Throughout the fight over the Speaker of the House seat earlier this month, the Beltway press kept up this weird pretense that Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who eventually secured the leadership role, is somehow at odds with the looniest members of the Republican caucus. The assumption that McCarthy is secretly sane and just trying to manage the far-right fringe persisted throughout his shepherding of the loudest conspiracy theorists into committees, like the House Oversight Committee, where their bizarre lies will get dramatically amplified. The assumption is that McCarthy is a reluctant handmaiden to the far right, a man boxed in by the outsized power the worst actors have in his slim majority.
That was always a dumb assumption, however, especially considering that McCarthy voted to support Donald Trump's attempted coup in 2021. The likeliest explanation for his behavior has always been that McCarthy is a member of the insurrectionist caucus in good standing and that the "rebel" faction that refused to vote for his Speakership was only acting out of a desire for media attention, not sincere disagreement with him on the issues.
