With GOP leader Kevin McCarthy failing in three separate votes Tuesday to get the 218 votes needed to become the next speaker and the House adjourning for the evening, many on the right are getting uptight about the process playing out and are setting their sights on the “rogue Republicans” who are refusing to support McCarthy.
The quintet on Fox News’s “The Five” discussed the day’s events with cohost Dana Perino, a former member of the George W. Bush administration, slamming the GOP holdouts by saying they make the squad look “reasonable” — this being the infamous group of radical left Democrats led by self-avowed socialist U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
(Video: Fox News)
“You know, it’s time to get together as a party. And stop embarrassing yourselves in front of the rest of us,” co-host Jeannine Pirro said, before fellow host Jesse Watters chimed in to ask Perino how long the voting can drag out.
She noted that in 1923, it took 113 ballots to finally elect a speaker, saying it could be days.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen. I think that because he’s not able to gain any votes on the second or third, maybe even in the fourth ballot at this point, then you have to say he’s already given away a ton of things to these, the small group of holdouts,” Perino added. “It’s like the opposite of the squad. They make the squad look positively reasonable in this situation. And a lot of this is just an ideological thing. Might be a personal thing. Like, I don’t like you. Okay.”
The prescribed talking point against the holdouts is that their stand is based on petty reasons.
U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., one of the more vocal holdouts, was a little more specific in his opposition.
“Every single Republican in Congress knows that Kevin does not actually believe anything. He has no ideology,” Gaetz wrote last month in a scathing op-ed. “Some conservatives are using this fact to convince themselves that he is the right leader for the moment, as McCarthy is so weak he’ll promise anything to anyone. As his mentor recently confessed, ‘He lies. He’ll change the lie if necessary.’”
Perino mentioned outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi not allowing proxy voting for speaker in 2020 “because her numbers were very, very small, but they were able to pull together.”
“You couldn’t do that for the speaker vote because she needed to have every single Democrat in the chamber so that she could become speaker. Yes. And yeah, she was pretty good about twisting those arms,” an impressed Perino said.
“I think that conservatives overall in the country remain deeply dissatisfied with Joe Biden. And every day that Republicans are going to spend in this exercise, with their heels digging in, with the name-calling starting ratchet up, I mean they are talking about now internally, within the party, enemies. That kind of thing is hard to forget,” she continued. “And one of the first things that this group is going to have to do is come together and decide whether to raise the debt ceiling. So you thought like this ballot is a tough one? Wait till you get to that one.”
Co-host Greg Gutfeld said the drama playing out was in large part because of social media, as he took a crack at the GOP holdouts.
“If this was relegated to C-SPAN, we wouldn’t even know it existed. Right. And they would probably get through it. But because it’s on like our shows now, they’re like going like, okay, this is for my future. I’m going to be like, I need to do this and make the people on Twitter happy or the people or my buddies in television who invite me more often because I’m seen as feisty, giving it to the man,” he said.
Insisting that the drama will end with McCarthy being speaker, Gutfeld called the opposition effort “the worst game of chicken ever.”
“It’s just a game of chicken, you have a car going at the other and you wait. It’s not even that. It’s not even that. It’s just bad. It’s like the Republicans read a book by the Democrats saying how to really screw up your party,” he concluded.
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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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