October 01, 2015 11:05 AM UTC

House Republicans Concerned About New McCarthy Era

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• by: Colorado Pols

Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Buck says that he plans to vote for California Rep. Kevin McCarthy as the next Speaker of the House, which is some of the better news that we’ve seen about McCarthy in the last week.

Congressional Republicans have been less than pleased with the recent actions of McCarthy, the current House Majority Leader, particularly after his comments earlier this week that framed the Benghazi hearings as a purely political stunt aimed at harming the Presidential aspirations of Democrat Hillary Clinton. CNN has more on the blowback:

House Republicans on Wednesday sharply repudiated Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s comments that suggested the Benghazi oversight committee had succeeded by tarnishing Hillary Clinton, saying it undermined their party’s messaging on a key issue and raised questions about his ability to be the GOP’s top communicator…

…Privately, Republicans were outraged by the remarks, saying the House majority leader had given Democrats unfounded ammunition to argue that the committee’s investigation is squarely being driven by politics. Republicans on the committee had tried for months to keep the focus of the inquiry on the administration’s handling of the attacks, avoiding getting into the ins and outs of the various aspects on the email stories.

But in one fell swoop, McCarthy undercut their strategy.

In case you missed it earlier this week, Dana Milbank wrote a scathing article for the Washington Post about McCarthy’s problem using words and stuff:

Kevin McCarthy is about to ascend to the highest office in the House of Representatives and become second in line to the presidency.

But there is a problem: The speaker-apparent apparently still can’t speak.

I have been tracking the California Republican’s valiant but often unsuccessful struggles with the English language for some time now, and I was alarmed to watch him lose another round on Monday during a foreign-policy speech to the John Hay Initiative, a new outfit of the neo-conservative bent…

…In McCarthy’s Monday address, Russia’s hybrid warfare became “high-bred warfare,” and restrictions on U.S. energy shipments became “the band on America.” He spoke of the “beth path forward to safety and security”; he asserted that Syria’s regime uses chemical weapons “to the very day”; he argued that the Soviet Union collapsed “because of America’s leadership and America resolve.” And he memorably rephrased the famous question asked of Republican presidential candidates: “Would you have gone to war if you knew what you knew now?”

Maybe McCarthy just needs some more Vitamin D. Or a tanning bed.