid? I suppose one could argue it energized the right and kept the Dems from expanding their majority in the house but that feels like a reach to me.Report
It sure didn’t help national unity. (I’m not saying it was the only thing that has hurt national unity, but it did hurt it.)Report
Heh yeah, impeaching a president for cheating on his wife is aces but impeaching a president for using foreign aid to dragoon another nation into helping his reelection campaign or impeaching a president for encouraging a violent invasion of the capitol to obstruct the transfer of power? That’s just divisive.Report
As I said, it wasn’t the only divisive thing that ever happened. I still think that the Clinton impeachment was the right thing to do and could have gone either way. I don’t think that either Trump impeachment met either of those conditions. If it matters, Clinton did actually cheat on his wife, lie about it in court, et cetera, and Trump didn’t do the things he was accused of.
ETA: I should say that Trump did some of the things he was accused of, because there were a lot of particulars, but I don’t see how the specifics can rightly add up to any impeachable offense, or added up to the overall charges against him. I should have been clearer.Report
He didn’t whip up a mob to rampage through the Capitol in an attempt to disrupt a constitutional process? I didn’t get the point of impeachment 1 but he absolutely did what he was accused of in 2. A chunk of Republicans conceded that, even if not enough to convict in the Senate.Report
No, of course not. He whipped up a crowd and did nothing, just like he did the five previous years. With Trump, you don’t have to look for an ulterior motive for pointing the spotlight at himself. And you know, if he’d wanted to prevent the electoral count, there are a lot of things a sitting president could do that would have been far uglier. He woke up that morning with zero plan, and no one has ever demonstrated anything different.Report
When I did my stint in criminal defense the most notable part was the incredible lack of planning, self-evidently terrible judgment, and total lack of foresight the average defendant had. Yet people are still deemed to intend the natural results of their actions. If I’m being asked to grant leniency to the president I need more than the possibility that he was too dumb to understand what he was doing. And even if it is the case I’d say that’s exactly the kind of thing impeachment is for.Report
Trump understood. Pinky understands that he understood.
And I agree – this is exactly what impeachment was and is for.Report
You’re lying about me. I don’t know if I should make a “keep your lies straight” joke, say that you don’t understand conservatives, or tell you that you’re doing a bad job representing Christianity, so consider this all three.Report
If there had been dozens of attempts to storm the Capitol, sure. If there’d been dozens of Trump speeches that erupted in mass destruction, sure. This had never happened before.Report
The first 11 treasons are free.Report
“So she did impeachment proceedings and got Don in the history books as the first President to be Impeached (and not removed) twice. ”
you think the important part is “impeached…twice”
but I think maaaaaaaybe the important part is “(and not removed) twice”Report
Important? That’s for history to decide. I’ll say simply that it’s not nothing (though, obviously, not as much as if either of the impeachments had resulted in removal).
You still haven’t identified identified how said impeachments were errors or failures of Pelosi’ manipulative political acumen though.Report
I wouldn’t have done the first. The facts have always been convoluted and the politics of it were bad.
Second there was just no choice and it was clearly the right thing.Report
I tend to agree on #1’s politics, it was convoluted.Report
If they tried to impeach The Worst President Ever(tm) twice and they couldn’t make either time stick, it suggests that maybe impeachment is not a particularly meaningful check on Presidential behavior, and “being impeached” is something US Presidents should just expect to happen once or twice from now on.Report
They did, and their party members dutifully voted for both impeachment and removal. That sufficient Republicans did not remove, despite issuing basically no coherent defense at all except “Despite testimony and evidence we don’t believe he’s guilty and no we have no evidence to show he’s innocent” says more about the GOP than the Dems.
Still absent, of course, is how impeachment proved an error. You’ve demonstrated that they didn’t remove Trump, but you haven’t demonstrated how impeaching was somehow worse than not impeaching for what he’d done.Report
Please. No one got railroaded into the impeachments except Trump, and he only railroaded himself by simply being who he is. Since he is The Biggest Loser he deserved both.Report
If half of the stuff in the Steele Dossier is true, he deserved a lot worse than impeachment. It’s *TREASON*.Report
Half of it is probably true, in as much as any intelligence we ever gather is true. Neither impeachment rests on that dossier however.Report
Trying to violently overturn an election was in the Steele Dossier? The guy’s a prophet.Report
Hard to keep the lies straight I guess.Report
How can you say that half of the Steele Dossier is “probably” true then complain that people don’t keep their lies straight?Report
Meanwhile they can’t decide on Paul Gossar, poster and defender of fake execution videos. A man whose own brother and sister call a psychopathReport