Kevin McCarthy's ‘Victory’ Comes With A Terrible Price

It took four days and 15 votes for Kevin McCarthy to finally be elected the Speaker of the House, and during the course of these votes, McCarthy gave up virtually every power that the Speaker could have to the extremists in his Party. The moderates will now be pushed out of the ranks, and the extremists will have the ability to bring whatever legislation or investigations forward that they choose. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses McCarthy's capitulation and what it means for this Congress.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

So Kevin McCarthy, of course, is now the speaker of the house today. They're gonna go and vote on all the new rules, packages and let us know exactly how horrible this new Congress is going to be. But the concessions that McCarthy made in order to become speaker already tell us how terrible things will be under Republican rule. First and foremost, one of the big concessions that McCarthy made in order to win this speakership was allowing any member on the Republican side, of course, to put up an objection and call for a vote to oust McCarthy as the speaker. You don't have to have a quorum, you just have to have one deranged individual, angry at Kevin McCarthy who walks down on the floor that day and says, you know what? Let's do all of this all over again. I move to remove Kevin McCarthy as the house speaker, Kevin McCarthy agreed to that, that is now part of their rules that will be voted upon today, and it's going to cause a lot of drama as we move forward, because all these holdouts that you still had with McCarthy, you know, the ones who still wouldn't support him in the end, those are the ones that we can likely look for objections from.

Now, that's just a silly procedural. Kevin McCarthy may regret doing that type of rule. A couple of the other concessions he made, one of them, of course, was like a balanced budget, uh, agreement, I guess you could call it, which basically says, if we come to a, an agreement on the debt ceiling, which they're gonna have to do that very soon, uh, we're gonna have to cut Social Security and Medicare. So basically, you wanna increase the debt of this country, fine will play along, but we're going to cut those social safety net programs because screw 'em. I guess, I mean, honest to God, I can't come up with a good rational reason why Republicans would want to cut Social Security in Medicare. I mean, those are your constituents. That is literally your largest voting block. That depends on those government programs that people pay into their entire working lives. They truly are entitled to that money, and you want to take it away from them. Why they, nobody's ever really been able to answer that question of why. And, and I think all too often, reporters who get the chance to talk to these people, don't ask them that question of why you are going to screw over your own voters. Why be because they like it, because they deserve to be punished or because deep down you just actually hate them. We, I guess, don't know.

Another concession that McCarthy, of course made was allowing some of the more extreme members of the Freedom Caucus to basically be guaranteed cushy positions on committees, which means you're gonna have fewer moderates on important committees and more of the extremists, which could include the intelligence committee, the Ways and Means committee, the uh, uh, uh, judiciary committee. All of the committees that are really gonna go out there, make decisions about everything that happens, whether it's foreign policy, domestic policy, investigations, the extremists are going to hold those gavels. There's a couple other concessions that he made. Those are, you know, a little less impactful. But the big thing is that we can expect cuts to Social security and Medicare from these Republicans. We can expect probably even more investigations than we were already anticipating.