Bret Stephens: Gail, remember “We Need To Talk About Kevin,” the unforgettable Lionel Shriver novel about a woman whose son murders his classmates? Maybe someone should write the sequel: “We Need To Talk About What They Did to Kevin.”
Gail Collins: A book-length disquisition on Kevin McCarthy, Bret? I dunno. Always thought his strongest suit was that he was too boring to hate. But now that he’s apparently promised the Republican right wing everything but permission to bring pet ocelots to the House floor, I can see it.
Bret: Too boring to hate or too pathetic to despise? I’ve begun to think of McCarthy almost as a literary archetype, like one of those figures in a Joseph Conrad novel whose follies make them weak and whose weakness leads them to folly.
Gail: Love your literary allusions. But let’s pretend you’re in charge of the Republican Party — tell me what you think of him in general.
Bret: A few honorable exceptions aside, the G.O.P. is basically split between reptiles and invertebrates. McCarthy is the ultimate invertebrate. He went to Mar-a-Lago just a short while after Jan. 6 to kiss the ring of the guy who incited the mob that, by McCarthy’s own admission, wanted to kill him. He hated Liz Cheney because of her backbone. But he quailed before Marjorie Taylor Greene because she has a forked tongue. He gave away the powers and prerogatives of the office of speaker in order to gain the office, which is like a slug abandoning its shell and thinking it won’t be stepped on. A better man would have told the Freedom Caucus holdouts to shove it. Instead, as a friend of mine put it, McCarthy decided to become the Squeaker of the House.
Gail: OK, Kevin is House Squeaker forever.
Bret: If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that the whole spectacle has shown voters what they get for voting for this Republican Party.
Gail: Hey, you’re still in charge of Republicans. Now that they’re sort of in command, do you have hopes they’ll make progress on your priorities, like controlling government spending? Without, um, failing to make the nation’s debt payments …
Bret: Buried in the noise about McCarthy’s humiliation is that his opponents had some reasonable demands. One of them was to give members of Congress a minimum of 72 hours to read the legislation they were voting on. Another was to limit bills to a single subject. The idea is to do away with the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink spending packages that Congress has lately become way too fond of.
Gail: Yeah, I can buy into that one.
Bret: On the other hand, the idea that this Republican clown show is going to accomplish anything significant — particularly since doing so would require them to work with a Democratic president and Senate — is roughly the equivalent of Vladimir Putin leaving the vocation of vile despot to become a … cannabis entrepreneur. Not going to happen.
So what do Democrats do?
Gail: Well, one plus is that we don’t have to worry about the Republican House passing some terrible, nutty legislation since the Senate is there to put a halt to it. Interesting how much better obstruction looks when your party is doing the obstructing ….
Bret: It’s almost — almost — enough to be grateful to people like Herschel Walker and Blake Masters for being such deliriously awful candidates.
Gail: When it comes to positive action, like keeping the government running, I’d like to think the moderate Dems and the moderate Republicans could get together and come to some agreement on the basics. Do you think there’s a chance?
Bret: What was the name of that Bret Easton Ellis novel? “Less Than Zero.” Bipartisanship became a four-letter word for most Republicans sometime around 2012. If we can avoid another useless government shutdown, I’ll consider it a minor miracle.
On the other hand, all this is good for Democrats. In our last conversation, I predicted that McCarthy wouldn’t win the speakership and that Joe Biden would decide against a second term. I was wrong on the first. Now I’m beginning to think I was also wrong on the second, in part because Republicans are in such manifest disarray. What is your spidey-sense telling you?
Gail: Yeah, Biden knows 80 is old for another run, but the chance to take on Donald Trump again is probably going to be irresistible.