Posted on 10/07/2015 11:44:36 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Man, this is tough stuff from an influential conservative at a moment when McCarthy’s desperately trying to convince righties in the House to give him a chance as Speaker.
In an unguarded moment, House speaker-in-waiting Kevin McCarthy claimed credit for the decline in Hillary Clinton's poll numbers because House Republicans had formed a congressional committee investigating the attacks in Benghazi, making it look like a political witch hunt.
“I heard from him at 6 a.m. the next morning,” Gowdy told the Post on Tuesday when asked about McCarthy. “How many times can somebody apologize? Yes, he’s apologized as many times as a human can apologize. It doesn’t change it. It doesn’t fix it. The only thing you can say is, instead of listening to someone else’s words, why don’t you look at our actions?”…
According to the Post, Gowdy trailed off while discussing forgiveness:
“Kevin is a friend, which makes the disappointment, frankly, even more bitter. If faith tells you to forgive somebody…” Gowdy trails off. “It’s tough,” he says after a moment. “People should go by what we’ve done. How many people have we interviewed? How many of those people have been named Clinton?”
Gowdy told the Post that he has spoken to some of the Democrats who voted to form the Benghazi committee “because what Kevin said put them in an incredibly bad position.”
As the chairman of the Benghazi committee, Gowdy’s the one guy more than any other who could have absolved McCarthy of his gaffe. No dice. Which raises the question: Does McCarthy have the votes to win the Speaker election? And if he doesn’t, er, who does?
Democrats are expected to back their own choice, probably Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, meaning a Republican would need 218 GOP votes to win. Assuming the Freedom Caucus sticks together and opposes Mr. McCarthy, it could force a deadlock. If he didn’t win the majority of members voting for a speaker, the voting would be repeated. That would be a painful rebuke to him, though he has expressed confidence in his ability to win…
For the Freedom Caucus to take a formal position in the speaker race and endorse a particular candidate, under its own rules, 80% of its members would have to agree. So far, it appears unlikely Mr. McCarthy could reach that level of support. Some members say they are getting calls from constituents urging a vote against Mr. McCarthy, and others express more favorable views about Mr. Webster.
“If 80% of HFC support McCarthy, then the group probably should be disbanded,” Rep. Justin Amash (R., Mich.) tweeted this week. “I’m not worried about that happening.”
If the Freedom Caucus balks at McCarthy then he can’t get to 218 — at least on the first ballot. The House would vote again, and again and again and again if need be, although the public humiliation to the GOP caucus generally and to McCarthy specifically if they kept getting deadlocked would wear down the resolve of one side or the other quickly, I think. (Or rather, I hope: Boehner’s apparently prepared to stay on for as long as it takes until a new Speaker is chosen.) Either McCarthy would drop out or members of the Freedom Caucus would defect and help elect him. And once McCarthy’s gone, the caucus will quickly move towards … Jason Chaffetz? I doubt it: McCarthy loyalists might not want to reward a guy who jumped in to the Speaker’s race in hopes of thwarting him. It might require a dark horse who’s acceptable to both sides, like Gowdy himself, being drafted for Speaker to resolve the stalemate. Or maybe this is all just gamesmanship by the Freedom Caucus to increase its leverage. When the Atlantic asked GOP Rep. and Freedom Caucus member Mick Mulvaney if they’d commit to support McCarthy, Mulvaney told them it depends. The FC wants seats on the Steering Committee, which determines the make-up of other House committees, to make sure that conservatives have some influence over the workings of the House. If McCarthy is prepared to give them that, plus some other “process reforms,” perhaps an … understanding can be reached. So that’s probably what’ll happen.
Via Mediaite, here’s Gowdy defending the Benghazi committee this morning on MSNBC. Exit question: If it looks like McCarthy doesn’t have the votes on the first ballot, why would House Democrats vote for Pelosi for Speaker when they could vote for McCarthy instead? Pelosi can’t win even if she ends up with more votes than McCarthy gets; it takes an absolute majority of 218 to choose a Speaker and Democrats are far, far short of that. In that case, logic suggests that they should push McCarthy over the top if he’s in trouble. If he falls short, there’s a risk that he’ll drop out and that the eventual Speaker will be further to the right than he is. He’s the Dems’ best chance to replace Boehner with another centrist while sowing discord among House Republicans by elevating McCarthy to the throne with left-wing votes.
Oddly enough, it may end up helping the GOP if it keeps Hillary in the race a bit longer. She is much weaker than Biden at this time.
Good point.
Another thread here has noted that DIM slimeball Alan Grayson has filed an ethics complaint against McCarthy and Gowdy citing the “politicization” of the Benghazi Committee, as admitted to in McCarthy’s comments.
At the same time, one of McCarthy’s hatchet-men is out saying that Pubbies who don’t support McCarthy should leave the GOP.
There’s a two-word term for what this is turning into. The first of those two word is cluster.
McCarthy said what he said -- either it shows he's not ready, or that he'll never be ready, or that he's a Democrat in all but name.
Trey should have told him, drop out of the speaker race to show us how much you are sorry for your moronic gaff...
The other word is evidently one of Hillary’s favorites when she’s ‘upset’.
NO KEVIN MCCARTHY!!!
I’m no McCarthy fan—I’d much rather see Gowdy in the spot—but I still don’t get the fuss about what McCarthy said to Sean (and neither did Sean at the time). McCarthy was stating a case of cause and effect, not partisan politics. Ants are more likely to appear at a picnic if crumbs are loose and plentiful, but that doesn’t prove that someone deliberately laid out the crumbs for that purpose. Hillary’s poll numbers waned because the facts (finally!) became known and were believed. That airing a believed truth affected her poll numbers is undeniable, but giving her a forum to be perceived as a victim (a degree in which she and hubby have doctorates) would have been a really stupid risk for the pubbies to take if they weren’t already pretty certain of their own facts. SHE caused her numbers to drop, not Gowdy’s or any other, committee.
“This committee was set up, as they have admitted, for the purpose of making a partisan political issue out....
how many time has the leftist commie’s made a political thing out of (chosen) gun deaths?
I guess that in the House of Representatives only the idiots rise to the top.
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I agree, it was no accident.
The Freedom Caucus needs to make it clear that if McCarthy wants to be Speaker he will need Democrat votes to do it.
Enough of the ‘deal making’. It’s time for the party base to drive the bus for a change.
I actually agree with that. En masse. :)
RE: SHE caused her numbers to drop, not Gowdy’s or any other, committee.
The problem with Liberals and the media is this -— THEY CAN ALWAYS CUT AND PASTE what you say and take it out of context to “prove their point”.
For example, when Newt Gingrich said in 1995 that if his healthcare plan was passed, people would love it so much that eventually when compared to Medicare, they would all flock to his plan and Medicare would [quote] just “wither on the vine”
A HA !, the Democrat attacked ad, then used the phrase “wither on the vine” ( totally taken out of context ) to make it look like Gingrich wants to slowly but surely, kill Medicare.
Same principle applies to what McCarthy said.
It can always be taken as an attempt by Republicans, not to get at the truth of what caused the Benghazi fiasco, but as a partisan political tool to destroy Hillary’s chances at the presidency ( and THAT is exactly what she’s doing ).
It is McCarthy’s own “wither on the vine” moment.
McCarthy’s the wrong man for the job. He comes across as a democrat...
Was MacCarthy in on the Libyan fiasco?
Well, it is widely reported that McConnel, Bohner and Obama worked all summer, in the shadows to concoct a budget. McCarthy is Bohners’ butt-boy. He may well have been a player in this fiasco to reconstitute the Beast. Worse has been done by the Pubes oligarch.
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