Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) needed 15 ballots before he finally became head of the House GOP caucus in January, but his latest blunder involving raising the federal debt ceiling has some suggesting that it’s time for him to be removed.
According to an analysis by MSNBC’s James Downie, McCarthy’s debt ceiling proposal appears to be fracturing the delicate coalition that helped put him in the Speaker’s chair.
The problem here isn’t the bill itself — even though it has the absence of substance you’d expect from today’s GOP. The problem is that the basic elements of what’s being requested in the bill have been public knowledge for months, and yet McCarthy and his team have dawdled on bringing it to the floor. And even after all this time, McCarthy is, once again, struggling to find the 218 votes he needs to pass the proposal. “The whip count on this is not good,” one senior Republican told Axios on Thursday.
How could McCarthy not have known that such a proposal would be met with disdain on both sides of the aisle? Probably because the Speaker doesn’t know what he’s doing, and, more importantly, doesn’t know how to count votes.
There is no excuse for such negligence. McCarthy’s failures in that office have been, like the rest of his career, largely inconsequential. But if the country is to raise the debt limit in an orderly fashion, then he must quickly find one of two qualities he’s never displayed before. Either he’ll need to put his country over his position and broker a bipartisan deal in the House before the Freedom Caucus inevitably replaces him. Or he’ll need to persuade a dozen or more Republicans, whose brand is just this side of ‘death to Democrats,’ to hold hands with Biden.
All that remains if McCarthy cannot reach a deal that’s agreeable to both his caucus and the White House is a series of moves that no one is eager to try, if only because they reek of desperation and may not even work.
Off-ramps remain, including invoking the 14th Amendment, minting a platinum coin, forcing a discharge petition through the House and issuing “premium bonds.” But these alternatives are untested.
How nice it would be to have a competent Speaker at this perilous moment, a leader, a statesman, Downie concludes, adding, “But we don’t have leadership. We don’t have selflessness. We don’t have competence. We have Kevin McCarthy.”
