Kimberly Strassel is leading the Fox effort to circle the wagons for McCarthy after he defied the MAGA wingnuts in the House and passed a CR with the help from Democrats to avoid a government shutdown.
October 1, 2023

It looks like Fox is circling the wagons for McCarthy after he defied the MAGA wingnuts in the House and passed a CR with the help from Democrats to avoid a government shutdown. The Senate and House averted a government shutdown at the last minute this Saturday, with Kevin McCarthy relying on Democrats, who voted in favor of the measure of 209 compared to the 126 Republicans who supported McCarthy.

What all of this means for the future of McCarthy's speakership, who knows, but for now, we know who Fox is supporting, and who they're ready to throw under the bus.

The Senate passed the bill about three hours before the deadline, so tragedy averted, for now.

Here's some of the back and forth on Fox's the Journal Editorial Report that was watching all of this in real time just after the House passed the CR, where regular Kim Strassel just straight up threw Matt Gaetz and the rest of his wingnut MAGA enablers that only care about seeing their names in the headlines instead of actually governing right under the bus and then backed over them a time or two.

GIGOT: Kim, it looks like the immediate crisis may be over here on the shutdown. But we still have to see what the Senate does. But what do you make of speak or McCarthy shift to open this up to get Democratic votes to keep the government open?

STRASSEL: Well he did the only thing he could do Paul. I mean look, the cognitive dissonance that's been coming out of a handful of Republicans on the right is really something to behold. On the one hand they kept saying all we want to do is work through these appropriation bills and they passed four of them, and there are eight to go.

But at the same time they refuse to vote for any CR that would actually give them the time to do that, and they scuttled even the negotiations that McCarthy has been giving them to give them more provisions in a CR, like more spending cuts, more things at the border.

They just kept saying no to everything. And so in the end, you know they're losers here and that McCarthy in the end had to go for a clean CR, go to Democrats for help. The government will stay open. That's good for the country. But these guys that just had dug their heels in, this is what happens when you won't get onboard with some Republican unity, and you end up with situations like.

Gigot and his other panel member, Dan Henninger, discussed the fact that the bill would likely pass in the Senate, which it did, and that the additional aid for Ukraine would likely be passed separately later, and Henninger acknowledged that if there was a government shutdown, Republicans were the ones that were going to be blamed for it.

Gigot then asked his other guest Bill McGurn what sort of risk McCarthy is taking when there are a handful of members of his caucus who won't be happy about him cooperating with Democrats.

McGurn responded that McCarthy played “the only hand that he could play” and avoided “having the hot potato of the shutdown in your lap at the end of the day” and praised him for boxing in Senate Democrats who weren't going to shut down the government over additional aid to Ukraine not being in the bill.

I personally don't they "boxed them in" and that they all knew full well that the aid would pass separately given the fact that Republicans have just recently voted for it and there is a ton of bipartisan support for additional aid to Ukraine.

Gigot then asked Strassel what is it that “the Republicans holdout want? What are they looking for?”

STRASSEL: No one knows Paul. This is the problem. I mean look, here's the sad thing. A lot of them just want headlines, and that's the really unfortunate aspect of this.

We're not talking about have many here, but it's enough when you have a four seat majority as McCarthy has, you have to listen to all of them, and I think they've done themselves real damage, though, in that they've really got a lot of resentment up from the rest of their caucus who watched Kevin McCarthy over past couple of weeks, you know, dance and dance and say “Hey, what more can I get you what you need and and they put together a giant CR that would have all these additional provisions that conservatives said that they really wanted, and then when it came up to a vote on Friday 22 of them voted against it again.

So if you can't get to yes, then you have to go to plan b. And we still don't know what they want, because they also just kept moving the goal post all along. Again you have to come to the conclusion that what they wanted was their names in headlines, not necessarily to get something done that would be helpful to the Republican goal, as Dan said, of cutting spending in the end.

That's been true of the lot of them for ages now. Republicans as a whole do not care about governing. They only care about it when they're forced to, and even then, they only care about protecting their wealthy campaign donors.

And Strassel is exactly right about a bunch of them that only care about making headlines and getting on television.

She's dead wrong that they've got any actual agenda, or that most of the American public should support what those idiots going after McCarthy are distracting from.

We'll see what happens with McCarthy's speakership, but as they noted later, who the hell else would even want the job? I think McCarthy calls their bluff and maybe a few Democrats save him, or better yet, if they want to try to kick him to the curb, say hello to Speaker Hakeem Jeffries. Thanks, wingnuts.

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