McCarthy tried to straddle two stools and not surprisingly fell between.
The fight over Marjorie Taylor Greene should be seen as a metaphor of the fight between the Republican donor class and the Republican base. McCarthy's backing of Liz Cheney offends the base but he did so because Liz Cheney scoops up huge sums from the donor class generating power for her in the House of Representatives, much as Mitch McConnell rules the Senate Republicans by the same means.
Always follow the money.
So McCarthy backs Cheney and the source of funds from the donor class. Of course, the interest of the donor class are inimical to the interests of the base as it was created by Donald Trump, a middle-class, working constituency of the middle West. The donor class wants to import cheap labor and export industrial capacity.
The donor class wants the elections to be determined on the basis of race (Nathan Bedford's decade-long maxim that all politics in America is not local but ultimately racial) but governing be done to protect their globalist class interests.
But little old Marjorie Taylor Greene has no donor class backing, indeed she has nothing going for her except a message that resonates with the base as it resonated in her district to the tune of 75% of the voters. McCarthy's strategy was to finesse the situation as the Rino Republicans have always done: make noise on behalf of the base, pretend to negotiate on Greene's behalf but actually operate on behalf of the donor class. So McCarthy tried to cut a deal, shave a committee assignment from Marjorie Taylor Greene, badmouth her moderately, and thus tacitly assure the donor class that representative Greene would be nothing but a well muzzled backbencher while the soul of the Republican Party remained unbesmirched.
The Democrats frustrated the scheme by refusing to compromise, so McCarthy is left with the worst of both possible worlds, his colleague in the party stripped of assignment, rebuked, and himself with an alienated base and no upside anywhere to show the establishment. He is revealed to be a toady of the donor class by his support of Lynn Cheney while exposing his own weakness in protecting his own.
A classic lesson of the folly of trying to be all things to all people.
