An Open Letter To Speaker McCarthy. Do Your Job. Govern. They’re “All Hat And No Cattle”

Dear Squeaker McCarthy,

Welcome back to work, I hope you enjoyed your vacation. I must admit, I’m jealous, I had to work for United Airlines for 15 years before I got six weeks of vacation a year. You guys get that just in one chunk.

But now it’s back to work, and to the First Law Of Work, The more things change, the more they stay the same. The Freedom Caucus was on your ass like a pair of Fruit-of-the-Looms when you left in early August, and they’re still there right now. Hopefully you washed them in the last six weeks.

I have a friendly word of common sense advice for you, and in all honesty I would have thought you’d have figured it out by now, since you used to be one of them. Ignore the Freedom Caucus! They’re a pain in the ass, and that’s all. Like swallowing ocean water while swimming, all they do is to leave a bad taste in your mouth.

The Freedom caucus came to power in the Tea Party Rebellion of 2010. At the zenith of their influence they numbered about 60 members, not even 1/3 of the GOP caucus. And they have never been anything other than an obstructive pain in the ass for the GOP majority. That’s why you, Paul Ryan, and Eric Cantor ditched them like a smoking habit for better advancement potential in the caucus.

The bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus is just about as large right now as the Freedom caucus. But the Problem Solvers caucus has actually passed legislation through the House. The only two actual accomplishments that the Freedom caucus can claim neither have anything to do with legislation. They hammered then GOP House Speaker John Boehner so mercilessly that he actually sang Zippedy-Do-Dah as he climbed the podium to flip them double barrel birds as he announced his early retirement. And they likely forced GOP successor Paul Ryan to start using Grecian Formula about 10 years early.

Blame yourself. You committed the cardinal sin of politics. You negotiated with the terrorists. Make no mistake Speaker McCarthy, the Freedom caucus never had a viable alternative candidate to you. They were like a 4 year old in the back seat of a car constantly repeating Are we there yet? All you had to do was wait them out until they got bored and fell asleep. Instead you sold your soul.

Here’s the good news. No harm, no foul. After all, if you sell your soul to the Devil, and he doesn’t have the means or skill to take it, you pulled one over on him. And that’s what you did with the Freedom Caucus. The simple fact of the matter is that they can threaten to fire you all they want, but they can’t pull it off, and worse yet, they know it. As Lawrence Sanders character PI Timothy Cone once told a mob bodyguard he had confronted, You could shoot me, but I don’t think you will. Touph guys act, they don’t talk. That gun is staying right where it is. That’s why the Freedom caucus is screaming so loud, screaming is all they can do.

And the fact is, you’ve already beaten them once. It’s why they’re so pissed off at you now. Those political performance artists actually wanted to drive the bus over the fiscal cliff, just to hurt Biden’s poll numbers, and you cut a deal with Biden instead. Why? Because you had the numbers in the moderate caucus to pull it off with Democratic support. Teabagger bomb throwers screamed for your head, but they never even bothered to file the Motion to vacate the chair. Because they didn’t have the numbers.

And they still don’t, no matter how dark the threats, they can’t remove you as Speaker, and they know it, especially the Gruesome Twosome, Wood Chip Roy and Machine Gun Marjie. Personally I think your best political move is to teach them a lesson. Let the 2 year old’s touch the hot stove on September 30th and shut down the government. And then, when the sh*t dumps down on their heads, wait until about October 3rd or 4th, and cut a deal for a continuing resolution that takes us through the end of the year. They won’t want to pull another government shutdown in an election year, they’re counting on 13 months between October and next November for people to forget the whole thing.

Here’s why I keep saying that you literally can’t lose if you just have the cajones to do the job right and govern. You may not have noticed, since you’re so busy trying to juggle those 30 balls in the air, but you already have a 20 member caucus of moderate Republicans in highly competitive districts in New York state that have already signed a petition asking for bad boy George Santos to be expelled from the House, to give them a fighting chance in 2024. The last thing they need is a maniac engineered government shutdown to have to explain to their constituents.

The last I checked, the constitution of the House was 222-212 in your favor. You can’t do a budget, since mental midget Chip Roy would bung it up in the Rules Committee. But you would have no problem whatsoever getting at least five of those moderate conservatives to join all the Democrats to pass a straight continuing resolution to make this go away. And the more moderate GOP votes you can get, the more protest votes from far left Democrats you can lose, and the greater your bipartisan passage of the resolution, which is what the vast majority of the country wants.

The same logic goes for any possible Motion to vacate the Chair. And the funny thing here is that the logic for both the moderate GOP members, and the Democratic caucus is exactly the same, Better the Devil you know, than the Devil you don’t. Use your head Mr. Speaker. Through 14 rounds of voting you never failed by more than a handful of votes. The Freedom caucus even rotated opposition names to embarrass you. The majority of the caucus has always been behind you. And do you honestly thing that either the moderate GOP caucus or the Democratic caucus want to ponder on the prospect of a Speaker Jordan, Speaker Gaetz, Speaker Roy, or Speaker Taylor Greene? Or the prospect of what could literally be weeks of GOP impotence and dysfunction while endless votes are held for a new Speaker?

Look Speaker McCarthy, the Freedom caucus elected you as the Speaker of the House simply because they didn’t have a viable replacement they could get 218 votes for. And they still don’t. Wouldn’t it be ironic if five or more moderate GOP members crossed the aisle and voted for a Speaker Jeffries?, and put the final nail in the Teabagger caucus? Honor your oath. Be an honest broker. Do your job. Let the chips fall where they may, if nothing else you maintain your dignity. Besides, do you want to keep getting sand kicked in your face for the next 14 months?