Okay, my Tea Party friends, now I'm completely confused. I thought the whole problem with John Boehner as Speaker of the House of Representatives was that he's a RINO/squish "progressive" cockroach traitor "establishment" guy, the embodiment of everything Tea Partiers hate and exist to stamp out. Now your House caucus is so desperate to get rid of the orange Ohioan after all the ludicrous, pathetic failed "coup" attempts over the past four and a half years that they're willing to replace him with the least conservative member of the House GOP leadership over that time period?
I take you back to a little over a year ago and the race to succeed the primaried Eric Cantor:
If Representative Kevin McCarthy is elected House majority leader next week, Republicans will have picked a #2 with a less conservative voting record than his predecessor.
The American Conservative Union gave McCarthy, the majority whip who has represented California in the House since 2007, a 72 score for his House votes last year. That was down from 86 the previous year.
McCarthy's scores were far lower than those of Virginia-7 Representative Eric Cantor, who announced Wednesday that he was stepping down as majority leader on July 31st after his GOP primary loss to newcomer David Brat on Tuesday.
The ACU scored Cantor at 84 on his voting record last year. That was down from 95 the year before. [emphasis added]
Let me reiterate that: Last year, Tea Partiers got rid of a MORE conservative House Majority Leader and replaced him with a LESS conservative House Majority Leader. All over Cantor being willing to pass a "comprehensive immigration reform" bill last summer for which McCarthy had, if anything, even more enthusiasm. I'd suggest that perhaps the Tea Party has been reduced to a single-issue rump sect - it'd sure as shinola help explain Trumpmania - but I already blew that speculation out of the water.
And now, a year later, Tea Partiers want to get rid of a MORE conservative House Speaker and replace him with a LESS conservative House Speaker.
Does this make any sense by the Tea Party's own lights? I don't get it:
House conservatives have begun holding preliminary talks about replacing embattled House Speaker John Boehner with Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
Please. Boehner isn't "embattled" by any distended misdefinition of the term. He's probably more detachedly amused than anything else.
"I don't think [McCarthy's] plotting," one member of the House Freedom Caucus told the Hill on Tuesday. "I don't think he's trying to aid and abet.
"I just think he is trying to figure out where everyone is," the conservative Republican said of the five-term California congressman. "I volunteered to him that, under the right circumstances, I could vote for him for speaker."
But why? McCarthy is less conservative and more pro-amnesty. He embodies "establishment" thinking - has to, or he wouldn't be in the House GOP leadership, right? So what gives? Is it a personal vendetta against Boehner, an emotional tide now unmoored from ideological and philosophical considerations? That would make it suspiciously similar to Trumpmania itself, and, ironically, provide some logical context to something so otherwise irrational.
Or perhaps Representative Mark Meadows (R-NC11) - you remember, the guy who got a bug up his butt when the Speaker temporarily had him stripped of his subcommittee chairmanship during the Trade Promotion Authority imbroglio three months ago and founded the House Freedom Caucus as an ill-disguised grudge - still has that Paul Bunyan ax to grind.
But still....Kevin McCarthy? Wouldn't House Majority Whip Steve Scalise be a better "outsider"/ideological fit? If White Supremagate wasn't prima facie evidence of it, I don't know what would be.
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