McCarthy and McConnell pre- and post-January 6 news from the NY Times; Yahoo News; Politico; MSNBC; The Nation; Political Wire, and a few other mainstream news sites with this headline:
“I’ve Had It With This
Guy.” GOP Leaders Privately Blasted Trump After January 6”
A prime real estate to a
“scoop” from New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander
Burns, and excerpt from their new book: “This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle forAmerica’s Future.”
It’s full of direct Trump-bashing quotes from GOP Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and GOP House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).
The headline quote is from McCarthy. Also in the story he seriously
considered telling Trump to resign, and other Republicans in the House agreed
with him that Trump’s behavior deserved swift punishment.
Politico leads with
the money quote of McConnell privately telling his top advisers: “The
Democrats are going to take care of the son of a bitch for us. If this isn’t impeachable,
I don’t know what is.”
McCarthy asked colleagues: “Whether he should call on Trump to
resign for his role in stoking the violent attack.”
McConnell told allies: “Impeachment was warranted.”
But McCarthy’s and
McConnell’s fury faded fast out of fear and retribution from Trump who has a
firm grip on the GOP base.
McCarthy also told other GOP leaders he wished the big tech companies would strip some Republican lawmakers of their social media accounts – members such as Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) had done so much to stoke paranoia about the 2020 election and made offensive comments online about the Capitol attack, he added saying: “We can’t put up with that.”
Rep. Bill Johnson (R-OH) cautioned
that conservative voters back home “would go ballistic” in response to
criticism of Trump,
He then demanded instead to
train denunciations on Democrats, such as Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden saying:
“I’m just telling you that that’s the kind of thing that we’re dealing with,
with our base.”
By the end of the month, McCarty was pursuing a
rapprochement with Trump, visiting him at Mar-a-Lago and posing for a
photograph. (“I didn’t know they were going to take a picture,” McCarthy said,
somewhat apologetically, to one frustrated lawmaker.)
McCarthy has never repeated his denunciations of Trump, instead offering a tortured claim that the real responsibility for January 6 lies with security officials and Democratic legislative leaders for inadequately defending the Capitol complex.
On a phone call with several other
top House Republicans on January 8, McCarthy said Trump’s conduct on January 6
had been “atrocious and totally wrong.” He faulted the president for “inciting
people” to attack the Capitol, saying that Trump’s remarks at a rally on the
National Mall that day were “not right by any shape or any form.”
During that conversation, McCarthy inquired about the
mechanism for invoking the 25th Amendment — the process whereby the vice
president and members of the Cabinet can remove a president from office —
before concluding that was not a viable option. McCarthy, who was among those
who objected to the election results, was uncertain and indecisive, fretting
that the Democratic drive to impeach Trump would “put more fuel on the fire of
the country’s divisions.
McCarthy’s resolve seemed to harden as the gravity of the
attack — and the potential political fallout for his party — sank in.
Two Trump Cabinet had quit their posts after the attack and
several moderate Republican governors had called for the president’s
resignation.
In the Senate, McConnell’s reversal was no less revealing.
Late on the night of January 6, McConnell predicted to associates that his
party would soon break sharply with Trump and his acolytes; the Republican
leader even asked a reporter in the Capitol for information about whether the
Cabinet might really pursue the 25th Amendment.
When that did not materialize, McConnell’s thoughts turned
to impeachment. On Monday, January 11, McConnell met over lunch in Kentucky
with two longtime advisers, Terry Carmack and Scott Jennings. Feasting on
Chick-fil-A in Jennings’ Louisville office, the Senate Republican leader
predicted Trump’s imminent political demise, saying: “The Democrats are going
to take care of the son of a bitch for us” (referring to the imminent
impeachment vote in the House).
Once the House impeached
Trump, it would take a two-thirds vote of the Senate to convict him. That would
require the votes of all 50 Democrats and at least 17 Republicans in the Senate
— a tall order, given that Trump’s first
impeachment trial in 2020 had ended with just one Republican senator, Mitt
Romney of Utah, voting in favor of conviction.
But McConnell knew the
Senate math as well as anyone and he told his advisers he expected a robust
bipartisan vote for conviction. After that, Congress could then bar Trump from ever
holding public office again.
The president’s behavior
on January 6 had been utterly beyond the pale, McConnell said: “If this isn’t
impeachable, I don’t know what is.”
In private, at least,
McConnell sounded as if he might be among the Republicans who would vote to
convict. Several senior Republicans, including John Thune (SD) and Rob Portman (OH)
told confidants that McConnell was leaning that way.
Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, privately told leaders
of several liberal advocacy groups that he believed his Republican counterpart (McConnell)
was angry enough to go to war with Trump adding: “I don’t trust him, and I
would not count on it, but you never know.”
Schumer was right to be
skeptical.
Once the proceedings
against Trump moved from the House to the Senate, McConnell took the measure of
Republican senators and concluded that there was little appetite for open
battle with a man who remained — much to McConnell’s surprise — the most
popular Republican in the country.
In February, McConnell voted to acquit Trump even as seven
other Senate Republicans joined with Democrats to muster the largest bipartisan
vote ever in favor of conviction in a presidential impeachment trial.
Anxious not to be seen as surrendering to Trump, McConnell
went to the Senate floor after the vote to deliver a scorching speech against
the former president.
But McConnell then went mostly silent about Trump after that
point. He still avoids reporters’ questions about the former president and only
rarely speaks about January 6.
For example, in a Fox News interview in late February, he
was asked whether he would support Trump in 2024 if he were again the GOP
nominee and he answered in one word: “Absolutely.”
My 2 Cents: This article shows
without any doubt the hypocrisy of McCarthy and McConnell, and a lot of other
Republicans in office,
Both of those two want to
retain their leadership after 2022 with McCarthy’s dream becoming “Speaker
McCarthy”, and McConnell taking over as GOP Senate Majority Leader.
In my view that must never
ever happen for obvious reasons – we need national unity and NOT more GOP
hypocritical-driven disunity and division ever since 2020 and still worse every
passing day.
Thanks for stopping by.
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