Washington, (Samajweekly) Ousted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s fall from grace is seen as his becoming the latest victim of former President Donald Trump-led extremism in the GOP with hardliners ruling the roost and his self-inflicted wound by pandering to them to win and retain his seat, but eventually losing it all.
US media reports, while being partially sympathetic to McCarthy, felt he was the victim of a self-inflicted wound when he was trying to appease the Trump-led MAGA extremism that was threatening the fabric of what conservatism actually meant for the Republicans – a drastic change in three decades from holding on to traditional beliefs into creating chaos.
McCarthy was not moderate and did little to check the GOP’s turn away from democracy, CNN political analysts said.
But his defeat, at the hands of far-right rebels he complained last week wanted to “burn the whole place down”, is an eloquent commentary on his party, the analysts said.
McCarthy’s political assassins, led by Florida Republican Matt Gaetz, ousted their leader with no mind on a plan for what comes up next – damaging an important wing of the US legislature, leaving it paralysed for at least a week.
The self-inflicted chaos will hamper the GOP’s effort to capitalise on President Joe Biden’s vulnerability, and the latest show of ”incompetence and extremism” could hamper the Republican bid to retain the swing seats it needs to keep its majority next year in the House.
The Republicans displaced the Democrats in the November midterms in 2022, wresting the House with a 222 to 213 majority under a Trump-led MAGA extremism on issues of economy, inflation and gun laws and abortion.
The commentators noted with a tinge of sadness that the high office of the Speaker of the House had been ridiculed by a handful of extreme right wingers and McCarthy’s ouster was a result of that.
The ex-Speaker’s historic ouster followed three days after he was forced to use Democratic votes to head off an imminent government shutdown that his own party’s “absolutism was about to trigger”.
This actually compounded McCarthy’s original sin, earlier this year, of keeping a shut eye when House GOP hardliners threatened the house with a “disastrous default on America’s debts throwing its economy into chaos causing global panic”.
Most global investors use the long-term 10-year and 30-year US Treasury bonds as a reserve for their investment strategy to face the downside of market fluctuations as they give high yields.
McCarthy’s nine-month speakership, Congress’ shortest, illustrated how the Republican Party in the age of Donald Trump has turned into one of “the great forces of instability in American life, and potentially the world, with the ex-President dominating the 2024 GOP primary as he seeks a wrecking ball second term”.
A party that once defined conservatism as preserving a “traditional sense of steadiness and strength” has evolved over the last three decades into “a haven for chaos agents, stunt politics and a perpetual ideological revolution that keeps driving it to new extremes”, the CNN analysts said.
The GOP’s willingness to accept the “outrageous was also on display Tuesday in New York, where Trump spoke vociferously outside a lower Manhattan courtroom hearing his fraud trial and was later slapped with a ”gag order for attacking a judge’s clerk on social media”.
McCarthy’s ouster by a section of the GOP amounted to political regicide showing the House majority is inoperable and that the Republican Party is unmanageable. If this is not going to change, America itself will become ungovernable, the reports said.
McCarthy’s fall is not ironic because he digressed from the path of extremism by seeking accommodation with Biden to save the country from harm. If the shutdown had happened, thousands of workers paid by the federal agencies would have been furloughed and left to the mercy of their paltry savings. That included the critical military and homeland security that was to protect the citizens of America.
US Media critics said that the Republican Party has evolved into a party which tries to break the cherished goal of a peaceful transfer of presidential power.
The man at the helm, Trump, has been criminally indicted four times, and for the hardliners in the party, “cozying up to some of the world’s most bloodthirsty dictators is not a disqualification”.
McCarthy’s reluctant search for compromise was unpardonable to the hardliners, the reports said.
For the GOP’s extreme hard-liner right wingers, what McCarthy was doing for a while seemed right — appeasing the radicalism that perpetually drives the GOP to the right — the critics said.
While holding McCarthy responsible for his downfall at the hands of his own party men, the CNN analysts pointed to the series of blunders he had done in his speakership and as a Republican in pursuit of a job he craved for all his lifetime.
The Californian Republican paid homage to Trump, reviving the disgraced ex-President’s reputation with a post-Capitol insurrection pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago and worked to thwart Trumps accountability for an uprising he briefly condemned.
In recent times, McCarthy ordered an impeachment inquiry into Biden, while it lacked any evidence of the “high crimes and misdemeanours that are the standard for considering the Constitution’s gravest sanction”.
Paradoxically, McCarthy himself was gone in less than a month of launching that inquiry, ejected by his own party men who ordered him to impeach Biden. McCarthy had a misplaced trust to contain the fury of the extreme right with the impeachment move.
But the extreme right’s demands were insatiable that there was no end to the anti-government GOP faction for which causing chaos was an end to its means, reports said.
To reflect the chaos caused by McCarthy’s ouster and what is the path that lay ahead, Republican Tim Burchett, one of the eight Republicans who toppled their Speaker, said , “I have no earthly idea, brother.” He was asked whether his party would have a new figurehead by nightfall by noted anchor Jack Tapper.
“Bring it on,” McCarthy told his enemies this week as they plotted to oust him. They did. “I never give up,” he had warned. Faced with reality, he did, choosing not to run in a new election for Speaker.
