Nancy Pelosi could be facing a demotion
If the GOP can regain control,
Republican Kevin McCarthy is widely believed to
be the guy who will take the reins
as the new Speaker, guiding the GOP's agenda
through Congress.
But who is he?
Kevin McCarthy was born in Bakersfield,
California to working class Democrats.
He likes to tell people that, when he was 19 years old,
he won the California lottery and opened a business.
- [McCarthy] I scratch off my first ticket.
They have six just like it is today, all three
and the most money you could win that was $5,000.
I scratch off three of them and all three say 5,000.
I was able to start a business when I was 19.
- [Narrator] However, a fact check by the Washington Post
notes that the California lottery
wasn't around when McCarthy was 19.
It didn't start until he was just quote:
Regardless of when, or how he got the money to do so,
he did open a sandwich shop.
the deli, aka counter and refrigerator
in someone else's shop,
was located in the back
of his aunt and uncle's yogurt store.
McCarthy called his prescient business
but perhaps "Subway, during Subway" would've worked better,
as there was already a Subway in the same town.
Just 14 years after taking credit for Subway,
McCarthy was on stage at the Republican National Convention,
taking credit for the internet.
- [McCarthy] Al Gore did not invent the internet,
but the young Republicans and whyrock.com revolutionized it.
- [Narrator] While none of these half-truths
are necessarily egregious,
they highlight McCarthy's character
in an all-out effort to stay afloat.
This curious relationship
with the truth didn't hold him back.
And after a stint working for Rep Bill Thomas
he quickly rose through the ranks
of California state politics.
In 2006, McCarthy was elected to the US House
of Representatives, where he's been ever since.
and raised a lot of money along the way.
In a 2015 profile on McCarthy,
the LA Times wrote:
McCarthy's career in politics is an interesting one.
He's not incredibly bombastic like many of his colleagues.
Rather than leading a political movement, he waits
until there is one and latches onto it,
and he's an expert at bridging the gap
between the more fringe members of his party
and the moderate ones, seemingly alienating few,
while keeping both factions happy enough
to pass legislation together.
For years,
but when Trump won over the party,
McCarthy shifted further to the right, at least publicly.
McCarthy loudly went to bat defending Trump's racist tweets,
introduced a bill
that would've fully funded Trump's border wall,
and added his name to a lawsuit trying
to overturn the 2020 election results.
But behind closed doors, it seems McCarthy
had a very different opinion about Trump.
In the aftermath of the deadly January 6th insurrection,
according to a book by two New York Times reporters,
McCarthy told a few of his top Republican colleagues
in a phone call, that he would urge the president to resign
and on the house floor,
said he believed Trump was responsible for the riot.
However, McCarthy claims he never urged Trump to resign.
On Twitter, he wrote that the reporting was
His spokesperson told The New York Times,
But the recording of the conversation says otherwise:
- [Narrator] McCarthy seems to have made it pretty clear
what his position was on Trump and the insurrection
he believed the then-President fueled.
- [Narrator] In response to the recording
on the conversation,
McCarthy said that he just walked through different
scenarios, and that he never thought
that Trump should resign,
which is interesting,
considering he was recorded saying he was thinking
about asking Trump to resign.
- [Narrator] If it's still unclear
where McCarthy really stands,
let's take a look at his actions.
In the 2022 midterms,
a McCarthy-aligned Super PAC spent millions
of dollars backing several mainstream moderate
candidates who were facing Trump-aligned fringe Republicans.
But once many of those far-right candidates prevailed,
despite McCarthy's best efforts to stifle them,
he invited Marjorie Taylor Greene
to the rollout of the GOP's midterms agenda.
She sat directly behind him,
foreshadowing establishment Republicans'
willingness to work with fringe Republican legislators,
giving the people who hate McCarthy but love Greene
a headache that seemingly already been there
from doing the mental gymnastics that come
with subscribing to Q-Anon conspiracy theories.
In the Greene-approved speech,
McCarthy laid out the GOP's plan.
He noted four important pieces of the agenda:
- [McCarthy] Government should be accountable.
No longer special interest, we should work
for you, not the other way around like it is today.
- [Narrator] While he now suggests
legislators shouldn't be beholden to special interests,
he himself has taken more than $1.8 million from lobbyists.
2.6 million from the oil and gas industry,
2.3 million from the insurance industry,
like Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
Saying one thing publicly,
and doing another thing privately is the game
McCarthy's played his whole career.
It's a game that's garnered him much success and power.
But how long can he keep it up?
In a party shifting dramatically to the right,
McCarthy's endeavoring to comprehend the GOP
and his place in it is ongoing.
While he has Greene on his side for now,
the balancing act is wearing thin
on other Trumpian folks like Matt Gaetz and Steve Bannon,
both of whom appear to despise McCarthy.
Catering to the establishment and the fringe
is a ticking time bomb that McCarthy
will have to figure out soon,
if he doesn't want to go back to making sandwiches.