The Necessary Fight

The twenty members of Congress who held out against Kevin McCarthy were able to get some massive wins for the republic. They upended how the budgeting process will work. They secured substantive rules changes and got committee assignments allowing them to enforce other promises. They were big wins.

Some of them indeed made it personal against McCarthy. Congressmen Rosendale and Gaetz wanted to just upend the apple cart. There was nihilism.

But what was kind of frustrating was how so much of the media missed that the bulk of the twenty holdouts were not part of a clown car brigade of nihilism but were, in fact, fighting for some substantive changes.

I have to give Jonah Goldberg some credit. His commentary on CNN was one of the few willing to bifurcate between acknowledging the clown car but also defending people like Congressman Roy, who was fighting for real change. And Roy won.

But it was not just Congressman Roy. Congressmen Brecheen, Bishop, Cloud, Clyde, Donalds, Gosar, Norma, Ogles, Perry, and Self, and Congresswomen Luna and Miller got dragged by the entirety of the press and held firm with Congressman Roy until they got everything they could get.

Then they switched. They did not personify their demands as a fight against McCarthy, but as a fight on principle. And, to his credit and possibly detriment, McCarthy gave way to all their demands.

What the media and many outside people miss is that this was the product of several months of planning and strategizing. McCarthy could have wrapped this up after November. But McCarthy has always dragged things out until the end and hoped to capitalize on crisis to get things done. This group knew that. They knew the playbook. So they strategized for months to make it happen.

Today, we are being told Donald Trump made a difference with his last-minute calls. We are being told this group really had no play. They had no alternative Speaker to offer.

The people saying these things had no seat at the table as these conservatives plotted. They spin this now as an inevitable deal that is good but spin these members of Congress as rubes and ideologues grasping at straws.

These men and women were underestimated and they took advantage of that underestimation to win.

The victory may be shortlived. It may all be undone. But it was a victory nonetheless and one, just a few days ago, the loudest voices within the GOP commentariat and talk radio condemned them for fighting for and assured them was impossible. Just consider Hannity and Ingraham’s nightly leg humping for McCarthy even as these twenty were getting more and more of what they wanted. Consider Newt Gingrich savaging them and ridiculing them and admonishing them to give up.

They spent a few months planning. Just because the talking heads and reporters had no seats at their table and no inside gossip with which they could report does not mean they did not know what they were doing.

Much of the commentary even now being written has been written based on interviews with people who were not privy to the planning and conversations. Much of the spin and credit giving are directed towards undeserving others.

The reality is the conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus not only outmaneuvered everyone, but they did so outside the coverage of the press, outside the knowledge of much of the conservative movement, and locked in gains that will serve us all well.

Remember the conservatives who have spent two weeks attacking them and telling them they had no plan, no alternative speaker, and needed to give up. And also remember that they did not listen and won.