QUID PRO QUO: McCarthy considering a back door move to satiate Trump

Let’s juxtapose the many versions of  Kevin McCarthy that seem to be running around out there, judging solely by his comments.

Here’s Kevin McCarthy on January 6, 2021, to Norah O’Donnell, around 3:30 PM, as Trump’s attackers were still ransacking the Capitol:

“I was very clear with the President when I called him. This has to stop. And he has to, he’s gotta go to the American public and tell them to stop this.”

And here’s Kevin McCarthy on January 13, 2021, the day of Donald Trump’s second impeachment:

“The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.”

Now, here’s Kevin McCarthy this past Thursday, when asked if he would consider a motion to expunge one or both of Donald Trump’s impeachments:

“[W]e’d look at it.”

The speaker also made sure to go on a rant about how unfairly the last Republican president was treated, echoing Trump’s rhetoric condemning the FBI and the “weaponization” of the Department of Justice.

To be accurate, McCarthy has always equivocated.

Even after condemning Trump’s actions on the floor of the House, he still voted against impeaching him.

I mean, he also voted against certifying the 2020 election, so if you’re going to go anti-democratic, why not run the full gamut?

He even made sure to race down to Mar-a-Lago later that month after Trump had finally packed up all of his shit and at last left the White House, so that he could take a photo with Dirty Donald just to show everyone that he was still the seditious ex-president’s #1 sycophant.

So we know that McCarthy has been acting like a low-class leech all his life – there’s nothing new there.

But now we’re truly seeing the extent that he’ll go to in order to please the man who was making last-minute phone calls to make sure McCarthy secured the speakership.

To be clear: it’s hard to say what effect an “expunging” of an impeachment would have.

The supposedly wise Founders seemed to have never anticipated that possibility, and what would it actually mean anyhow?

Since there were already two trials in the Senate, would those now vanish, as Warden Norton in The Shawshank Redemption would say, “like a fart in the wind?”

It may be that this procedural reach-around will just be symbolic and nothing more. But it would certainly say something to Trump, who would lap it up and never let us live it down.

Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) recently summed up the GOP’s strategy well:

BREAKING: MAGA Speaker Kevin McCarthy announces that he will "look" into "expunging" Donald Trump's two impeachments — which would be a green light for future Republicans to attempt their own insurrectionist coups. RT IF YOU THINK THAT TRUMP DESERVED TO BE IMPEACHED!

— Occupy Democrats (@OccupyDemocrats) January 13, 2023

Interesting, is it not, that out of all the things in our history in need of correcting, Republicans seem to center on poor, defenseless Donald Trump, who never did anything wrong and never got a single break in life, right?

We cannot talk about injustices to black people or Native Americans or the poor without setting off the Republican cancel culture alarms, but if you want to talk about the supposed persecution of a rich white guy who never sacrificed anything of himself, they’re all ears.

So this is what we can expect from the Republican House: a picture painted of Donald Trump as some persecuted martyr while Hunter Biden is obviously the antichrist.

We’ll get endless hearings, mostly about nonsense, and there will be party-wide amnesia about what happened on January 6, 2021, when the mob violence Trump incited brought about five deaths and hundreds of injuries, not to mention the damage to our collective reputation.

The true purpose of the GOP's new “investigate the investigators” committee?

To undermine legitimate probes of Trump and 1/6 – which implicate the committee's own members.

Kevin McCarthy sacrificed a lot to be Speaker. Our democracy and national security most of all. pic.twitter.com/RjZbeoSKjZ

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) January 10, 2023

And let’s not forget as well that Trump’s first impeachment was about his purposeful delay of weapons to Ukraine, which undoubtedly also caused a significant amount of avoidable deaths.

But those were foreigners, so good luck getting Republicans to care.

It’s a shame and a joke that Trump was not convicted in the Senate and a shame and a joke that he’s not in prison now for his vast multitude of crimes.

Even Boss Tweed was eventually sent away. Yet Trump still roams free.

Let’s not add insult to injury by having our lower house of government lower itself to kiss Trump’s ample bottom.

And if we’re going to expunge anything, let’s start with our chocolate éclair-backboned speaker, undoubtedly a political melanoma.

To hear the hurtful truth and maybe have some laughs at the GOP’s expense, follow Ross on Twitter by clicking on @RossRosenfeld.

Ross Rosenfeld

Latest Posts