Kitten McCarthy Tries Growing Claws. Question Is, Does He Know How To Scratch?

Well, this is cute. President Joe Biden was in college on the day that Kevin McCarthy was born. McCarthy was in 1st grade on the day Biden took his 1st oath of office for the US House. And now the Howdy Doody Speaker wants to go mano-a-mano on the deficit against a man who has been in US government damn near as long as McCarthy has been alive. What could go wrong?

Biden almost seems to be enjoying himself, not just at the potentially suicidal matchup for the GOP, but with McCarthy’s woefully inadequate stance as to what he’s even bargaining for. In the lead up to todays meeting, in response to a question shouted by a reporter, Biden grinned and said, I’ll show him my budget, and he can show me his. Then we can talk. McCarthy’s pathetic Twitter response was pure sulk, I’m not going to the White House to talk, I’m going to negotiate on behalf of the American people. Oh, Princess, you are so ugly when you pout!

And while I can’t say that I sympathize with McCarthy, I can understand where’s he’s coming from. And it’s no place good. McCarthy is allegedly in charge of a fractured majority with razor thin margins. And thanks to his feckless negotiations in order to become Speaker, they’ve got him on a choker chain.

And the composition sucks. It stretches from a small but critical moderate caucus that actually wants to govern and solve problems, all the way to a nihilist gang who want, to quote Al Capone in The Untouchables, I want to burn the House to the ground! I want to go in the middle of the night and piss on the ashes! Little wonder that McCarthy showed up empty handed at the White House today, not even a 12 pack, some Doritos, and salsa.

Not only are they incoherent, they can’t even agree on the basics. On the one hand, the moderate conservatives want a clean debt ceiling increase, budget cuts can come later. On the other side, the ruling Freedom caucus want, if I understand it correctly, which is sketchy given  GOP rhetoric, dollar-for-dollar budget cuts from mandatory spending programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security for an increase in the debt ceiling. Oh yeah, and they want no reduction to defense spending.

That lasted about a week. But when Republican bomb throwers started hearing from their frost top constituents like me, sane senior leadership for the GOP came out and hurriedly announced that Social Security and Medicare cuts were off the table. This new stance puts the GOP House in an untenable position.

In his hilarious and insightful book Parliament of Whores, conservative pundit and author PJ O’Rourke summed up the GOP’s current woes perfectly. By far and away the largest drivers of deficit spending are the mandatory spending programs, Medicare and Social Security, along with the military budget. O’Rourke nailed it perfectly when he said that without The Big Three, any deficit reduction attempts, whether Republican or Democratic, were reduced to a political fiscal exercise similar to looking for loose change under the sofa cushions. They concentrate on puny spuds like the Moherd subsidies, and the Beekeepers exemptions, which don’t amount to jack shit in the totality of the federal budget. I agree with O’Rourke when he said that any cut worth less that half a billion dollars was chump change, and not worth the effort as far as deficit reform was concerned.

That’s how McCarthy wandered into the West Wing today. But I’m sure that McCarthy did the best he could. In an earlier article, I said that when it came to George Santos, McCarthy made lemonade out of lemons. He did the same thing today, I believe with an assist from Biden. When asked by reporters about the meeting, Biden was taciturn, saying only It was a productive meeting, and I look forward to talking to the Speaker again. When McCarthy was asked the same question outside of the White House, his reply was intriguing, Look guys, I’m not going to negotiate deficit reduction terms in the media. I’ll negotiate directly with the President, on behalf of the American people.

Oooohhh. Red lights and warning bells should be going off in the Freedom caucus right now. I can already see where this is going. McCarthy has a totally unruly caucus on his hands. Therefore, he’ll continue to make bellicose statements about what a hard ass he’s being, and then go to the White House and negotiate in good faith. The object is crystal clear. McCarthy needs to negotiate some kind of superfluous deficit reductions that he can take back to his caucus to show what a hardass he is. The goal is to get at least 100 sane GOP members to sign on, making it worth the Democrats time and trouble to bail him out. Biden’s no dummy. He’ll meet McCarthy halfway, agreeing to common sense non critical programs and waste they can cut, letting McCarthy save face, and then Biden will tell the House Democratic caucus to vote for it. Biden wins too by looking bipartisan.

McCarthy is trying to grow claws by working directly with Biden without the Freedom caucuses input. The question is, Will they let him get away with it? Or do Sugar Daddy Matt Gaetz and Machine Gun Marjie do what every paranoid sociopath does, and assign a sherpa to go with McCarthy to the White House, and make sure their best interests are represented?

My analysis is that they let him get away with it. My analysis is that Gaetz and Greene are no different from mental midgets like Florida Governor Ron Pissantis. They’re performance artists. Their entire purpose in life in life is to make outrageous statements and threats to increase their FUX News facetime and campaign donations, and then 10 days later make another outrageous statement to make their sheeple forget the last one. They’ll do the same thing here.

When McCarthy has at least some deficit reduction cuts to show, and once he has enough solid GOP support to ensure a firmly bipartisan passage, the Freedom caucus will lick its nuts by voting no, and then bellow about how sniveling, ineffective Kevin’s Speakership is now officially on probation. GOP performance art.

According to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin, it will be the 1st or 2nd week of June before the government literally runs out of money and defaults on its debt. In my estimate, that means that we can look forward to more of this infantile bullshit until the early to middle part of April, because the US congress only actually performs when there’s a hard deadline involved. Then you’ll see an increase in serious negotiations between McCarthy and Biden, and increased howler monkey screeching from the Freedom caucus. Welcome to the political Kabuki.