Tag Archives: Kevin McCarthy

2020 General Election, Republicans

Kevin McCarthy — after lying about the election and undermining the results — calls for unity

When we last checked in with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, he had issued a statement that failed to hold Donald Trump responsible for months of lies about the election, underhanded attempts to overturn it, and then the violence on the 6th.

McCarthy subsequently spoke on the House floor, in a call for unity, explained why he would oppose impeachment:

A vote to impeach will further divide the nation. A vote to impeach will further fan the flames of partisan division.

Most Americans want neither inaction nor retribution. They want durable, bipartisan justice. That path is still available, but it is not the path we are on today.

He continued by placing a measure of responsibility on Trump:

That doesn’t mean the President is free from fault. The President bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.

These facts require immediate actions by President Trump: Accept his share of responsibility. Quell the brewing unrest. And ensure President-Elect Biden is able to successfully begin his term.

In the context of a months-long campaign before November 4 to undermine the election, repeated attempts to overthrow the results afterwards, and stirring up a mob to demand that the Vice President and Congress declare Trump, not Biden, the victor, this is pretty weak tea.

Nor is this circumscribed view of the President’s responsibility surprising considering Congressman McCarthy’s role in the subversion.

On November 5 on Fox News, McCarthy insisted:

President Trump won this election. So, everyone who is listening: Do not be quiet. Do not be silent about this. We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes. 

We can unite together. And you don’t need to be a Republican. If you believe in every legal vote needs to count, if you believe in American process, join together and let’s stop this.

McCarthy — whom Trump affectionately calls, “My Kevin” — ingratiated himself with Trump with a lie, which he followed up with a call to action: “Let’s stop this.”

A month later, McCarthy was one of 126 GOP House members — well over half the caucus — to sign onto a meritless court challenge to Biden’s victory.

On January 6, he voted to reject Biden’s victory in Arizona. And then, hours after the violence in the Capitol, McCarthy cast a vote with 137 other House Republicans to reject the electoral votes of Pennsylvania.

McCarthy lied about the outcome of the election. He urged on others to act on this lie. He joined a suit in court to overturn the results. Then he voted to throw out Biden’s victories in two battleground states that Trump falsely claims he won.

McCarthy doesn’t offer a mea culpa or an apology or even an excuse for this string of “undemocratic, un-American, and criminal” actions (to borrow his words). He doesn’t acknowledge his bad behavior at all. Instead he appeals for unity.

In his spoken remarks that evening, McCarthy said, “this call for unity may ring hollow.” That’s for sure.

(Image: PBS.)

Democracy, Donald Trump, Republicans

Most Republicans refuse to hold Donald Trump accountable, even after assault on the Capitol

Since the 2016 inauguration, most Republicans — if they didn’t step up to defend and support him — have dodged and weaved, made excuses, changed the subject, ducked reporters and declined to comment, when confronted with norm-busting outrages by Donald Trump. Throughout four years of aberrant presidential behavior, there have been a handful of GOP critics who objected forthrightly to one discrete thing or another, but then retreated into silence (and acquiescence); other Republicans have (at most) tut-tutted about tweets, overlooking every other crash through the guardrails of democracy. Virtually all Republicans serving in the Senate and the House — whether voicing occasional murmurs of disapproval or not — hardly ever strayed from the Trump-GOP party line. They were willfully blind to Trump’s off-the-rails conduct.

The Republican Party has never been willing to hold the President accountable for his actions. Not even when national security was as stake — from choosing Putin over the Intelligence Community in Helsinki, to betraying American allies in Syria, to extorting the Ukrainian president, to refusing to utter a word of criticism regarding Russian bounties on American soldiers or cyberattacks on government agencies and corporations — the pattern has been to let it slide. Trump made implementing tax cuts and packing the courts possible. Republicans kept their heads down, celebrated their partisan victories, and endeavored to preserve their careers.

At this stage — four days after Trump instigated the crowd that assaulted the Capitol, seeking to overturn the election — the pattern hasn’t changed one whit. There are a handful of GOP critics who have taken their leader to task, while the vast majority of Republicans have stayed silent, sought to deflect Trump’s sedition by changing the subject, and absolutely refused to hold him accountable.

(The pattern looks different but only because of a handful of names, including four Senators: Mitt Romney, Pat Toomey, Lisa Murkowski, and Ben Sasse. Yes, their voices have our attention, but this is still a small number of Republicans. Turning to the House, few Republicans — Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger stand out — have objected to Trump’s anti-democratic rampaging.)

Look no further than House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. On Friday, he issued a statement that condemned “the violence, destruction, and chaos that unfolded at the Capitol on Wednesday” as “unacceptable, undemocratic, and un-American.” He said he had spoken with Trump (after the rioting had unfolded) to advise him that “he had a great responsibility to intervene to quell the mob and start the healing process.”

