Merry Christmas to all, or Happy Holidays.
Who would have expected California Rep. Kevin McCarthy as a potential House Speaker in 2023 or beyond?
He doesn’t seem to have the skills needed to garner attention like Gingrich and Pelosi.
Congressional leaders don’t necessarily need a lot of attention. Dennis Hastert was speaker for eight years and never had a very high profile (and given what we now know about his past, perhaps he preferred not to be in the limelight).
Well, partly because of her gender and her outspokenness. And she has been minority leader/speaker for a very long time.
He was nearly Speaker back on 2015. As Majority Leader, he was heir apparent when John Boehner stepped down. But then conservatives revolted because they thought he wasn’t conservative enough, and we got Paul Ryan.
I thought it wasn’t so much that, as he said the quiet part loud:
My gut feeling is that should the Republicans win the House in 2022, McCarthy gets jumped over by Liz Cheney. She’s smart, she knows how to work behind the scenes and McCarthy already got skipped once.
Nobody expects Speaker Kevin McCarthy!
How was that not the first reply?
His chief weapon is surprise. Surprise and dumping on Hilary Clinton…amongst his weaponry are such elements as surprise, dumping on Hilary Clinton, and an almost fanatical devotion to Trump. Damn. I’ll come in again.
I think it’ll probably be McCarthy. After getting passed over in 2015, Trump getting elected gave him an enormous opportunity to prove his bona fides by slavishly backing everything the man has done. And if the Republicans take back the House in 2022 with him as their leader, he’ll get the credit (undeservedly so — the political rule is that the President’s party loses House seats in his first midterm election, and the Ds only have a ten seat majority).