By Bob Gaydos
There were two significant events this past week:
1. The stink bugs arrived in the neighborhood and settled on the screens to the kitchen windows, resulting in constant barking by the resident beagle.
2. Kevin McCarthy became the first speaker of the House of Representatives to be removed by a vote of its members in the history of the United States of America, as a result of a motion introduced by members of his own Republican Party, no less.
The odor emanating out of Washington was far worse than anything the bugs could offer and, while Republicans kept barking that Democrats were to blame for McCarthy's squashing, for a change no one was listening. He and they are victims of their own cravenness.
While a quick finger snap on the screen got rid of the bugs (at least temporarily), Republicans had to shut down the entire House of Representatives for the rest of the week after their Tuesday dethronement of their "leader" because no one was sure what to do next.
Apparently, a lot of Republicans expected the Democrats to provide the necessary votes to keep McCarthy in the speaker's position, even though he had given them no reason to do so, having gone back on his word to President Biden on a deal to avoid a government shutdown and then having agreed to a sham hearing to decide whether there was any conceivable reason to begin impeachment proceedings against Biden. There wasn't.
So yeah, Democrats really felt like supporting McCarthy. Your mess, you fix it, they said. Rightly so.
The mess, of course, is the inevitable result of the GOP's own deal with the devil. In this case, the part of Faust was played by the Tea Party.
When the GOP grew weary of traditionally lagging badly behind Democrats in registered voters, rather than seeking to offer ideas for a new century, rather than offering programs and projects that might appeal to more Americans, and, thus, result in more votes for Republicans, the party simply agreed to let in more radical rightwing thinkers whose ideas were even less popular with a majority of Americans, simply because they at least represented more numbers.
But those new "Republicans" never had any concept of how to govern, and, indeed, never intended to do so. They wanted mainly to gain the power to strip the government of virtually all its control of how corporations and businesses make money and to impose their own strict, moral code on the nation. To heck with "of the people, by the people, for the people." They wanted it their way and were willing to do anything to get it
Over time, efforts to prevent certain people (non-whites) from voting weren't successful enough to boost Republican election numbers, so the party simply let in pretty much anyone who could sign his or her name and say no to every Democrat.
A few of them eventually wound up in Congress and, in the House of Representatives, which is almost evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, their disproportionate ability to sway the vote for speaker despite their numbers saw them pressure McCarthy to promise to give them anything they wanted if they would let him be Speaker of the House. Pretty please with a tax cut on top.
And so he did and so they did and so, predictably, they now calling themselves the Freedom Caucus turned on him the only time he tried to actually do his job and keep the government open so that tens of thousands of Americans could get their paychecks and government services could proceed as usual.
McCarthy, driven purely by ego and apparently devoid of any backbone, didn't understand that they were giving him the title, but not the power. A whole lot of other Republicans in the House simply sat quietly while they watched the travesty unfold, apparently waiting for Democrats to save McCarthy from the knives of his own party. Again: Fear, ego, cowardice.
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