Kevin McCarthy is upset.
But the House minority leader is not upset at the 13 Republicans who helped the president pass an extra $1 trillion in new “infrastructure” spending on top of an economy exploding into the worst inflation in nearly half a century. He’s not upset at the hundreds of Republicans who greenlighted our way to that fiscal travesty. He’s not upset at Adam Kinzinger for calling for the imposition of a no-fly zone over Ukraine — a surefire way to start a nuclear war with Russia. He’s also not upset at Marjorie Taylor Greene for embracing a literal neo-Nazi just after he stirred applause for President Vladimir Putin for starting Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Instead, it was Madison Cawthorn’s imbecilic but ultimately harmless rumor-mongering on a podcast about supposedly salacious behavior on the Hill. Likening the reality of the nation’s capital to that in the TV show House of Cards, the freshman Republican claimed that unnamed boomers he “looked up to” in politics had invited him to orgies and that he had witnessed leading anti-addiction figures snort “a key bump of cocaine” in front of him.
Although the denizens of Washington aren’t particularly smart, few are so openly dumb enough to solicit sex from and snort coke in plain view of a congressman. And Cawthorn, at 26, the same age as this author, sounds indistinguishable from dozens of other slightly-past-tipsy, single millennial men trying to impress a girl before last call on a Saturday. As far as braggadocio goes, it borders on positively boring, even in politics — especially in the era of Hunter Biden cruising California for crack and Katie Hill soliciting her staff for a throuple!
It is genuinely weird that McCarthy is mad about this. Yet Cawthorn, the backbencher baby of a 435-person body, has earned some of the harshest words McCarthy has yet doled out to a sitting Republican not named “Cheney.”
“I just told him he’s lost my trust. He’s going to have to earn it back, and I laid out everything I find is unbecoming,” McCarthy said to the press while addressing Cawthorn’s “unacceptable” remarks. “And you can’t just say, ‘You can’t do this again.’ I mean, he’s — he’s got a lot of members very upset.”
But this stuff, as dumb as it is, is not remotely the worst or most destructive thing someone in McCarthy’s caucus has said this session. It isn’t even the worst thing Cawthorn has said this month! (Cawthorn was caught on camera calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “thug” who presided over an “evil” government.)
And just how false were his remarks? Of the five presidents Cawthorn has lived through, two have repeatedly cheated on their wives, one or two (depending on whether you believe the Bush reports) have done cocaine, and the absolute best thing you can say about our current oaf in the Oval is that he’s probably never done either.
Everyone knows there’s something rotten in the nation’s capital, but it’s not because of anything Cawthorn said about swingers or blow. The real problem seems to be that McCarthy cares when his inferiors make him look bad, but not so much when they do bad for the country or for the GOP.
