Is This The End Of Kevin McCarthy?

Why it's time for Kevin McCarthy to exit stage left

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy was caught on tape lying about calling for Donald Trump to resign.

I wish I could say I was surprised.

I’ve been sounding the alarm about his lack of character and his foreign compromised status for years. We’ve gone there with his Chinese-funded no show jobs for his wife. He needed to go when his affair with Congresswoman Renee Ellmers was exposed in 2014. For at time it seemed as if he was on his way out.

But instead he hung on and clung on.

Will this finally be the thing that causes him to be undone? Hard to say.

First McCarthy claimed that he hadn’t called for Trump to resign in the days after January 6. 

He even went and claimed that two New York Times reporters were lying. Which isn’t always a bad guess.

But it turns out that Liz Cheney had (probably) recorded a private phone call when he has claimed exactly that.  Listen for yourself. 

True to form, Congressman Matt Gaetz, my friend, reminded us of how often Kevin McCarthy has really bad political judgments.

I’m not as persuaded. I think Kevin’s judgment aren’t his own.

Cheney, for her part, claims she didn’t record the call. That could well be true but I have a hard time believing her after her family made millions of dollars stealing from the taxpayer through Halliburton no-bid contracts. Yes, yes, it’s good of her to serve on the January 6th committee but let’s not forget the criming of the Cheneys as they try to whitewash their reputation.

What most members of Congress haven’t glommed onto yet is that all of their calls are recorded and often by multiple intelligence agencies, foreign and domestic.

I’ve spoken to no fewer than fifteen Republican members of Congress from all parts of the party. No one really believes McCarthy but who shall replace him? He raises the big bucks in his plantation running way.

It’s hard to see how he comes back from this. But cockroaches have a way of hiding when the light catches them out and about doing cockroach things.

To my mind what’s likely to get McCarthy is his moneyman Jeff Miller. Why he’s Washington’s new “Indispensable Man”! Miller helped McCarthy raise $9.5m at one fundraiser!

The parallels between former House Speaker Tom Delay and lobbyist Jack Abramoff are hard to ignore, especially now that a Miller-connected firm, Ryan LLC, is under investigation by the FBI. (Miller serves as a principal at the firm and works on government affairs.)

This is how Salon describes it:

“The Republic reported that Ryan LLC, a Texas tax firm founded by Ducey donor G. Brint Ryan, pressured the Arizona Department of Revenue (DOR) to give a tax break to an oil client and filed a lawsuit against the agency. The firm pushed the DOR to agree to refund sales taxes on fuel for mining companies even though the tax had been in place for decades. The firm sought a $12,000 tax refund for an oil client but officials said the change would have triggered refunds in all other similar cases, which would cost taxpayers more than $100 million and $30 million per year in subsequent years. Ryan LLC stood to make millions in commissions.”

That investigation into that same firm is ultimately why Governor Doug Ducey really declined to run for U.S. Senate in Arizona.

Other nations want lower taxes on our mining and oil extraction so that we wind up consuming our own domestic supply — a supply that they can buy or control on the open market by our adversaries.

You might call such efforts treasonous.

Whatever they are, they have no business being this close to the next Speaker of the House.