Ross: McCarthy said just because you’re ‘angry,’ ‘chaotic’ doesn’t make you conservative

Well, that didn’t take long. The resolution was brought to the floor, the House voted, and just like that, Kevin McCarthy was no longer speaker. And yet, at his post-vote news conference, he was upbeat. He accepted defeat, didn’t fight it, didn’t claim the vote was rigged.

He said he negotiated with Democrats to avoid a shutdown for the good of the country, and if that meant giving up his dream job, so be it. But I also got the feeling he was glad to be rid of it.

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“You can’t do the job. Eight people, you have 96% of your entire conference, but eight people can partner with the whole other side,” McCarthy said. “How do you govern and for them to make a motion on me because I made a decision for the country that they agreed with? But they choose to do the other. That becomes a problem.”

And when he was asked about those eight conservative Republicans and their insistence on conservative principles, he refused to accept the premise that Matt Gaetz and his cohort were in any way conservatives.

“They don’t get to say they’re conservative because they’re angry and they’re chaotic. That’s not the party I belong to,” McCarthy said. “The party of Reagan was if you believed in your principles that you could govern in a conservative way. They are not conservatives, and they do not have the right to have the title.”

I don’t know who has the official power to declare who’s a conservative and who’s not, but I do think we’ve learned that there are some members of Congress who, despite their oath, just don’t get the point of the Constitution. As McCarthy pointed out, it’s all about one word.

“Government’s designed that you have to have compromise,” McCarthy said. “No, you can’t get everything that you want.”

“Government’s designed that you have to have compromise.” Yes! That’s the whole reason there’s a House and a Senate! But if you fill those positions with members who see compromise as a dirty word, all you get is a standoff.

And so it was that a Republican Speaker who compromised with the Democrats to keep the government open… was voted out by those same Democrats, who closed ranks with the eight Republicans who would not compromise. So that Nov. 17, when the next shutdown crisis is scheduled, there’ll be a new speaker facing the same old problem.

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