Tangle - Kevin McCarthy announces retirement.

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

Kevin McCarthy. The California Republican and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced last week that he will be retiring from Congress at the end of December. McCarthy, 58, announced his plans in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, where he boasted about leading Republicans to a House majority twice, passing border security legislation, keeping the government open, and reducing the deficit. He also pledged to continue recruiting America's "best and brightest" to run for office.You can read today's podcast ⁠⁠here⁠⁠ and today’s “Have a nice day” story here. You can also check out our latest videos, and interview with presidential candidate Marianne Williamson here and a look at what a potential second term for Donald Trump could look like, here.Today’s clickables: Correction (0:40), Quick hits (2:09), Today’s story (4:02), Left’s take (6:04), Right’s take (9:46), Isaac’s take (13:28), Listener question (16:28), Announcement (19:46), Numbers (20:29), Have a nice day (21:28)You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Take the poll. What do you think of Kevin McCarthy's legacy in Congress? Let us know!Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Jon Lall. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season? Talk to

your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca. From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle Podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we are going to be talking about Kevin McCarthy and his retirement, what it means for Congress and what to make of it.

Before we jump in, though, a couple notes. First of all, a correction. In last week's post on Henry Kissinger, we correctly noted that Kissinger served under Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon throughout our piece, except for in one place right at the top of the article where we erroneously said he served under Ronald Reagan. I don't know how that happened, but given how many presidents Kissinger informally advised, it is no surprise that very few people caught this error, but it was a mistake nonetheless. This is our 95th correction in our 226-week history and our first correction since December 6th. We track them and place them at the top of the podcast and maximize transparency with our listeners. I also want to give a heads up that

on Friday, we published an edition in the podcast of a paywalled Friday newsletter. It was titled 10 Thoughts About What's Happening in Israel Right Now. The piece has generated a lot of strong feelings. I encourage you, if you are a podcast listener, to go back and listen to it and let us know what you think. This is the kind of stuff we were thinking about putting up in the podcast more regularly and behind a paywall. Also, we are going to drop the paywall on the article that was published as a newsletter additionally and now lives on our website so people can share it because a lot of people asked us to and I thought it was a smart thing to do. All right, with that out of the way, we're going to jump in with some quick hits.

First up, the Texas Supreme Court paused a lower court ruling that would have allowed a Dallas woman to receive an abortion despite the state's new bans on the procedure. A 30-year-old woman had sought an abortion after learning her unborn baby was at high risk for Edwards syndrome, which results in fetal loss in over 80% of cases. Texas argued that the case does not meet medical requirements for an exemption. Number two, University of Pennsylvania President Liz McGill resigned on Saturday after backlash over her remarks during a congressional hearing about anti-Semitism on campus. Number three, Israel ordered civilians to evacuate Khan Yunis in southern Gaza

as it pushed into the center of Gaza's second largest city. Separately, Israel is accused of using white phosphorus in an October attack in Lebanon. Number four, Elon Musk reinstated the account of Alex Jones on X, formerly Twitter, after a user poll. And number five, the Air Force disciplined 15 people for poor supervision following Jack Teixeira's alleged leaks of national security secrets in a Discord chat. California Republican Congressman and former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy says he is leaving Congress at the end of this year. In an opinion piece published by the Wall Street Journal today, McCarthy said he is leaving the House of Representatives to serve America in different ways. The announcement comes two months after a faction of McCarthy's own party moved to oust him from the speakership after he worked with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown.

