Skip to main content
Friday, November 13, 2026Nov 13
Subscribe
All Sections
Search
More

Opinion: Watch while Kevin McCarthy puts on ‘impeachment theater’ and the government teeters

File photo/J. Scott Applewhite/The Associated Press / Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., talks to reporters at the Capitol in Washington on Monday, July 17, 2023. House conservatives in a group known as the Freedom Caucus have unveiled a list of demands that they want included in a stopgap spending measure to keep the federal government running after the end of September. It's a smorgasbord of non-starters for the Democratic-controlled Senate and the White House, signaling the challenges McCarthy will face to get a bill passed in the House without alienating a sizeable share of his conference.
File photo/J. Scott Applewhite/The Associated Press / Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., talks to reporters at the Capitol in Washington on Monday, July 17, 2023. House conservatives in a group known as the Freedom Caucus have unveiled a list of demands that they want included in a stopgap spending measure to keep the federal government running after the end of September. It's a smorgasbord of non-starters for the Democratic-controlled Senate and the White House, signaling the challenges McCarthy will face to get a bill passed in the House without alienating a sizeable share of his conference. File photo/J. Scott Applewhite/The Associated Press / Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., talks to reporters at the Capitol in Washington on Monday, July 17, 2023. House conservatives in a group known as the Freedom Caucus have unveiled a list of demands that they want included in a stopgap spending measure to keep the federal government running after the end of September. It's a smorgasbord of non-starters for the Democratic-controlled Senate and the White House, signaling the challenges McCarthy will face to get a bill passed in the House without alienating a sizeable share of his conference.

By Jackie Calmes / The Los Angeles Times (TNS) 5 min read

The kudos for Kevin were short-lived.

Last spring House Speaker Kevin McCarthy rightly got props from folks across the political spectrum, myself included, for compromising with President Joe Biden to raise the nation’s debt limit and thereby avert economic armageddon. But that meant, of course, that the uncompromising far-right flank of his Republican caucus, which has the power to hold McCarthy hostage to its demands, was apoplectic.

The troublemakers needn’t have feared.

The proverbial ink on the debt deal was hardly dry before McCarthy started backtracking. Astoundingly, he assured the wacky House Freedom Caucus that spending levels in the dozen bills that fund the government would be lower than what he’d just agreed to in the debt limit deal with Biden and senators of both parties. This sort of double-dealing is what happens when a “leader” feels beholden to anti-government zealots to keep the job he coveted for so long.

McCarthy also signaled his openness to letting the culture warriors tack onto the spending bills their pet provisions against abortion rights, transgender kids and more — nonstarters in the Senate. Oh, and he promised to pursue Biden’s impeachment — allegations and evidence TBD. Yet when the House returns from its summer break next week, it has all of 11 working days to pass its funding bills and settle the bills’ differences with the Senate and the president before Oct. 1, the start of the next fiscal year.