There is no further reference to Donald Trump in McCarthy’s statement, no suggestion that Trump paused to consider McCarthy’s advice, and not a hint that the President bears any responsibility for the violence he encouraged. McCarthy (with most Republicans) has let Donald Trump off the hook.

The Minority Leader hasn’t acknowledged that the rioters were Trump supporters of all stripes, from (what passes for) mainstream Republicans to fringe groups and true believers who revere the President.

Donald Trump has waged a months-long campaign to challenge the integrity of the election; to hurl baseless charges of fraud; to press, through established legal channels as well as through rogue, illegal, and corrupt efforts without precedent in American history, to overturn a democratic election. After Georgia officials refused to bend to Trump’s will, he turned to the ceremonial certification of the Electoral College vote in Congress. While Vice President Pence declined to play along with the Trump script, and a violent mob could only delay the count, Senate and House Republicans got on board to challenge the results in several battleground states that Trump lost.

McCarthy’s January 8 statement acknowledges none of this, though I submit that Trump’s campaign has been “unacceptable, undemocratic, and un-American,” the tactics of a wannabe strongman, not the elected leader of a free country. McCarthy doesn’t acknowledge that Donald Trump bears the least responsibility for any of this.

McCarthy’s statement appeals to President-elect Joe Biden to “work together to lower the temperature and unite the country to solve America’s challenges.” And he doesn’t spare high-flown rhetoric in his statement:

The coronavirus is still coursing through our communities, businesses and workers are facing unprecedented stress, and children are falling behind. Threats from adversaries such as Russia, China, and Iran are increasing. As leaders, we must call on our better angels and refocus our efforts on working directly for the American people. United we can deliver peace, strength, and prosperity our country needs. Divided, we will fail.

In a statement a day earlier, the Majority Leader acknowledged his role in casting doubt on the integrity of the election. He noted that “millions of Americans” questioned that integrity, without referencing the role of the President, Congressional Republicans, and conservative media in spreading lies. He further proclaimed the challenges served “to ensure that our country follows an accurate and accountable process.” He doesn’t note that after the Trump mob trashed the Capitol, McCarthy (and 139 of his House colleagues, plus 8 Senators, Republicans all) returned to the chamber to challenge the integrity — without any factual basis — of the election results in Pennsylvania.

Never mind McCarthy’s role in the campaign to delegitimize the election; never mind doubts about the sincerity of his appeal to unity. What is indisputable is that McCarthy declines to ascribe responsibility to Donald Trump for either the welter of lies regarding the election or the full-court press to overturn the results.

In the Senate, Marco Rubio’s stance is instructive. While Rubio, a perennial weathervane in the Republican caucus, stood with the majority of his colleagues in rejecting the challenges, he is not prepared to hold Donald Trump responsible for his anti-democratic crusade. Instead, Rubio has decided to change the subject. He has gone on a tear, first criticizing Biden’s comments — which “makes everybody blow up and go back in their corner” — and which equally characterized Rubio, who never left his corner. Then the next day he turned his attention to a perennial Republican grievance: Rubio tweeted that Twitter, in banning Trump, would “only stoke new grievances that will end up fueling the very thing they claim to be trying to prevent,” another charge that applies equally to Rubio and his tweets.

Senator Rubio, like Kevin McCarthy, is loath to even nod to the possibility of holding Donald Trump accountable.

We shall see, if and when the Democratic House moves to impeach Donald Trump, what fraction of Republicans acknowledge Trump’s role in delegitimizing and seeking to overturn a free and fair election, which culminated in the attack on the Capitol. I suggest — based on recent history — that there will be no more than a handful.

January 11 updates: David Frum called out Rubio for a hedged and contorted statement on the violence in the senator’s 4-minute “blame-everybody-but-me video” (which I hadn’t seen) that “joined 20 seconds of forthright condemnation to nearly four full minutes of blame shifting and excuse making.” The video consists of shameless grievance-mongering. There are two passing references to Donald Trump, but the principal blame for the attack on the Capitol falls on Trump’s and Rubio’s political opponents.

Jonathan Bernstein weighed in on Republicans’ retreat “to the flimsiest of defenses against impeachment and removal,” defenses that “say nothing about whether the president is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, and nothing about whether his offenses are so grave that they demand the extraordinary action of impeachment and removal in the last days of his term. Surely that’s what matters, not whether standing up for the republic is divisive or hurts the feelings of those who oppose it.”

(Image: Sky News.)

2020 General Election, Democracy, Off the Rails, Republicans

An unhinged President continues his efforts to overthrow the free and fair election that he lost

With fewer than 16 days left in his term, Donald Trump continues to try to wheedle, bully, beseech, and whine his way into staying in office beyond January 20, when Joe Biden is sworn in — as revealed in the recording of an hour long phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (reminiscent of his call to Ukrainian President Zelensky).

