The surprising ouster of Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as speaker of the House deeply alarmed the Washington, D.C., establishment. While many Republican congressional leaders have lost their positions, it was the first time such a removal occurred via a motion to vacate the chair.
The outrage was directed less at the 208 Democrats who voted to remove McCarthy and more at the eight Republicans who did. The media and other permanent Beltway inhabitants asserted that American life itself was thrown into chaos by the vote.
“Kevin McCarthy voted out: How the House chaos affects you,” promised Yahoo! News‘ Christopher Wilson, who asserted the use of an official parliamentary procedure to vacate the chair was somehow a “degradation of American democracy.”
“Kevin McCarthy’s sacking deepens the chaos in American government,” editorialized The Economist. Meanwhile, ABC News‘ Rick Klein went with, “MAGA-inspired House rebellion against McCarthy leaves chaos on Capitol Hill.”
Over at The Washington Post, Dan Balz opined, “By voting to expel Kevin McCarthy as House speaker, Republicans ground the work of Congress to a halt and revealed the danger of governing by chaos.”
The “chaos” talking point regurgitated by the media originated with Democrat leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., whose letter to colleagues claimed that House Republicans “unleashed chaos, dysfunction and extremism on hardworking American taxpayers.”
It all reminds me of this absurd scene in the 1980s film sequel “Airplane II,” when a space plane shuttling a cabin of passengers to the moon short circuits and gets knocked a “tad” off
