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Declarations
McCarthy’s Fall Is a Comedy Without Laughs
His chief antagonist, Matt Gaetz, is a cartoon villain, a man so small he makes decadence look banal.
By Peggy Noonan
Oct. 5, 2023 6:41 pm ET
I want to respond to the toppling of Speaker Kevin McCarthy with the gravity appropriate to a signal event that carries such immense implications (America’s reputation for stability once again weakened, a government shutdown looming, no replacement in sight).
Yet the whole thing is so . . . below the country. It’s so without heightened meaning. It’s as if Julius Caesar were stabbed to death in the Forum by the Marx Brothers.
The killers weren’t serious people, they don’t have a serious purpose, they have no plan or platform. They are led by a great doofus, a cartoon villain with Elvis hair, a political nepo baby whose father was president of the Florida Senate, a guy whose way was paved. Tearing things down is his business model. At least the Marx Brothers made you laugh.
Mr. Gaetz is so small, he makes decadence look banal. Almost everyone believes he was driven by personal motives: An ethics investigation, launched in 2021, went forward in the House, and Mr. McCarthy didn’t stop it. (An earlier Justice Department probe was dropped without charges.) It involves allegations of sexual misconduct, illicit drug use, misuse of campaign funds and sharing inappropriate images on the House floor. (Mr. Gaetz has denied the allegations.) The day of Mr. McCarthy’s fall, Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, who served in the House with Mr. Gaetz, told CNN that when accusations surfaced in the now-concluded Justice Department probe involving Mr. Gaetz and a 17-year-old girl, “there’s a reason why no one in the Congress came and defended him.” The reason? “We had all seen the videos he was showing on the House floor,” of women with whom he claimed to have had intimate relations. Mr. Mullin said Mr. Gaetz found fame nine months ago when he opposed Mr. McCarthy’s bid for the speakership. Now “he got this last moment of fame.”
I hope it is his last moment of fame. I doubt it.
As for Mr. McCarthy, part of what led to his fall was that some of his biggest supporters were ambivalent about his leadership. He wasn’t the most thoughtful or substantive member of the conference; he valued his job and the institution; he was certainly better than his enemies—but on Jan. 6-7, 2021, he voted to sustain objections to Arizona’s and Pennsylvania’s electoral votes. In the weeks that followed, he personally went down to Mar-a-Lago to resuscitate Donald Trump who was drowning in the polls. And when he ran for speaker, he desperately, suicidally agreed to lower to one vote the threshold needed to trigger a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair. He wanted the job too much. This column said at the time that when you want it bad you get it bad, and he did.
What happened in the House this week was irresponsible and destructive, a classless move by classless people for low and shallow reasons. Finding a new speaker won’t be quick; it will be a painful, destructive winnowing that will make America look worse.
What GOP members need is what they don’t have. They need a leader who, through the force of his presence and with an awesome competence, can listen to everyone, reach out, heal—and instill sharp stabs of terror in the hearts of his lean and hungry legislators. He needs to be feared. They need a ruthless Mama Cat who can pick the kittens up by the scruff of the neck and throw them in the box. They need Nancy Pelosi. Who, somebody once said, has a Glock in that Chanel bag.
On Wednesday, feeling bleak, I reckoned that demoralized Republicans had two options. First, they could pick as speaker a nut from the nut caucus that did Mr. McCarthy in, and then wait for it to all blow up. It would within months, because they can’t govern. They have verve, they raise money, they know how to use social media and tickle the party’s id. But they can’t lead institutions because they don’t respect institutions because they’re not in the least conservative. They’re a bunch of crazy narcissists, and narcissists can’t create and sustain coalitions because that means other people exist. But picking one of them and watching him flail might break some of the fever.
Or the conference could pick someone normal, someone who connects with moderate Republicans and the nuttier quadrants. The nuts themselves might support someone like that now. They’d think it would show they were always sincere and it was never personal. They’d follow that vote with a party at which they talk about how the new speaker has better personal relationships than Kevin, and his word is more reliable. Then, after a few months or a year, they’d try to kill him.
But a few days later I thought there’s hope in this: There are 221 Republicans in the House, and only eight of them voted, with all the Democrats, to remove the speaker. That number was decisive, it carried the day, but it was small.
The normal Republicans and conservatives who numerically dominate the GOP conference have to assert themselves in a new way. The Gaetz Eight should be shunned and Mr. Gaetz expelled from the conference. He thinks he’s such a big freelance power, let him be freelance.
Members who took a constructive part should stand together. They have to stop seeing themselves as victims of those who make chaos. They should spy an opening where it exists. What’s happening in the GOP isn’t a civil war but a split on the Trumpian right. Mr. Gaetz sent out a fundraising email this week saying Mr. McCarthy was “Democrat-owned,” lies to conservatives and cut deals with Democrats. Right-wing radio star Mark Levin immediately shot him down on Twitter: “But Marxist Democrats unanimously backed you, moron.” He suggested Mr. Gaetz should vacate his own seat after his “shameless serial lies to conservatives.”
That split is an opening, exploit it. And don’t allow the next speaker to agree that in the future it will only take one vote to vacate the office.
There are tens of millions of normal Republicans and conservatives all over this country, and they too should be pushing back against the chaos.
The Democrats have nothing to be proud of. Every member of their caucus voted to do Mr. McCarthy in, even though his deal with them to avert a government shutdown triggered his ouster. People trying to protect America would have taken a longer view and not let the House dissolve into public chaos. They could have saved the day against their own immediate interests. It would have been moving if they had. But they’re rough and tough. And small, puny, and thinking no more of the big picture than Matt Gaetz does.
I don’t know. The central fact of the two parties now is that one is dominated by a policy cult (extreme stands on crime and illegal immigration) and the other by a personality cult (Donald Trump). People in cults don’t think, they only defend against whatever seems a threat or exploit what they think a gain. Something has to come along and break through this stasis. Something will, but I don’t know what.
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