“We won very substantially in Georgia. You even see it by rally size, frankly. We’d be getting 25-30,000 people a rally, and the competition would get less than 100 people. And it never made any sense.”

In addition to rally size, Trump made many disparate appeals — to rumors, social media trends, conspiracy theories, and lies, none of which were grounded in fact, evidence, or reason.

A rambling Trump brought up 250-300,000 mysteriously lost ballots; a couple hundred thousand forged signatures; the promise of providing an accurate number – in the 50s of thousands – “with certified accountants”; 4,504 voters who weren’t registered; 18,325 vacant address voters; 904 with only post office box numbers; a burst water main (and vanishing Republican poll watchers); suitcases or trunks with ballots, rather than official ballot boxes; 4,925 out-of-state voters; 2,326 absentee ballots with addresses, but no names; drop boxes that were picked up, but not delivered for three days according to affidavits from many people; ballots dropped in massive numbers; close to 5,000 ballots from dead people; 300,000 fake ballots; 3,000 pounds of shredded ballots; a big issue with Dominion removing voting machines, or replacing the internal parts; a person identified on the internet as responsible for 18,000 to 56,000 phony ballots, including a “devastating” new tape showing the ballots fed through voting machines 3 times; and a “corrupt” Fulton County taking advantage of Raffensperger.

The vote margin of Biden’s win — 11,779 — is referenced multiple times, including the ask that Raffensperger somehow, someway find 11,780 votes to put Trump ahead in the count.

Trump reminds the Secretary of State that he is a Republican, calls him a child, objects that the GBI and FBI (who have found no evidence of voter fraud) are “either dishonest or incompetent,” and mocks him: “Stacey Abrams is laughing about you. She’s going around saying these guys are dumber than a rock. What she’s done to this party is unbelievable, I tell ya.”

Trump references “corrupt” ballots, warning Raffensperger:

And you are going to find that they are — which is totally illegal — it is more illegal for you than it is for them because, you know, what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. And that’s a big risk.

Whatever else this call reveals about the pathetic, incoherent, flailing narcissist who sits in the White House, it exposes something else: an abuse of power that clearly constitutes impeachable conduct.

The President of the United States is actively, compulsively (albeit fecklessly) intent on overturning the results of a democratic election.

A majority of the Republican caucus in the House is on board with this theft, including the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, while nine-term member (and former judge), Louie Gohmert, responded to his loss in federal court (where he sought to overturn Trump’s defeat) with these words: “But if bottom line is, the court is saying, ‘We’re not gonna touch this. You have no remedy’ — basically, in effect, the ruling would be that you gotta go to the streets and be as violent as antifa and BLM.”

In the Senate, a dozen Republicans intend to resist Biden’s victory.

A handful of Senate Republicans have spoken out against these attacks on an election that was free and fair, and in which Donald Trump lost decisively. Most prominent among these dissenters are Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse. But most national Republicans are Trump enablers — actively endorsing his conspiracy theories that Biden’s election was fraudulent; pretending that the election is in doubt, while dodging and weaving to avoid embracing the lie that Trump won; or maintaining silence, so as not to offend their vindictive leader.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party pose a grave threat to democratic governance. The GOP is seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, cast aside the votes of millions of Americans, and keep the Republican loser in power. That is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.

A full recording and transcript of the call is available from the Washington Post; the link to the recording in the first paragraph is from Atlanta’s 11Alive on YouTube.

(Screengrab of firefighter extinguishing an arson fire at a ballot drop box in Los Angeles from KCBS report.)

Democracy, Off the Rails, Republicans

Lies, gaffes, inconsistencies, silence, and hiding from the media: the GOP and the election

From this morning’s Los Angeles Times:

To U.S. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, the general election was a resounding success for his party.

“Not one Republican incumbent lost,” McCarthy said during a news conference last week.

Except, of course, President Trump.

Now, more than two weeks after the election and several failed attempts to overturn it, the Bakersfield Republican still refuses to accept Trump’s defeat. — Maya Lau and Laura J. Nelson, “California Republican leaders go all in on Trump’s election subterfuge, but some are more vocal than others”

Not a single California Republican headed to Congress in January has broken ranks from this duplicitous playacting. None have pushed back against the narrative that denies the results of a free and fair election, obstructs the peaceful transition of power, and wounds the incoming president. None have acknowledged Biden as the winner.

Republicans from the Golden State are not outliers. The same pattern is true nationally, where just four United States Senators in the Republican caucus have acknowledged Joe Biden as president-elect: Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sasse, and Susan Collins. 

