Category: Kevin McCarthy

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Fox News Lies GOP Kevin McCarthy

Kevin McCarthy Calls Out Maria Bartiromo For Lying: ‘You’re Saying Things That Are Not True’

We saw something today that millions of us never thought possible: A high-ranking Republican member of Congress went on Fox and actually told the host that she was lying about what she said.

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was a guest on “Sunday Morning Futures” when the host, Maria Bartiromo, began criticizing him for the debt ceiling bill President Joe Biden signed on Saturday.

“I want to go through some of the criticism of this bill because some people say it really was different,” she whined, complaining that the bill failed to eliminate funding for 87,000 new IRS agents. She also noted that she was upset the GOP didn’t get work requirements for Medicaid recipients.

But McCarthy was having none of it, telling Bartiromo, “Well, that’s not true, Maria. Maria, Maria, you’re saying things that are not true.”

“We repealed the 1.4 billion they would spend on hiring new [IRS] agents this year, so no new agents are being hired,” he added. “This is scored as the largest cut.”

McCarthy also bragged that he was proud of the fact that both Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) voted against the final debt ceiling package.

“Did we get it in everything?” he added. “No, but we got [work requirements] in welfare that puts people back to work, the core of what we looked for.”

A clearly annoyed Bartiromo retorted, “To be clear, the bulk of that money is still in the bill that the president signed.”

“OK, Maria, Maria, pause for one moment,” McCarthy explained. “Maria, pause for one moment. That was already in law. We do not have the Senate. We do not have the presidency. But we just stopped them from hiring any IRS agents.”

How does a Fox host know she’s a lying liar? When then top House Republican tells her to her face.

 

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Congress Economics GOP Kevin McCarthy

McCarthy Lacks The Republican Votes Needed To Pass His Draconian Budget Cuts: Report

It appears that Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) dream of making drastic cuts in the federal budget as a condition for raising the debt limit is dissipating by the second, with reports suggesting that he doesn’t even have the Republican votes he needs to take a knife to spending programs.

Jackie Calmes of The Los Angeles Times notes that when GOP House members saw the actual cuts McCarthy is proposing, many of them balked and said they cannot support such draconian measures.

We got evidence of the squeeze this week, even as McCarthy, in his on-again, off-again debt ceiling negotiations with President Biden, was full of budget-cutting bravado to reporters. Just before midnight on Monday — midnight! — the House Appropriations Committee canceled its Tuesday and Wednesday meetings when voting was scheduled on the first of the dozen bills that annually fund the federal government’s operations. Those bills have to fill in the gory details of the spending cuts that Republicans left unidentified when they passed McCarthy’s debt limit bill last month.

The devil, the old saying goes, is in the details, and that’s the problem: McCarthy cannot get the votes he needs to enact his massive cutbacks.

Oh, and as you’d expect, when the Speaker couldn’t muster the votes, he began lying to cover the reason he was calling for a postponement.

The stated reason for the postponement: The committee’s Republican majority wanted to give McCarthy “maximum flexibility” in his talks with Biden.

The real reason: They didn’t have the votes to pass their own bills. Failure, in turn, would have undercut McCarthy’s leverage in the negotiations.

Clearly, McCarthy is getting hit on both sides. The White House is telling him the cuts are a no-go and his own Republican colleagues are also letting him know they won’t sign their name to anything that could hurt them politically with an election now just a little more than a year away.

Oh, and there’s also the matter of Republican hypocrisy, which was revealed when it was reported that they also intend to try and extend the Trump tax cuts for billionaires.

Even then, the savings generated would be small relative to the nation’s annual budget deficits. And Republicans, if they have their way, would in effect wipe out those savings by extending all the Trump-era tax cuts for another decade, adding trillions more to the federal debt they purport to fear.

What will McCarthy do? Probably what politicians are known for doing: Declaring victory and walking away really quickly before anyone can ask any questions. It’s the old Washington two-step, and all it requires is the willingness to pretend.

 

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Congress Domestic Terrorism GOP Kevin McCarthy WTF?!

Kevin McCarthy Orders House Committees To Run Interference For Trump If He’s Indicted

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said Saturday that if former president Donald Trump is indicted next week in Manhattan as expected, he wants the relevant House committees to “immediately” determine if any federal funds have been used to investigate the failed ex-president.

McCarthy made his intentions clear via a posting on Twitter.

“Here we go again — an outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump. I’m directing relevant committees to immediately investigate if federal funds are being used to subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions.”

McCarthy’s comments came just hours after Trump went on an unhinged rant, with his post made on the failing Truth Social site.

“NOW ILLEGAL LEAKS FROM A CORRUPT & HIGHLY POLITICAL MANHATTAN DISTRICT ATTORNEYS OFFICE, WHICH HAS ALLOWED NEW RECORDS TO BE SET IN VIOLENT CRIME & WHOSE LEADER IS FUNDED BY GEORGE SOROS, INDICATE THAT, WITH NO CRIME BEING ABLE TO BE PROVEN, & BASED ON AN OLD & FULLY DEBUNKED (BY NUMEROUS OTHER PROSECUTORS!) FAIRYTALE, THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK. PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!”

