Category: Kevin mccarthy
‘Canary in a coal mine’: Ousted speaker warns against the rising risk of GOP House resignations
Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) warned that political breakups might become more commonplace in the Republican Party.
McCarthy’s prediction comes after Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia announced that she will retire from the House in January before finishing her congressional term. This announcement followed a public falling-out with longtime ally President Donald Trump.
‘I’ve found Marjorie to be very effective.’
Despite being one of Trump’s most loyal supporters on Capitol Hill, Greene said their falling-out was over her commitment to releasing the Epstein files, which the White House later supported. Other reports suggested that the split came after the White House squashed Greene’s political aspirations beyond the House of Representatives.
“She’s leaving Congress, but I don’t think that’s the end that you’ll see about her,” McCarthy said.
RELATED: Marjorie Taylor Greene calls it quits after ‘traitor’ branding by Trump
Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
“I’ve always believed that any time you have an elected official that’s known by three initials, they’re effective on what they do,” McCarthy added. “And I’ve found Marjorie to be very effective.”
McCarthy, who is all too familiar with having one’s political career cut short by MAGA world, said Greene’s resignation may be the first of many unless Congress changes course.
“She’s almost like a canary in a coal mine,” McCarthy said. “And this is something inside Congress. They better wake up, because they’re going to get a lot of people retiring, and they gotta focus.”
RELATED: Marjorie Taylor Greene says she has received violent threats — and blames Trump
Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
McCarthy also noted that the infighting ultimately takes away from a very small window of time in which Republicans hold the ultimate political advantage: a trifecta majority.
“I think keeping members out of Congress, you only get two years to be in the majority,” McCarthy said. “And if the Democrats get you not to work every day for two months, that’s losing two months of the majority.”
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Why the post-Pelosi Democratic Party seems directionless
Earlier this month, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced her retirement after nearly four decades of public service. As Democrats say goodbye to one of their last remaining operatives to actually effectuate change, the party is left directionless.
The extent of Democratic leadership has now been reduced to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York. Both figures have repeatedly struggled to balance the progressives and the establishment moderates, with the most recent shutdown fiasco serving as a prime example.
‘We all need to take a very big dose of humility.’
Onlookers on both sides of the aisle largely agree that the undisciplined messaging and disorganized strategy would never have taken place when Pelosi held the gavel.
With no obvious leader to follow in Pelosi’s footsteps, the Democratic Party has become more undisciplined and rudderless than ever before.
RELATED: ‘Rebellion’? Democrat lawmakers urge federal agents to resist Trump agenda in cringe video
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“She’s an all-time great speaker because all other tools that speakers had to discipline or motivate legislators were not available to her,” said Dheeraj Chand, a Democratic strategist and pollster with Siege Analytics, of Pelosi.
“She has no whip. She has no carrot. All that she has left is persuasive power, and she held that entire group of imbeciles together using nothing but persuasive power,” Chand told Blaze News. “No small feat.”
The latest instance of intraparty insubordination took place when 23 House Democrats chose to rebuke one of their own. The unusual reprimand came after Democratic Rep. Chuy Garcia of Illinois was censured by nearly all Republicans and several Democrats, with Democratic Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington authoring the condemnation.
Garcia, a retiring Democrat, was censured after he set up his chief of staff to be the lone Democrat on the primary ballot to succeed him in his deep-blue district, a move which Gluesenkamp Perez called “election subversion.”
“Both parties are finding it increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to lead their respective caucuses in the traditional hierarchical manner,” Len Foxwell, a Democratic strategist based in Maryland, told Blaze News. “We see the example with Representative Garcia as emblematic of the challenges that Democrats face with breakaway members, and we saw during the attenuated leadership tenure of Kevin McCarthy how virtually impossible it is for establishment Republicans to contain the Freedom Caucus.”
“When there’s no leader, it’s not only that there’s no opinion, but there’s nobody calling the shots,” Chand told Blaze News. “When there’s nobody calling the shots, it’s hard to feel like you are playing for a team that can protect you.”
RELATED: Democrat lawmaker faces censure for ‘colluding’ with Epstein during congressional hearing
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In both cases, neither party had a political north star to follow. With former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, President Donald Trump’s command of the party slipped away after former President Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election. In the case of Democrats today, the party is still on the back foot following the colossal electoral rebuke they endured in November 2024 after Kamala Harris stepped in to replace Biden at the top of the ticket.
Some party moderates still believe that “a lot of Democratic voters didn’t come out because they were appalled at the vice president just getting to step in for the president, even though that was her job! Another perceived coronation, from her eyes, is just going to exacerbate the brand problem,” Chand suggested.
“Without a leader, every legislator is responding to what they think is the reason for the loss,” he told Blaze News.
“The Republican leadership chain is much more vertical and much more linear because the party is still led by Donald Trump,” Foxwell told Blaze News. “It is still absolutely Donald Trump’s party, and Mike Johnson toes the Donald Trump line, period full stop. It’s easy when you have an outsized leader at the top to set the substance, the tone, and the stylistic direction of the party.”
“We don’t have that, and we haven’t had it in more than a decade, even with the four-year interim with Joe Biden,” Foxwell added. “He was not what one would consider a strong party leader.”
RELATED: Hakeem Jeffries’ campaign allegedly solicited money from Jeffrey Epstein
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The shortcomings of the directionless Democratic Party culminated on November 4, 2024, when Trump swept all seven swing states and secured impressive electoral gains across nearly every demographic.
“Exit polls are something like tabular tarot cards — you see what you want to see in them. They reveal more about you than they do the world,” Chand told Blaze News. “It’s unreasonable to rely on them too much, but post-election surveys are very, very revealing. This kind of loss is a catastrophe that is decades in the making. It’s bigger than one candidate in 100 days or one term. We lost share with everyone except affluent white people. That’s a Reagan-level defeat [over Walter Mondale], for similar reasons.”
“Right now our party is in the midst of one of its periodic transitions in which the establishment wing is in a battle for primacy with its progressive insurgent wing. It’s taking on philosophical overtones, but also generational ones,” Foxwell told Blaze News. “It’s not just that the old-school leadership represented by Pelosi was perhaps philosophically out of sync with some of these younger, more progressive insurgents, but she also came from a different generation.”
While Republicans comfortably dominate the political landscape, Democrats are trying to find their own identity. New York progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani have emerged as rising stars in their party and as a rebuke to establishment figures like Schumer and even Pelosi. Other figures, like Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and even failed candidate Kamala Harris, seem to be scoping out the competition.
Even with a range of politicians to choose from, the first step Democrats need to take is zoom out and understand their electoral failures.
“Nobody sees this coming,” Chand told Blaze News. “I think we’re going to lose until we win. And when people figure out what it takes, we will win. I think we all need to take a very big dose of humility.”
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