McCarthy's announcement, along with other resignations and the expulsion of former Congressman George Santos will impact the Republican slim majority in the House. The California Republican and former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced last week that he will be retiring from Congress at the end of December. McCarthy, 58, announced his plans in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, where he bragged about leading Republicans to a House majority twice, passing border security legislation, keeping the government open, and reducing the deficit. He also pledged to continue recruiting America's best and brightest to run for office. McCarthy, first elected to the House in 2006, announced his departure after a surprising fall from grace. He was elected House Speaker in January after a tumultuous 15 rounds of voting

and was then ousted in October after his decision to pass a short-term funding bill to avoid a debt ceiling breach. McCarthy's retirement is a surprising end to his career in Congress, where he progressed from majority whip to majority leader and then speaker over 16 years. With McCarthy's departure from Congress, Governor Gavin Newsom, the Democrat, will be responsible for setting a special election date to replace him. McCarthy's departure from Congress has set off a number of subplots heading into the 2024 election, where Republicans will be defending a slim House majority. For starters, five Republicans up for re-election in McCarthy's home state of California are holding seats in districts Biden won in 2020.

Further, McCarthy has been one of the party's most prolific fundraisers, meaning Republicans will have to find someone else to bring in donations without his campaigning. And, of course, many are curious to see if McCarthy will recruit challengers to run against some of the House Republicans, like Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, who ousted him as Speaker. McCarthy has already inserted himself into the 2024 presidential race, warning Donald Trump that voters are not interested in a campaign of retribution. Today, we're going to take a look at some reactions to McCarthy's announcement from the left and the right, and then my take. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

First up, we'll start with what the left is saying. The left calls McCarthy's resignation a fitting end to a disgraceful career. Some criticize him for choosing not to serve out his term and suggest he is bailing on his constituents. Others focus on McCarthy's fealty to Trump and say it will define his legacy. The Los Angeles Times editorial board said McCarthy's resignation is poetic justice for the Trump apologist. It's not surprising that dozens of members of the U.S. House of Representatives are choosing to leave the dysfunctional chamber rather than seek another term. The politics are toxic, the rhetoric is ugly, and it seems that members aren't interested in doing much besides fighting the culture wars and one another, the board wrote. But we don't believe for a minute that's the

reason former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy decided to step down at the end of the month after 17 years in Congress. After all, he helped create the hostile conditions in Congress by toadying to the hard right Republicans in his conference. In the end, however, McCarthy couldn't manage the unruly conference and was deposed in October after a mere nine months in charge. His crime, according to the GOP hardliners who orchestrated his downfall, taking the kind of sensible action that Americans expect of their leaders. He's not a tragic hero, though, just a victim of the maga flames he fanned, the board said. He could have put aside his hurt feelings and indignation

to serve the full term he was elected to. In MSNBC, Hayes Brown wrote about the final humiliation of Kevin McCarthy. I can't say that I'm surprised that this is the path McCarthy is taking. His 16 years in office, almost all in conference leadership, have been almost solely defined by his opportunism. It was clear after last fall's midterms that his future in the House was reliant upon a razor-thin majority. His eventual downfall was all but predestined. But rather than continue to serve the people of Bakersfield, California, or work to counter the far-right members who toppled him, he's opted to chase power elsewhere. or work to counter the far-right members who toppled him, he's opted to chase power elsewhere. It is the choice of a coward, Brown said. McCarthy's op-ed declaring that he will leave office to serve America in new ways is a perfect distillation of his congressional ethos,

paragraphs of pablum with no substance. The closest thing to a thesis one can draw from the piece is that Congress is pointless, so his failures don't really matter, Brown added. If this is the lie that McCarthy has to tell himself, that's fine. It is an unconvincing rewriting of history and will do little to change the legacy he has crafted. He's been a poor steward of the people's trust. Rather than sever ties with former President Donald Trump in 2021, he rehabilitated the biggest threat facing American democracy. He has done nothing to leave Capitol Hill a better place than when he first arrived. In the New York Times, Michelle Cottle asked,

was it worth it, Kevin McCarthy? In his fevered pursuit of the gavel, Mr. McCarthy time and again prostrated himself before the altar of Donald Trump, sacrificing basically all the things that matter. His dignity, his integrity, his values, such as they were, his soul, you name it, Cottle wrote. It's hard to dispute that this is the ending that Mr. McCarthy deserved. By contrast, the American people don't deserve the damage that he has done to the House, and really, the nation, that will linger long after he is gone. By empowering the most extreme elements of the Republican conference, he made an already fractured, fractious chamber even more dysfunctional. Worse, by shoring up Mr. Trump after January 6th, he helped put America back on a crash course with a dangerous anti-democratic demagogue looking for political revenge. These are Mr. McCarthy's legacies. If he is remembered at all, it will be as a cautionary