McCarthy’s comments drew a sharp response from presidential historian Michael Beschloss, who noted, “This almost disgraceful tweet that Kevin McCarthy has put out and I don’t use that word often to describe speakers of the House. He is interfering with the process of the rule of law; this is a duly elected D.A. in New York who we don’t even know what’s going to happen yet or what the grand jury is going to do. But the speaker of the House has absolutely no business interfering with this process, siding with one side, Donald Trump’s side, and also saying that he is going to investigate the use of federal funds to interfere.”

Beschloss continued:

“We don’t know what’s going to happen yet so, you have an ex-president calling for a protest we now know could turn into violence, as it did on the 6th of January, 2021. Hordes invaded the Capitol, we were in danger of killing the vice president, killing the speaker of the House, other members of the congress, the defiling of the House and Senate chambers. That’s what happened that day. But at least, as horrible as that was, you and I talked about it that day, at least you had a speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, where we could be sure that she would do her best to try to protect the Capitol against violent attack. After this statement by Kevin McCarthy, we have no such reassurance.”

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Donald Trump GOP Kevin McCarthy WTF?!

Don Jr’s ‘Interview’ Of Kevin McCarthy Is Such A Train Wreck That You Won’t Be Able To Stop Laughing

For some unknown reason, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy agreed to be interviewed by Donald Trump Jr., son of the failed, one-term, twice-impeached ex-president, and the results were nothing short of a massive train wreck, with Junior don’t most of the talking and seeming to be on some sort of substance that has his amped up.

Newsweek reports the interview was part an episode of Triggered with Don Jr. this week.

The 46-second clip has been watched more than 160,000 times on Twitter as of early Saturday. The full hour-long episode is available on video platforms including Rumble, which is popular with conservatives.

Here’s a partial transcript from the interview:

Trump Jr: “Perhaps his (Donald Trump’s) greatest, maybe, political weakness was that he never wanted to show his empathetic side. I’m dealing with China, I’m dealing with Iran. I can’t be soft.”

McCarthy: “Yes.”

Trump Jr: “”I’m like, you don’t have to be soft with them but, like, show that side.”

McCarthy: “No.”

Trump Jr: “He still had that old-school Germanic sort of whatever it was.”

McCarthy: “Yeah, I don’t know if…”

Trump Jr: “He actually has so much more of that empathy.”

McCarthy: “I wish…”

Later in the so-called “interview,” Don Jr. also suggested that members of Congress need to learn how to “hustle” and that he once worked jobs that only paid minimum wage.

“I understand where I come from and my background—I get it. But my father made sure I worked minimum-wage jobs….I also worked for tips, which is something that’s really important that everybody should understand.”

What in the hell? Junior, we all know that you’re a trust fund baby and have never actually “worked” a day in your life. And if did happen to make minimum wage at some gig daddy set you up with, at night you went home to a mansion with servants.

Here, see for yourself. This is so cringeworthy that it’s hilarious.

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Congress GOP Kevin McCarthy

Hakeem Jeffries Just Put Kevin McCarthy On Notice

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has just put Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on notice regarding committee assignments, and if McCarthy ignores the warning it could well make his tenure as Speaker shorter than he ever imagined.

The Washington Post reports that Jeffries wrote McCarthy to let him know he was recommending Reps. Adam B. Schiff and Eric Swalwell be reappointed to the House Intelligence Committee, which Schiff once chaired.

In a letter dated Saturday, Jeffries argued that McCarthy has no justifiable reason not to accept his appointments of Schiff, who served as chairman of the Intelligence panel until Republicans took control of the chamber, and Swalwell.

In his letter, Jeffries writes:

“It is my understanding that you intend to break with the longstanding House tradition of deference to the minority party Intelligence Committee recommendations and deny seats to Ranking Member Schiff and Representative Swalwell. The denial of seats to duly elected Members of the House Democratic Caucus runs counter to the serious and sober mission of the Intelligence Committee.”

McCarthy has said he will not place Schiff and Swalwell on the Intelligence Committee, seeking to exact revenge on Democrats for removing Reps. Paul Gosar (AZ) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA) from committee assignments. But as Jeffries notes in his letter, both Gosar and Greene were removed by a vote of the full House.

Greene and Gosar were removed “after a bipartisan vote of the House found them unfit to serve on standing committees for directly inciting violence against their colleagues. It does not serve as precedent or justification for the removal of Representatives Schiff and Swalwell, given that they have never exhibited violent thoughts or behavior.”

Jeffries also pointed out that McCarthy had no problem appointing “serial fraudster” George Santos (R-NY) to committees despite the fact that he is facing multiple investigations, including from the House Ethics Committee and may also be subjected to criminal prosecution for lying in order to win his congressional seat.

If McCarthy insists on refusing to seat Schiff and Swalwell, Democrats could call for a motion to vacate, a procedure which would result in a formal vote to remove McCarthy from the Speaker’s chair. Considering that McCarthy only holds a slim majority in the House, such a move could further weaken him.