October 05, 2023 09:43 AM UTC

Republicans Attempt to Blame Democrats for McCarthy's Ouster

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• by: Colorado Pols

“Bumfuzzle.”

That’s today’s “word of the day” from an email list that we somehow ended up joining. Regardless, it’s useful for today’s news. “Bumfuzzle” means “to confuse or perplex; to bewilder.”

We are completely “bumfuzzled” by Republican attempts to blame the ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy ON DEMOCRATS.

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) initiated a full-court press on Wednesday calling House Democrats the “Chaos Caucus” for not intervening to save McCarthy from being the first person in history to lose the Speakership through a vote of his/her peers.

Absolutely no rational person who paid any attention whatsoever to what took place in Congress in recent weeks would even consider the idea that the dysfunction in Congress is the fault of Democrats. In fact, virtually every news outlet covering McCarthy’s historic ouster noted early and often that the outcome was 100% related to the fact that House Republicans are an ungovernable mess.

Eight Republicans in the House — including Colorado Rep. Ken Buck (R-Greeley) — voted to toss out McCarthy on Tuesday. THAT is why the House of Representatives is now in a state of chaos. This is a Republican problem through and through. Hell, Dave Williams, the Chairman of the State Republican Party in Colorado, was among the many Republicans who applauded the decision to vacate the office of Speaker.

Exactly ZERO Democrats voted to elected McCarthy as House Speaker after 15 embarrassing ballots in January. Why would any of those Democrats suddenly decide to save a man whom they never supported in the first place?

Republicans have already made it very clear that they have no interest in working with Democrats on choosing the next Speaker, and that’s fine. The majority party in the House gets to select the House Speaker; that’s how it works. What this also means is that the majority party doesn’t get to blame the minority party if they screw it up.

[mantra-pullquote align=”right” textalign=”left” width=”60%”]“All of that is absurd, but it’s also revealing. In a sense, what Republicans really wanted from Democrats is help in solving a problem that’s grown intractable for them: At critical moments such as these, there’s nothing holding the House GOP majority together.”

— Greg Sargent, The Washington Post (10/5/23)[/mantra-pullquote]

Greg Sargent of The Washington Post has more on this ridiculousness:

Because Republicans are such firm believers in benevolence toward political foes, they are furious with Democrats for failing to save Kevin McCarthy. After Democrats voted en masse this week to remove the California Republican as House speaker, his fellow Republicans responded by revoking some of Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s Capitol office privileges. They are reportedly planning more acts of retaliation. [Pols emphasis]

But Democrats were right not to save McCarthy. With the forces unleashed by former president Donald Trump and the MAGA movement damaging the House GOP caucus, Democrats absolutely shouldn’t have stepped in, because so doing would help Republicans erase their own culpability for nourishing those forces for so long.

Republicans believe Democrats should have joined most of them to vote against the motion to vacate the speakership that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) brought against McCarthy, which would have enabled him to survive despite eight GOP insurgents voting to remove him. As Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman reports, Republicans intend to “exact revenge for a long while.” McCarthy himself was reportedly behind the retaliation against Pelosi.

Ah, yes, let’s all blame former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who wasn’t even in the building on Tuesday (Pelosi was in California for memorial services for the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein).

As Sargent notes, one of the central reasons that Republicans were upset with McCarthy was because he ended up working with Democrats in order to avoid a government default in May and a shutdown in September. It doesn’t work to be mad at McCarthy for working with Democrats — which he only did out of absolute necessity — AND be mad that these same Democrats didn’t do anything to save him.

Sargent sums up what Republicans really want with one simple paragraph:

Republicans essentially want Democrats to stand by while they indulge MAGA in all kinds of sordid ways and then rush in to provide votes when MAGA’s demands grow so problematic for Republicans that the GOP conference can’t hold together any longer.

You can understand why Democrats would say, “Nah, we’re good” when presented with this offer.

It is actually quite telling that Republicans are going to such bumfuzzling [is that the correct way to use this word?] lengths to obscure their own incompetence. They KNOW that this looks horrible for them, and they KNOW that there is no real way to explain why the GOP caucus is such a circus. So in response, they do the only thing they know how to do: Blame Democrats.