Mccarthy must crack the whip on clowns
Another week, another lunacy. Last week’s baton-twirler in the congressional Republicans’ endless parade of horribles is Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona. On the same day NBC News reported that Gosar’s own brother called him a “traitor” for his role in provoking the Jan. 6 insurrection, an invitation appeared online for a fundraiser for Gosar hosted by a well-known white nationalist and Holocaust denier who favors segregation.
The invitation said the fundraiser, with the group America First, was “authorized by Gosar for Congress Committee,” and at first Gosar appeared to confirm its authenticity in a tweet: “Not sure why anyone is freaking out. I’ll say this: there are millions of Gen Z, Y and X conservatives. They believe in America First.” (Gosar had appeared at a gathering of the same group in February and stood by as the same white nationalist bemoaned the loss of America’s “White demographic core.”)
Later in the week, Gosar changed his tune, saying,
“There’s no fundraiser scheduled on Friday.” This was suspicious wording (the invitation had said the date was “to be announced July 1st”) but the fig leaf was good enough for House Minority Leader Kevin Mccarthy. “He says he doesn’t have — that it’s not real. That he doesn’t have anything on his schedule,” he told The Washington Post’s Marianna Sotomayor.
It was just the latest leadership failure for Mccarthy, for whom no member’s antics go too far. Fomenting or excusing insurrection? Flirting with white nationalists? Boosting Qanon? The clowns keep piling out of the car — Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Andrew Clyde (Georgia), Matt Gaetz (Florida), Mo Brooks (Alabama), Andy Biggs (Arizona), Louie Gohmert (Texas), Gosar — and Mccarthy does nothing to cancel the act. The only one to draw a rebuke has been Rep. Marjorie “Jewish Space Lasers” Taylor Greene of Georgia, and it was the Democrats who forced her off a committee. There are always going to be clowns, in any party, in any Congress. The problem here is the ringmaster — or lack thereof.
The Post’s Paul Kane recalled Mccarthy’s vow in 2019 that “action will be taken” against racists in his ranks.
“Two-and-a-half years later, Mccarthy has ceded that moral high ground in policing his own caucus,” Kane wrote. “Instead, he has adopted something best called whataboutism.”
What about Ilhan Omar, he’ll say. Well, what about her? The Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, a naturalized U.S. citizen who emigrated from Somalia, has more than once crossed the line into anti-semitism with her criticism of Israel. The difference is her Democratic colleagues have criticized her, and she has changed her tone.
On CNN, Omar defended her recent statement that “we have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan and the Taliban,” and she said Jewish Democratic colleagues “haven’t been partners” in seeking justice. After an outcry, she authored a retraction, saying “many of my colleagues — both Jewish and non-jewish — deeply share that commitment to fighting injustice,” and referencing the prominent role of Jews in the civil rights movement.
Mccarthy’s counterpart in the Senate has been only slightly less cowardly. ABC News’s Jonathan Karl, in his new book “Betrayal,” reports that Senate Republican leader Mitch Mcconnell privately urged Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, to refute Trump’s unfounded claims of voter fraud. Mcconnell didn’t speak out himself, because he cared more about political advantage than preserving democracy. “Look, we need the president in Georgia” for the Senate runoff election, Mcconnell told Barr. “And so we cannot be frontally attacking him right now.”
With such feeble leadership, the most extreme and least honorable in the Republican ranks have nothing to restrain them as they compete to be the most outrageous.
At the moment, Gosar holds the crown. At a hearing June 15, he alleged that Ashli Babbitt, the insurrectionist shot dead by Capitol Police on Jan. 6, was “executed” by a police officer “lying in wait” for her. Gosar demanded the name of the officer who pulled the trigger. A month earlier, he described insurrectionists as “peaceful patriots.” In April, Punchbowl News identified him, along with Greene, as creators of the “America First Caucus,” devoted to honoring “Anglo Saxon political traditions.”
Weeks before the Jan. 6 insurrection, one of the “Stop the Steal” organizers claimed that he, Gosar and two other lawmakers “schemed up” the plan to put “maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting” Jan. 6. Now, there’s this purported white-nationalist fundraiser.
And Mccarthy? He’s finally threatening to punish Republican lawmakers — the ones who join a select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.