Former House Speaker Pot returned to Capitol Hill Tuesday, carrying an important message: His GOP kettle rivals, the ones that drove him from office? Yeah, it turns out they’re all black.
When I talk of former House Speaker Pot, I mean, of course, the now ex-congressman from California and once-upon-a-time House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who found time in his busy schedule of taking his ball and going home to return to Capitol Hill and slam some of the lawmakers that led to his downfall.
According to The Hill, McCarthy — a man who was credibly accused, in his final wilderness days in Congress, of surreptitiously elbowing a fellow Republican who voted against him in the kidneys while said Republican was doing an interview — used the visit to Washington to declare that another one of his opponents apparently needed professional help.
And, just because it wouldn’t be a full day without it, McCarthy also speculated wildly on Rep. Matt Gaetz’s sex life, without proffering evidence to back up that speculation, because why the heck not?
In an interview that couldn’t have made Republicans more happy that GOP Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson is now the House speaker had McCarthy calculated it to end up that way, McCarthy said that South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace needed help to “straighten out her life.”
Mace was one of what McCarthy dubbed the “crazy eight led by Gaetz” — eight Republican lawmakers who forced McCarthy to hand over the speaker’s gavel after he reached a temporary spending agreement with Democrats that could more accurately be described as a wearied capitulation.
McCarthy suddenly found renewed vigor after conservative Republicans abandoned him and no Democrats would come to his aid to preserve his speakership, but alas — a day late, a few trillion dollars short.
Mace, who started out as a centrist when she was first elected in 2020 but has become increasingly more conservative, “is facing a tough primary challenge from her former chief of staff and reportedly suffers from an office staff in turmoil,” The Hill noted.
“I hope Nancy gets the help she needs, I really do,” McCarthy said.
Should Kevin McCarthy have been voted out as speaker?
“I just hope she gets the help to straighten out her life. I mean, she’s got a lot of challenges.”
“No one will stay working for her,” he added. “You can’t have somebody who just flips and flops based upon what TV station she gets put on. You want someone who’s willing to work, and so I hope she gets that kind of help.”
Yes, she’s clearly a woman in need of guidance, says the very stable man who later stated, without any supporting evidence, that Rep. Gaetz, the Florida Republican who led the charge to oust McCarthy as speaker in October, was a reckless philanderer.
“He probably lies about who he sleeps with,” McCarthy said of Gaetz.
Stay classy, Kevin. Stay classy.
Nor, in fact, is this the only evidence that McCarthy is about as stable as the wooden tower two hours into a drunken game of Jenga.
In November, NPR reported that, while the tote-bag-and-propaganda outlet was doing an interview with GOP Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett, another “crazy eight” member, in the Capitol, McCarthy sucker-elbowed him in the kidneys.
NPR described what transpired thusly: “McCarthy shoved past Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., as he was speaking with NPR’s Claudia Grisales in a hallway. Burchett stumbled forward and yelled after McCarthy, ‘Why’d you elbow me in the back, Kevin?! Hey, Kevin, you got any guts?!’
“Burchett then called McCarthy a ‘jerk’ and chased him down the hallway. When he caught up to him, he said, ‘What kind of chicken move is that? You’re pathetic, man. You are so pathetic.’”
McCarthy said it was a “tight hallway” and “I guess our shoulders hit.”
The plot thickens. Kevin McCarthy denies delivering a “clean shot to the kidneys” on Rep. Tim Burchett as alleged payback over Speakership ouster:
“I guess our shoulders hit. I did not run and hit the guy. I did not kidney punch him.” pic.twitter.com/zQSXXn1O2m
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) November 14, 2023
Burchett said otherwise: “He got me, right in the kidneys. I mean, I’ve had that before,” Burchett told Newsmax. “I’m not going to the hospital or I’m not filing an ethics complaint on him … it’s just who he is, and it’s unfortunate.”
As for Gaetz, McCarthy has said he “belongs in jail” and is “psychotic … People study that type of crazy mind, right? Mainly the FBI.”
But no: Rep. Nancy Mace really needs to get her life together. Spoken from a man who has his personal house in order like he had the House of Representatives in order.
The Hill reached out to Mace’s office for a response, but as of Wednesday, hadn’t heard from her. And why bother, when your opponent is willing to self-own like this?
Gaetz, a more talkative sort of fellow, was willing to get a humorous kidney-shot in about comments McCarthy made regarding the Florida lawmaker’s standing with the Republican presidential front-runner: “The ghost of Christmas past visited us here in the halls of the Capitol and Kevin McCarthy apparently said that I wasn’t as well liked by President Trump as I thought, but I recall President Trump asking me to go campaign for him in Iowa and New Hampshire,” Gaetz said.
“And there’s a reason President Trump hasn’t asked Kevin McCarthy to go campaign for him anywhere. It’s because on almost any stage in the Trump campaign, Kevin McCarthy would be booed off of it.”
But that’s just because former House Speaker Pot has Got It All Together™ and seen the light. The crazy black kettles who voted him out of a gavel — man, they’re the ones who need help.