tale about what happens when one leaves it all on the field in the service of little more than blind ambition. All right, that is it for what the left is saying, which brings us to what the right is saying. The right says McCarthy's resignation marks the end of small government Republicans who cede cultural issues to the left. Some suggest McCarthy is retaliating against the House GOP for ousting him by refusing to serve out his term. Others argue he was an effective politician and will be missed by Republicans. In National Review, Henry Olson explored how the young guns failed. Once touted as the party's future, McCarthy and his one-time comrades-in-arms, former Speaker Paul Ryan and former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, will be all out of office and on the outs with their party's voters, Olson said.

Their failure to create the GOP of their dreams would be cautionary enough. Combined with the continuing failure of Republicans who unseated them to construct a durable governing alternative, it's a tale of how a party that loses touch with its voters can wander aimlessly for years. Under their leadership, government was supposed to get smaller in relative size and our budget deficits were supposed to be shrinking. Instead, the federal government is ballooning and our deficits have exploded, Olson wrote. McCarthy held on the longest because he is a sharp political animal, but he failed in the end because he too is simply not the type of person GOP voters want. He's too interested

in the inside game and uninterested in the cultural issues that unite the party. He could talk the talk about being pro-life or fighting for women's sports, but it was easy to see that these weren't his passions. In hot air, Jazz Shaw asked what was behind McCarthy's resignation. If he had been suffering from health afflictions or experienced some tremendous loss in his personal life, I wouldn't blame him. For that matter, if he had received some fantastic offer from the private sector that needed to be acted on immediately, I would similarly cut him some slack, Shaw said. While it pains me to say it, this looks more than anything else like a simple case of sour

grapes. McCarthy is angry over the way that he was ousted from the speakership that he had coveted for so long, primarily engineered by some of the most conservative elements of his own party. In his parting statement, McCarthy said he wants to serve America in new ways, but if he really wanted to serve America from a conservative perspective, further weakening the House GOP's razor-thin majority at this moment clearly isn't helping. He could have served far better by finishing his term and allowing the voters of his district to pick a replacement. Now, Gavin Newsom will have the option of scheduling an election or leaving the seat vacant for all of next year, weakening the GOP voting bloc further. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book,

Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. Last season, over 102,000 influenza cases have been reported across Canada, which is nearly double the historic average of 52,000 cases. What can you do this flu season?

Talk to your pharmacist or doctor about getting a flu shot. Consider FluCellVax Quad and help protect yourself from the flu. It's the first cell-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older, and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at FluCellVax.ca. In the Orange County Register, John Seeler said California is going to miss Kevin McCarthy. Republicans especially will miss McCarthy for his fundraising prowess. Like it or not, money remains the mother's milk of politics, and McCarthy was highly adept at raising it at the state and national levels. The loss of his skills cost the party crucial House

seats from California, possibly losing their majority, Sealer wrote. That's especially crucial in a state where Republicans commonly are outspent by Democrats tapping into the vast, taxpayer-provided funds of the public employee unions. McCarthy also was effective in this state because, before heading to Congress in 2007, he was in the Assembly from 2002 to 2006 and minority leader for most of the last two years of that period. He knew politics from the state and local levels up to the top of the country, Seeler said. I get why more conservative Republicans in Congress, especially Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, worked to oust him, but it was a mistake. In politics, you're lucky to get one thing accomplished. Expecting more is unrealistic. With such a slim majority,

that one thing should have been padding the majority in 2024. All right, that is it for what the left and the right are saying, which brings us to my take. So it is a pretty shocking moment in congressional history, but I also have to remind myself that this won't get too much attention outside the political junkies. Most Americans have already moved their focus onto the war in Israel or what is going to happen to Ukraine funding or back to the abortion fight and the economy, but I am struggling to think of such a swift rise and fall for an American politician in recent memory. Remember, two months ago, McCarthy was second in line for the presidency.

