September 30, 2015 11:04 AM UTC

Kevin McCarthy Off to a Bad Start as Speaker-in-Waiting

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• by: Colorado Pols

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is widely expected to be coronated as the next Speaker of the House when his Orangeness, Rep. John Boehner, resigns at the end of October.

If House Republicans elevate McCarthy to Speaker, he will become the least-experienced House Speaker since…wait for it…1891 (Henry Clay is the answer to that trivia question). As our friends at “The Fix” explain, McCarthy’s inexperience could be problematic for a Congress that is already among the least-effective and most disliked legislative bodies in American history.

House Republicans are in the midst of a coronation of California Congressman Kevin McCarthy as the next Speaker of the House. McCarthy’s comments about the motives of the House select committee investigating the attacks in Benghazi, Libya on Tuesday night, however, should give the party pause about whether he’s totally ready for the big job.

Prodded repeatedly by conservative Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity to name an accomplishment for the Republican-led Congress, McCarthy seized on the Benghazi committee and its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s role (or lack thereof) in the handling of the incident during her time as Secretary of State.

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” McCarthy told Hannity. “But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.” [Pols emphasis]

Whoops!

Yes, indeed. Whoops!

It’s embarrassing enough that McCarthy couldn’t immediately name an important accomplishment for Republicans in Congress, but it’s a mistake made even worse by his eventual answer. In other words, McCarthy thinks the most important accomplishment by a Republican-led Congress is a partisan political committee meant to take down a former Secretary of State. Republicans have held a majority in the House for nearly five years now, and McCarthy wants to talk about how much the GOP has hurt Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers? Really?

When Boehner first announced the Benghazi special committee in early 2014, he was careful to explain that the decision was about “getting to the truth” of the terrorist attack that killed four Americans in 2012. The Benghazi committee was obviously created in large part to damage the Presidential hopes of Hillary Clinton, but Boehner knew very well that he couldn’t frame the entire thing in those terms. “I intend for this select committee to have robust authority, and I will expect it to work quickly to get answers for the American people and the families of the victims,” said Boehner on May 2, 2014. 

As “The Fix” writes today:

While anyone with a brain would have concluded a while ago that the Benghazi committee wasn’t solely about policy, having the man who is about to be the next Speaker of the Republican-controlled House say exactly that is not smart. At all.

Perhaps McCarthy’s statement is exactly the kind of thing that a Republican House descending into anarchy would want to hear. Perhaps not. But for the rest of us hoping to see actual leadership in the Speaker’s office, McCarthy is off to a shaky start.