Murc’s law as farce

AOC cuts right to the heart of the matter:

Contrary to how McCarthy’s defenders are behaving, men failing up is not a Constitutionally protected right.

The man made risky decisions and faced the natural consequences of them. I am not his mom, and my job is not to put pool noodles around hard corners for Republicans.— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 4, 2023

McCarthy made a very explicit decision to offer Democrats this to stay in office: nothing. That he expected them to bail him out anyway because Murc’s Law is a very real presumption is his problem, not that of the Democratic caucus. He made the decision to make it as easy as possible for a handful of MAGA goons to fire him and then behaved as if the old rules were still in place.

Another thing that is not pointed out nearly enough about McCarthy (and his media mouthpieces and reflexive both-siders) taking Democratic support for granted is that such support never happens, ever:

Anyway, back to office politics. Rothman and others need to be clear on the precedent here. Minority parties always vote unanimously against the majority party’s candidate for Speaker. There are no exceptions. If Democrats had done otherwise, it would have been unprecedented.

So was unprecedented action called for? Let’s roll the tape:

• Kevin McCarthy was one of the first Republicans to make a U-turn on the January 6th insurrection and deny that anything wrong happened.
• McCarthy negotiated a spending level of $1.59 trillion for discretionary programs during the debt ceiling standoff. Within days he reneged on that and demanded a much lower spending level.
• He did the same dozens of times, agreeing on some legislation or other and then immediately reneging under pressure from the MAGA wing of his party.
• He made a handshake deal with President Biden to provide more funding for Ukraine. Practically before he made it back to the Capitol he had reneged on that.
• He promised he wouldn’t open an impeachment inquiry without a full vote of the House, and then did it anyway on his own.
• He took a bipartisan National Defense Authorization Act that passed 58-1 in the House Armed Services Committee and larded it up with right-wing poison pills that then passed only on a pure partisan vote and never had any chance of passing the Senate.
• At the end, McCarthy offered nothing to Democrats as a token of good faith and even said he didn’t expect any of their votes.

McCarthy betrayed Democrats over and over and over. It’s hard to see that they owed McCarthy anything, let alone that the circumstances were so unique that Democrats should have broken 200 years of tradition to interfere in the caucus matters of another party.

Nothing about McCarthy’s actions even hinted that he was trying to seek completely unprecedented Democratic support to maintain his speakership, and he got what he deserved and what anyone less incompetent than McCarthy would have known what was coming.