Now he is retiring early from Congress, toothless and with very little political capital. In fact, McCarthy is now going to leave Congress before Nancy Pelosi. That McCarthy does not see an effective path forward for himself now that he isn't Speaker is an interesting look into congressional power and the current state of infighting in Congress. Rising from the bottom to the top is the normal order of things. Going from the top dog to something else is so unacceptable to people like McCarthy that continuing to serve out his term isn't even an option. He isn't just not running for re-election, he is resigning almost a full year early. For Republicans, it is a sign of the times. Not just of populism rising, but of increased strength

in the party among the right-wing hardliners. I, very wrongly, predicted Matt Gaetz would actually face some kind of repercussion for leading the revolt against McCarthy. I floated a possible expulsion or censure from Congress or at least an organized political hit job to hurt him. So far, there has been nothing. Crickets. Nada. He is carried on, mocking McCarthy from his seat, and McCarthy isn't even sticking around for the fight. Perhaps he had fewer friends in Congress than we all thought. For a lot of Republicans, this is a worrisome development. Say what you will about McCarthy, he is a caricature of a politician who promises everything to everyone and seems hell-bent on attaining more power,

but he was a prolific fundraiser, and Republicans could really use the money. Remember that they just lost George Santos, narrowing their majority, and could very possibly lose that seat. McCarthy is gone too, and while his seat is relatively safe, there are a half-dozen Republicans in California who could have really used his help. McCarthy has been directly responsible for between 10 and 25 percent of all the money raised this year by almost half of the House's most vulnerable Republicans, according to the New York Times. The most interesting thing now is what he plans to do with his newfound free time. Will he work to help the Republicans in the same institution that just spurned him? Or will he go on a vengeance tour against members of the House Freedom Caucus?

And how might he weigh in on the 2024 presidential race? It's hard to believe his time is really up. And I also struggle to imagine a world in which we aren't hearing a lot more about him in the coming months. world in which we aren't hearing a lot more about him in the coming months. We'll be right back after this quick break. All right, that is it for my take, which brings us to your questions answered. This one's from Julie in San Diego, California. Julie said, I'm a high school junior who hopes to go into AI. Recently, I wrote and published my first ever article about my opinion on AI doomerism, she linked to the article, and why I believe it's

a harmful narrative. Being rather new to Tangle, I'm not familiar with your take on AI or the doomerism aspect of the AI revolution in general. And I'm curious your thoughts. So first of all, I've got to say I'm impressed by how thorough your article is, Julie. You covered a ton of ground in your take, including in areas that I see frequently left out of the conversations pundits have about AI. And in two big areas, I agree with you. And for what it's worth, you might be interested in a piece I wrote about scary tech and its impact on politics. There's a link to that in today's episode description, a piece from a few months back.

The first of the points that I agree with you on is in the definition of general intelligence or human intelligence. Those are terms we don't actually have good definitions for. And thousands of people in the fields of neuroscience, psychiatry, and psychometrics have been trying to both define and measure intelligence for decades. In trying to do so, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is at play. The more closely we try to measure something, the less certain we can be of what we're measuring. Here, the more specifically we test for quote-unquote intelligence, the less we measure general intelligence. We instead end up defining intelligence as the ability to perform well in our test. And I think we see this very

much at play with AI. Machines have amazing processing capabilities, far past what humans can achieve in computation and memory storage. But humans have had an enormous advantage in complex language until recently. Defining AI by its ability to perform as well as a human in language processing is pretty narrow. Does a computer showing it's able to answer a question show it has human intelligence? Or does it show that it can perform machine processing text association about as well as a human can think and present their own answer through language? Second is the assumption of extrapolation. AI doomers assume that machine intelligence will keep improving itself more and more quickly until we reach some unknowable singularity.

