MSNBC's Chris Hayes takes a hard swat at the Republicans and talking heads playing their usual game of trying to blame Democrats for Republicans' malfeasance.
October 5, 2023

MSNBC's Chris Hayes takes a hard swat at the Republicans and talking heads playing their usual game of trying to blame Democrats for Republicans' malfeasance following the vote to oust Kevin McCarthy as Speaker.

HAYES: A little over 24 hours ago for the very first time in all of American history, a House caucus deepest their own speaker. A group of hard-line members of the Republican majority, led by Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, forced a vote to vacate the Speaker's office, ousting Kevin McCarthy.

Now, I'll admit, it is not super clear why Gaetz and his allies thought this was a good idea. The move left a lot of members of their own party bewildered and downright furious, and it has sparked a resurgence of a consistent theme in this political era.

Whenever the Republican party, or its leadership, acts in a particularly egregious, norm shattering fact fashion, conservative politicians, members of the conservative media, and even many members of the mainstream media, rush to find some reason to blame Democrats.

After running through a whole litany of examples, the final one being Rep. Mike Lawler carping about Democrats not voting to keep McCarthy in office, and saying “I think there is an opportunity for folks to put the country above the insanity. I think it left a lot of people with a bad taste in their mouth,” Hayes responded.

HAYES: Oh you had a bad taste in your mouth because the Democrats didn't do what you wanted? Is that right, Mike Lawler, running in a plus ten Biden district in the state of New York?

After discussing the petty revenge taken by the interim Republican Speaker Patrick McHenry against Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi and former Democratic leader Steny Hoyer, to vacate their hideaway offices, Hayes moved onto who's actually at fault for the mess Republicans currently find themselves in, and why there's no way in hell Democrats should have thrown him a bone.

HAYES: The only reason we had this vote was because the rules package negotiated by Gaetz and the holdouts and Kevin McCarthy. They created the conditions for the vote to happen in the first place.

And we have never seen this level of House dysfunction before. It's genuinely historic. I'll say, there really were arguments on both sides about how Democrats should handle the vote. I talked to a bunch of people yesterday as I was reporting this out. But those arguments were arguments about how the Democratic caucus should exercise its own political interests and the interests of those people they represent.

The idea that Democrats should have protected Kevin McCarthy for the good of the country is nonsense.

First of all, if Kevin McCarthy wanted Democrats to vote for him in this vote that only came about because of the rules package he negotiated, Kevin McCarthy who's a big boy, could have tried to persuade Democrats to make a deal with them. That's the way politics works.

He did not do that. In fact, he reportedly waited until the last minute to call the Democratic Leader, Hakeem Jeffries. And his allies said, pointedly, publicly and privately, that McCarthy was opposed to cutting any deals with Democrats.

But the even deeper issue at play, as one House Democratic staffer explains today, was just basic trust. Quote, we did not trust Kevin McCarthy and he gave us no reason to. He could have done so, and I suspect saved his gavel through fairly simple actions. He chose not to do that.

Democrats could not make a deal with Kevin McCarthy. They could not support his speakership, because his word means nothing. They could not trust him.

Keep in mind, McCarthy was already, in front of all of us, he wasn't secret about this, he was in the process of ripping up the biggest deal he ever made on the debt ceiling, right? They cut the deal with Joe Biden, and then folks in his caucus got mad about the deal, and he was about to go and undercut that deal, rip it up.

There was no reason for Democrats to believe that he would not turn around and rip up another deal with them tomorrow. In fact, he had already promised his caucus that he would do that. So he had to be lying to someone. Either lying to his caucus are lying to the Democrats to cut a deal with them, but he's lying to someone.

What good would it do them to save McCarthy and then, the next day, watch him push forward and impeachment of Joe Biden, massively cut social funding, put a whole bunch of awful poison pill provisions into must-pass legislation, steer the country into another shutdown?

As Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall points out, Republicans bad behavior and destruction is assumed in Washington. It is a given. It's like gravity. Everyone knows it's unexpected. Everyone else has to work around it.

That means Democrats have to be the ones to figure out how to make the government work. Of course the dysfunctional misbehaving Republicans are all grown ass adults, with moral agency. Like, they're responsible for their own actions. They make decisions. They can do good things or bad things.

So, I cannot quite believe this needs to be said, but the people to blame for Republicans blowing up their own Speaker are Republicans.

It does need to be said, and can't be said often enough.

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