Seth Meyers
Late-night hosts continued to respond to Kevin McCarthy’s removal as speaker of the House by members of his own party, after the California Republican became the first speaker in US history to be recalled from the position. “Republicans have a knack for creating history in the most embarrassing way,” said Seth Meyers on Late Night.
“So they fired the speaker, then just left town without picking a new one,” he added. “It’s very Republican party to take step one without putting any thought into step two.”
McCarthy “wasn’t an especially memorable political talent”, Meyers explained, “and he had to endure all kinds of indignities to climb his way to the top of the garbage heap that is the House Republican caucus, like the time Donald Trump called him by a completely different name and McCarthy didn’t correct him.” (That would be when Trump called McCarthy “Steve” at a press conference in 2019.)
“That’s the modern GOP: you have to endure endless humiliations just to get a job that sucks,” Meyers mused.
“It all ended in humiliation for McCarthy and his allies, which is fitting because McCarthy had to humiliate himself to get the job in the first place,” by enduring a record 15 votes and a deal with far-right Republicans to install him as speaker in the first place.
“He basically had to crawl over broken glass to get hired for a shit job he couldn’t even keep for nine months,” said Meyers.
Jimmy Kimmel
“We got a new episode of ‘the House floor is lava’ last night,” said Jimmy Kimmel of McCarthy’s ouster. “The search is now on for a new speaker after the Maga monkeys kicked out Kevin McCarthy.”
“The ins and outs of how it happened are complicated – basically, Kevin McCarthy went through the political equivalent of getting pantsed in front of the whole school, and then having a squirrel bite you on the penis,” Kimmel explained.
Even more strangely, some Republican caucus members, including “Klan mom” Marjorie Taylor Greene, have proposed that Donald Trump be appointed speaker of the House. “He’s never going to have sex with you, Marge. Stop it!” Kimmel exclaimed.
“Could you imagine this? As if there isn’t enough insanity in the House right now, they want to bring in Donald Trump to settle things down,” he continued. “Man has 91 felony counts against him, and he’s in the middle of a $250m fraud trial in New York.”
“I guess in some ways it makes sense,” Kimmel mused. “Republicans need a speaker, and the way things are going right now in court, pretty soon Trump might need a house.”
Stephen Colbert
And on the Late Show, Stephen Colbert offered an elegy to McCarthy’s beleaguered tenure as speaker. “After just nine months of sucking at his job, McCarthy was stripped of the gavel by eight member of his own party,” he said. “To make it even worse, this all happened – and this is true – on National Kevin Day.”
Wednesday, 4 October, was national taco and vodka day, Colbert continued – “or, as Kevin McCarthy called them this morning, breakfast.”
After his defeat, McCarthy held a press conference “that could only be described as one hour long”, Colbert quipped. McCarthy started with a nod to an esteemed former president: “Abraham Lincoln once said ‘I’m an optimist, because I don’t see any other way.’”
“Is he sure that’s really from Lincoln and not a crocheted pillow on Etsy?” Colbert laughed. “As Winston Churchill once said: it’s wine-o’clock somewhere.”
Colbert reminded the audience that “the only reason these eight Republicans were able to get rid of McCarthy in the first place is that back when he was struggling desperately, after 15 failed votes to get enough votes cobbled together to become speaker,” the Republican hardliners got McCarthy to agree to a rule that would allow any one representative to call a vote to eject him. “So, I mean obviously, McCarthy can’t blame anybody but himself … is what I thought,” said Colbert.
McCarthy, naturally, blamed his ouster on the Democrats. “Really?” exclaimed Colbert. “You handed a straight razor to the craziest, most selfish nihilist in the entire Maga mob and said ‘just hold this to my neck, and if I say or do one thing you don’t like, just slice away,’ and you’re blaming the Democrats?”
The whole affair, Colbert summarized, was a “slide down chaos mountain into insanity river at the bottom of dumbass canyon”.