Not only that, but technologists in general assume we'll be able to understand and define intelligence. This includes you, Julie. Writing that defining intelligence is still in its infancy assumes that we're going to reach such a mature definition. But maybe we never get there. Maybe intelligence will prove just as hard to reach such a mature definition. But maybe we never get there. Maybe intelligence will prove just as hard to define as consciousness or nature. I don't even know if

that's the most important reason to be skeptical of doomerous extrapolation. For me, it's the assumption of constant and exponential improvement. Even if an AI can have a direct sense of the physical world, evolving past the point of being a very convincing text association engine, does that mean it gets to the point where it can accelerate its understanding and powers to a god level? I think that requires several assumptions layered on top of several others. My thinking on AI currently comes to the same conclusion as yours. It's a powerful tool that's getting more powerful, and we should be careful with it. But I don't think that more refinement of AI is an existential threat, and I'm not sure that it ever really will be. All right, that is it for our reader question today. A few weeks ago, we published an interview

with Representative Dean Phillips, the Democrat from Minnesota, shortly after he entered the Democratic primary. Several readers wrote in to say that it was odd and maybe even unfair that we immediately interviewed Phillips, given that another person, Marianne Williamson, was already in the race and had a strong and significant following. This was a great point. So we reached out to her for an interview, and she agreed to come on our show. I was very pleased Williamson gave us a full hour of her time. You can go watch that interview right now. It's up on our YouTube channel and I hope you guys enjoy it. Let us know what you think. All right, next up is our numbers section. Republicans majority in the House after McCarthy leaves office at the end of December will be 220 to 213. The number of days within which a special election must be held to fill a vacant congressional seat in California is 140, and the percentage of the

vote won by McCarthy in California's 20th congressional district in 2022 is 67%. The percentage of the vote won by McCarthy when he was first elected to the House in 2006 is 67%. The percentage of the vote won by McCarthy when he was first elected to the House in 2006 is 71%. McCarthy's fundraising total for 2023 was $78 million. The percentage of the funds raised by the House GOP's campaign committee in 2023 that McCarthy contributed was 25%. The percentage of Americans who said they had a very or somewhat favorable view of McCarthy in a September 2023 poll was just 26%, while 48% said they had a very or somewhat unfavorable view of McCarthy. All right, and last but not least, our have a nice day story. In yesterday's Sunday edition, we shared a long-form piece about how women are embracing

the positive aspects of motherhood. But there's more good news in child care. We are living through a baby knowledge boom. Global child mortality has historically been around 50%, but early 20th century medical progress brought that number down to 27% in 1950. As of 2020, the number was brought down even further to 4.3%, which includes a 1.7% mortality rate per and a 3.5% under 5 mortality rate per live birth. And the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has its sights set on lowering those numbers further. To do so, they want to share medical findings with countries where mortality is high, creating a baby knowledge boom, better access to antenatal steroids, probiotics for premature babies, and probiotics for malnourished mothers who could further reduce under 5 mortality to 2.4% globally, the foundation believes. The Progress Network has the story and there's a link to it in today's episode description. All right, that is it for today's podcast. As always,

if you want to support our work, you can go to readtangle.com and become a member. Don't forget, we just released that Paywalled Friday edition as a podcast. You can go check it out or you can read the full thing on our website. And we have a new interview up right now with Marianne Williamson on our YouTube channel. You can find us by going to Tangle News on YouTube. We'll be right back here same time tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul, and edited and engineered by John Wall. The script is edited by our managing editor, Ari Weitzman, Will Kabak, Bailey Saul, and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bokova, who is also our social media manager.

Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. And if you're looking for more from Tangle, please go to readtangle.com and check out our website. Based on Charles Yu's award-winning book, Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural who dreams about a world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web, his family's buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. The flu remains a serious disease. the spotlight. Interior Chinatown is-based flu vaccine authorized in Canada for ages six months and older,

and it may be available for free in your province. Side effects and allergic reactions can occur, and 100% protection is not guaranteed. Learn more at flucellvax.ca.