Kevin McCarthy will leave Congress, but won’t escape infamy for rescuing Trump | Opinion

This is how Kevin McCarthy’s biography on his congressional website still read on Wednesday:

“Congressman Kevin McCarthy proudly serves California’s 20th District and is currently the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.”

Except, he’s not the speaker anymore. He lost that job in October, when a gang of far-right members fed up with him conspired to vote McCarthy unceremoniously out of that lofty office. The Bakersfield-born Republican became the first House Speaker in American history to be stripped of his gavel and leadership authority.

Then, on Wednesday, McCarthy announced in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that he would leave Congress at the end of this month. A special election will be required to give his 20th District a representative for next year.

For residents of Kern, Fresno, Kings and Tulare counties represented by McCarthy, it will be the second time in two years that their House member has retired early. Devin Nunes left in January 2022 to work for Donald Trump.

Being House speaker — behind only the vice president in the line of succession to the presidency — was McCarthy’s longtime goal in politics. The reference on his website that he still held the office could be a staff oversight.

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Or, perhaps McCarthy could not bring himself to admit to the past tense, “was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives ...”

Being speaker lasted all of nine months. The razor-thin majority the GOP had in the House saw to that.

McCarthy’s decision to call it a career was a stunning, yet unsurprising, decision by a lawmaker who enjoyed one of the safest seats in the nation.

For nearly all his time in politics, McCarthy held some sort of leadership role. Elected to the California Assembly in 2002 from his hometown of Bakersfield, McCarthy soon took on the role of Assembly Republican leader. Four years later he was elected to Congress. He quickly rose to the post of chief deputy whip before he became House majority whip in 2010. Four years later he became GOP majority leader, then House Republican leader in 2018. From there he became House speaker.

It took 15 votes, however, for McCarthy to finally grab hold of that brass ring. To achieve it, McCarthy had to agree to a demand by the far-right Freedom Caucus members: Any single representative could bring a motion to vacate the speakership.

That is exactly what Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz did on Oct. 2. McCarthy could not muster enough votes to prevail, and he was forced out of office and into the history books.

But there were other history-making moments in the last years of McCarthy’s tenure.

On Jan. 13, 2021, a week after the Jan. 6 rioting at the U.S. Capitol, McCarthy said then-President Trump “bears responsibility” for the rampaging that occurred. It was a needed moment of accountability from a GOP leader.

Then on Jan. 28, 2021, McCarthy visited former President Trump at his home in Florida in what many analysts have since characterized as a “lifeline” event for Trump’s political survival. This despite Trump knowing that he had lost the election, as McCarthy related to then-Rep. Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming.

The visit reinvigorated the prospects of the former president, and today he is the leading GOP candidate for next year’s presidential nomination. If elected, Trump is promising retribution for anyone who has opposed him — a dangerous and chilling possibility for American democracy that only exists because of McCarthy’s ill-fated help.

Infamous lifeline to Trump

Over the last 17 years, McCarthy shook thousands of hands, posed for hundreds of photos, gave multitudes of Fox News interviews and accepted scores of young people’s applications to the nation’s military academies.

But embracing Trump will be the infamous calculation by McCarthy that historians will single out when recalling him. That is the view of three longtime observers of politics in the San Joaquin Valley.

Mike Madrid is a Latino Republican and longtime political consultant from Sacramento who got to know McCarthy during his statehouse days. I asked Madrid for his perspective on McCarthy. He immediately referenced the Trump visit after Jan. 6.

McCarthy “knew Donald Trump was a threat to the republic. He knew what this moment in history was, and he chose not to do the right thing. That is how history will remember him ... he will go down as one of weakest speakers in the history of the republic.”

Mark Arax of Fresno, the celebrated author and former Los Angeles Times reporter who covered the Valley, said McCarthy grossly miscalculated when he joined himself to Trump.

“I don’t see Kevin McCarthy doing well when history makes its judgment,” Arax said. “He will look like all the other cowards with their proverbial fingers in the wind.

“His first impulse on Jan. 6 and the days after was to challenge Trump, but he could not stay true to that.”

Fresno State political science Professor Tom Holyoke said the Trump-aligned forces in the House GOP proved to be more than McCarthy could control.

“Put more simply, he tried to ride the tiger, but the tiger would not, could not be controlled, and ate him,” Holyoke said.

McCarthy’s legacy

McCarthy’s departure will be a blow to the GOP. He has prowess almost without equal when it comes to fund-raising.

The National Republican Congressional Committee said McCarthy raised $40 million in the previous election cycle and had generated $20 million so far in the current one.

His political action committee, the Congressional Leadership Fund, raised about $215 million for the 2020 election, roughly $350 million during last year’s midterm races and around $80 million so far this cycle.

Madrid wants McCarthy to break with Trump and offer a new vision of America.

“Few Republicans have made amends and demonstrated contrition in the Trump era. If he wants to be known in history other than someone complicit in what this era will be known as, he needs to get to work at it.

“He should be far more concerned with his legacy than his bank account.”