Until yesterday when Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn did so.  “I have not spoken with the president-elect. We did have… the vice president-elect come to the floor this week to cast a vote.” 

Oops! The Nashville Tennessean reports that following the live interview, the Senator took it back:

Later Friday night, a spokesperson for Blackburn said the comment was a mistake and that Blackburn had “been very clear” on her position about the election outcome. 

“She simply misspoke — it’s nothing more,” said Abigail Sigler, a campaign spokesperson for Blackburn. Blackburn’s Senate staff did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Sigler emailed to clarify after this story published. — Natalie Allison, “Staff of U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn says she misspoke by calling Biden ‘president-elect'”

Of course Senator Blackburn knows perfectly well that Joe Biden was elected president, as do (at least most of) the four dozen Republican Senators (and dozens more Republicans in the House) who are playing along with the reckless man whom they fear. 

They are creating doubts among the GOP base that the Democratic candidate won the election; they are justifying Donald Trump’s attempts to sabotage the incoming president; and they are creating a narrative for the next four years that Joe Biden found his way into the White House illegitimately. 

Senator Blackburn had, in speaking truthfully, committed the classic Michael Kinsley gaffe: she spoke a truth that she wanted to hide. 

When lying (or playacting as though you believe something that you know perfectly well is false), you have to keep your guard up. 

“One of the problems of successful lying is that it’s hard work,” says psychologist Michael Lewis. “You have to be very consistent in doing it.”

In this instance, the lie is far-fetched. There is no evidence to support it (as revealed in courtrooms across the country). The results of the election are clear. Whenever the insecure, vindictive man in the White House isn’t in the forefront of your mind, you might slip — relying on what you take for granted — and speak truthfully. Then you have to send your press secretary out to clean up your mess.

This would be humorous if it weren’t so dangerous. The cynical calculation that runs throughout for every Republican official is this:

“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change.”

As noted above, there are significant downsides to democratic government, to public trust, to the national interest. The question the Republican official is actually asking is: What’s the downside for me and for the Republican Party?

And when we focus on party, not country, the question answers itself. That’s why Kevin McCarthy, Marsha Blackburn, and very nearly all their colleagues in both houses of Congress, are humoring Donald Trump.

(Image: Marsha Blackburn via Wikidmedia Commons.)

Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans

GOP response to facts damning to Trump: denial, diversion, accusations & embrace of victimhood

When the facts are damning, do anything you can to detract attention from those facts. Three experienced Republican leaders — House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Freedom Caucus-founder Jim Jordan, and Senator Lindsey Graham, always ready to flatter the President with contortions and contrivances — demonstrate how to avoid offering a simple, straightforward answer to an inconvenient question.

Watching the videos (linked to the tweets) is a lesson in subterfuge as practiced by a Republican Party too fearful of the President to acknowledge wrongdoing. Observe Congress’s most vocal defenders of Trump in action on mainstream television:

1. Leader McCarthy listens to Scott Pelley read one of the most talked about exchanges from the memo on Trump’s phone call to President Zelensky.

McCarthy responds: “Well, you just added another word.” Pelley assures him that the word “is in the White House transcript.”

McCarthy pivots and begins a reply, “When I read the transcript …,” by repeating talking points that Republicans distributed last week to Members of Congress. While McCarthy denies having seen those talking points, it’s obvious from his comment about the “added” word that he hasn’t read the transcript — or hasn’t retained what he read. (Not ready for prime time.)

2. Jake Tapper interviews Congressman Jim Jordan, one of the most aggressive practitioners of deflection and whataboutism in the House.

Tapper: I understand you want to change the subject, but the President was pushing the president of Ukraine to investigate a political rival. I cannot believe that that is okay with you. I can’t believe it’s okay with you.

Jordan: It’s not okay because — but he didn’t do that.

Tapper: … It’s in the transcript. We all read it.

Jordan: I read the transcript.

But of course, if he has, he doesn’t want to talk about it. Instead, he throws out accusations against the Bidens, whines about Trump’s victimhood at the hands of the FBI, but — talking fast and loud — won’t acknowledge the simple facts related straightforwardly in the White House transcript. (Finally Tapper has had enough and concludes the interview.)

3. And, last but not least, the Senator from South Carolina: Among the highlights of the interview with Margaret Brennan, is Graham’s complaint about hearsay (“a second hand account,” as the GOP talking point puts it).

Bennan points out that the whistleblower’s account has been confirmed by the White House transcript of the call. The facts don’t matter to Graham. He invokes hearsay multiple times, makes the false claim that “they changed the rules” about hearsay and whistleblowers, and — like Jordan — offers a long diatribe about Trump being persecuted. (And nary a glance at the facts that have been confirmed already.)

(Image: Steely Dan’s Pretzel Logic album cover.)