Newsmax host Eric Bolling went back and forth with guest Bill O’Reilly in a discussion Thursday on new House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and the role U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) played in the removal of former speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)
No fan of Gaetz, O’Reilly found himself at odds with Bolling when he spoke favorably of the job McCarthy was doing as speaker.
“I don’t know Johnson and don’t know what he’s going to do, but I didn’t think McCarthy did a bad job,” O’Reilly said, before blasting Gaetz as an “ideologue” and a “self-promoter” who embarrassed his party with a poorly thought out strategy.
When O’Reilly repeated the comment that he thought McCarthy “ran the show pretty well,” Bolling protested to say, “I can’t believe you back the RINOs (Republican in name only).
“No,” O’Reilly countered. “That means by that logic, alright, 213 members of the Republican House are RINOs because they voted to keep McCarthy So are they all insane? I mean, is that what you’re telling me? Look, you govern by working with the opposition. That’s the way the Constitution was set up by the Founding Fathers. You don’t walk in there and say, ‘I want this, I want that’ when you don’t have the votes to get it.”
“But Bill, the process worked,” Bolling pushed back. “Granted, the timing was awful–”
O’Reilly fired back, “You don’t know if the process worked or not!”
“I can tell you that Mike Johnson is far more conservative than Kevin McCarthy ever was or will be,” Bolling insisted, prompting O’Reilly to say the parties are supposed to be “problem-solving, not being ideological.”
They went back and forth a bit over the out-of-control spending before O’Reilly ran out of patience and cut to the chase, slighting his pal Bolling in the process.
“Look, I’ll make this point again and I’ll slow it down so you understand it, Bolling,” he said. “Matt Gaetz would get nothing done if he were speaker of the House. Nothing… Nothing would change.”
“If you’re telling me that [Gaetz] is going to go in and solve vexing problems, you’re wrong Bolling. He’s not,” O’Reilly concluded. “Now, I don’t know about Johnson. I’ll give Johnson a try, but based upon what I know of the dynamics in the Senate and the House, McCarthy did the best job he could do.”
As for Johnson being a more conservative speaker, Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh signified that the honeymoon is over for the new speaker in sharing a 2020 clip of Johnson saying he was “outraged” over the “murder” of George Floyd, and that there are “underlying issues” in America that need to be fixed.
“Struggling to see why we had to kick out the last guy for this guy. It’s the exact same guy pretty much,” Walsh opined.
Struggling to see why we had to kick out the last guy for this guy. It’s the exact same guy pretty much.
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) October 25, 2023
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Tom Tillison grew up in Maryland before moving to Central Florida as a young teen. It is in the Sunshine State that he honed both his passion for politics and his writing skills. Tillison also contributes to BizPac Review.
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