In Clowns We Trust: McCarthy's Impeachment Inquiry
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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss why Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has been forced to open an impeachment Inquiry of Joe Biden. Then pour one out for ol' Mitt, as Romney the Senator won't run again but at least has a book he's peddling. Plenty of great questions from our Patreon listeners round out the show.
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Welcome to the Weekender Edition of the McCreary Podcast.
I'm Jerry J. Sexton.
Sexton.
I'm Jerry J. Sexton.
That's not a great start to a weekender, Nick Hausman.
I'm always impressed by how quickly you can get the opening of the can right when I hit record.
Like, it's impeccable how we... Can I be honest about it?
I start it.
Oh.
Because if you just leave it flat, it's hard.
Sometimes it's going to mess up.
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It's the preparation.
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We have so much going on.
We're going to do some quick hits on the headlines.
Then we're going to get to a whole host of questions.
They're good ones, as they always are.
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Everybody, we have to start with... I don't know how else to say this, Nick.
Republican Silly Season.
In the past couple of days, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has gone ahead and given the approval for an impeachment inquiry.
He promised that he wasn't going to do that single-handedly.
He was going to leave it up to a vote.
Turns out, a whole lot easier to go ahead and make it happen by yourself.
Meanwhile, there's no reason given, there's no direction given, there's no real explanation, and on top of that, the exact people that he was trying to appease in the first place, the far right, the Freedom Caucus, you name it, they are not thrilled about what's going on right now.
Well, I mean, there's a laundry list of things they're not thrilled about.
So just doing one of those things, which is the impeachment inquiry, isn't enough, right?
And we know clearly that some of these deals he had to make at the 11th hour.
Is it 11th hour?
It was like beyond the 11th hour.
It was 1159.
Yeah, it was like it was late.
And, you know, he obviously, you know, promised a lot of stuff that he ain't gonna go come through with.
And so you got these people who are really against him anyway.
I love the fact that We're not supposed to be able to have an impeachment inquiry without a vote, but then, well, Nancy Pelosi did it, so we... It just so happened that Trump, you know, Department of Justice had ruled that it isn't okay, you need to have a vote, and they probably won't have the votes if they actually did that for even the inquiry, much less any kind of impeachment process.
So, yes.
What did you call it?
What kind of season are we at?
Silly season.
Silly, clown season?
Yeah, whatever you want to call it.
Clown, silly, silly season, is what I'm going to go ahead and say.
First off, one of the reasons why people listen to this podcast as opposed to paying attention to legacy media, Nick, is because we are telling you how this stuff's actually happening.
It's not just Kevin McCarthy and the Republicans are coming after Joe Biden.
This isn't like a big homogenous group of people who are all on the same page.
What is happening right now is that Donald Trump, as he's trying to cover his ass during all this legal trouble, he has been rounding up every person on the far right, every MAGA Republican, pushing them to do this.
Kevin McCarthy knows that there is no way in hell that Joe Biden is going to be convicted and removed from office, but they also understand that there is a benefit to going ahead and kicking up a Benghazi-style hearing against Joe Biden.
They want to go on a fishing expedition.
Meanwhile, none of this is on the same page.
None of this is organized.
This is a gaggle clusterfuck unlike any that we have seen in a very, very long time.
I got a great point to make, but I think we should hear from one of the Senators in the esteemed chamber and their reaction.
This would be John Fetterman's reaction to the fact that they're opening this inquiry.
Ask me about this news that Speaker McCarthy has formally launched an impeachment in- or has said he's going to- Oh my god, really?
Oh my gosh.
You know, oh, it's devastating.
Ooh, don't do it.
Please don't do it.
Oh no, oh no.
Wow.
He's really spooked.
It sounds almost like he's spooked to the level of caricature.
Almost.
And by the way, I'm glad that you pulled that clip and wanted to hear it because that image of him has a lot of the Republican crazies thinking that it's not really him.
They've replaced him with somebody else.
I mean, it's a hologram situation if I've ever seen one.
Oh my god.
But then you have the freeze frames, look at the eyebrows, whatever.
I mean, it's insane.
But here's my question for you, Jared.
I needed to do a deeper dive.
I lament that I couldn't before we started recording, but I'm not even sure there's information to be gleaned from this.
But here's my take on it.
To impeach a president, it's supposed to be impeaching the things that he did while he was president.
Right?
Isn't it limited to that?
And obviously, what they're trying to do is, you know, fold in something that happened when he was vice president 10 years ago.
So, that is the question that nobody... Have you heard... Has anyone else asked that question to you?
Have you heard that anywhere?
Well, no one's interested in asking that question.
No one's interested in looking at this.
Like, there's no reason for any of this.
We understand that all of this is just bald-faced performance.
We know it.
Everybody knows that there are things that are being said here that have no meaning whatsoever behind them.
And again, we say it all the time, and I want to be on the record again, if Joe Biden is guilty of an impeachable crime, we'll be sitting there saying he should be impeached.
But they can't even foster something approaching it.
It's simply that they have to do it.
Right?
They have control of the House.
There are all of these pressures from Trump, their constituents, what they have, and the 2024 election looms large.
They had to do this.
