Kevin McCarthy Is (Politically) Dead

Laura Jedeed
5 min readOct 3, 2023

No Survivors

Kevin McCarthy holding a gavel but with a red filter and X’s for eyes and a sad dead mouth
Wikimedia Commons, altered by author

Despite McCarthy’s shitassery, I don’t think the Democrats will torpedo the government by getting behind Gaetz’ motion — they are, by and large, politicians and not warriors. *They might abstain, which would do the same thing, but the results would be catastrophic for the country and they know it.

-Me, three hours ago

Narrator: The Democrats absolutely did torpedo the government by getting behind Gaetz’ motion. A few hours later, for the crime of uniting with Democrats, eight Republicans united with the Democrats to make McCarthy the first Speaker ever ousted via resolution.

Oops.

My knee-jerk reaction was to blame the Democrats for this. Some kind of latent centrist instinct, I guess. Like, isn’t it more important to govern than to have petty vengeance? Wouldn’t it be good to debate the budget instead of indulging the GOP’s humiliation fetish for days, possibly weeks?

Wrong again. Two reasons:

  1. Debate wasn’t going to happen anyway. As outlined in the earlier article, the Freedom Caucus is refusing to budge
  2. Fuck ‘em

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Laura Jedeed
Laura Jedeed

Written by Laura Jedeed

Freelance journalist, filthy pleb. Politics mostly. Find my work at NYMag, Politico, Rolling Stone, New Republic, and https://bannedinyourstate.com

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