They had no other choice.
They are being affected by forces beyond their control.
They have no idea why they're doing it.
There's no actual philosophy.
There's no motivation.
They simply have to do it because they have to do it.
Well, I mean, they need to distract from what Trump is, right?
Like, that's what it is.
And, well, they did it to us and we did it to them.
And they promised us they would do this.
We knew this.
We predicted this from the beginning.
It's not even a prediction that they were going to do this.
Now, again, this is as far as it's going to go, right?
I don't think they're going to actually get to the The impeachment part of this in the House, right?
Do you feel like they actually are going to stumble into it?
Who even knows?
You know, I mean, literally, I think you could take the Republican House and have them vote on lunch and then they would starve.
You know, I mean, this is not a cohesive group of people.
There are a lot of factors here where, and we've talked about this for a while, there's a civil war within the Republican Party.
There's a group of people who are old traditional Republican neoliberals who want all the same things, by the way, that these people want.
It just so happened that, and we'll talk more about those people like Mitt Romney here in a minute, like there is an internal battle here and whether or not they can get all of their people in a row, I have my doubts.
But the whole point of this is to have hearings.
The whole point of this is to have some sort of power to start, like, rifling through Joe Biden stuff.
That's it.
Jared, lunch could very well be the single hardest decision to make.
Hey, listen.
I'll be honest with you, Nick.
I am not always the greatest person when it comes to picking what to eat.
My general role is to be the person that's like, that sounds great.
Let's do that.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's funny.
I just came off a three-day juice cleanse.
This is the weekend we can talk about that, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Three-day juice cleanse, and so you have to slowly introduce things.
So my lunch, I had to have carrots and hummus, and I'm kind of, like, pushing the boundaries there.
I probably shouldn't even have that, but I gotta tell you, it does feel good to not eat, like, pasta and meat and all sorts of heavy stuff at lunch.
You know, I'll tell you, I think that you're making decisions.
I think carrots and hummus are a fine snack.
I think that's good.
Speaking of eating that poorly, Here's a segue.
What has actually happened in the wake of this entire situation, and to remind everybody, Kevin McCarthy, he struck a deal with the Freedom Caucus that he was always one member away from a vote to get rid of him as Speaker of the House.
This inquiry was an attempt to sort of do an olive branch.
It has landed with a resounding thud because he cannot control these people.
Matt Gaetz, our favorite alleged serial criminal, and Predator went on the floor and delivered these remarks. - On this very floor in January, the whole world witnessed a historic contest for House Speaker.
I rise today to serve notice.
Mr. Speaker, you are out of compliance with the agreement that allowed you to assume this role.
The path forward for the House of Representatives is to either bring you into immediate total compliance or remove you pursuant to a motion to vacate the chair.
Oh, big, big, big words from a little man.
Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy, and this is breaking news, Nick.
I heard about this earlier today, and I was like, there's no way that's true.
But it turns out it was true.
He was in a meeting with the Republican caucus, and he has told them that if they want to get rid of him as Speaker of the House, quote, move the fucking motion.
Which brings Kevin McCarthy to the John Boehner, Paul Ryan position of, I didn't want this job in the first place.
I don't know why I took it.
I don't know why I did all of this.
And here we are.
And meanwhile, everyone looks on and they say, what in the hell is going on here?
I wonder if Kevin McCarthy was crying in that, during that meeting, because that seems to be the theme too.
Yeah, who wants that job?
But clearly, that's why I was hoping Matt Gaetz would get into a little bit of the laundry list of things that he demanded of McCarthy to be the last guy to finally give him the vote he needed to become Speaker.
We knew this was another one of these very predictable things that is almost comical in its predictableness.
It is, and this is where we're going.
We've turned on all of our turbo boosters straight into silly, silly cuckoo season.
On a similar note, Nick, a big announcement that a lot of us have been expecting for a while.
Utah Senator Mitt Romney, the 2012 nominee for the Republican Party, has declared that he will not seek re-election.
This That is an interesting step.
This is part of, again, the ongoing war within the Republican Party.
Mitt Romney has been held up as a quote-unquote sensible, responsible Republican.
I want to talk about that here in a minute.
But this is, it's a big announcement.
There are a lot of things to look at here, a lot of things to criticize, but let's not say that it isn't a substantial development.
I mean, he's the only guy that voted for impeachment on the Republican side for the first one.
Impeachment 1, is that what we're calling it?
But Super Bowl 1, Super Bowl 2, so Impeachment 1.
Is it Roman numeral 1?
Yeah, we'll do it that way.
And then Impeachment II, I suppose would be the second one.
Listen, we've said this before in the notion that if he had won and beaten Obama in 2012, maybe we're not in the wrong timeline now.
No, I think, let's put a caveat on that.
Things would still be bad, and bad things would be taking place.
It wouldn't feel the same.
There would be a different tone and tenor to this, and I'll get to why I think that in a second.
But yeah, I don't think everything would be fine.
I think the Republican Party would be a little bit different.
Right.
Well, I mean, the Republican Party has moved so much that someone like George W. Bush is someone like you'd be like, gosh, let's have him back in the White House.
Boo!
Boo!
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