The Ricochet Podcast - Burning Down the House

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

Isn’t this a way to start out a New Year? We’re breaking all sorts of precedents, starting off with a long thoughtful discussion on the state of American football. We talk about the Damar Hamlin incident from the Monday Night game in Cincinnati and then give a hail and farewell to “The Pirate,” Coach Mike Leach of Mississippi State and then local man has a nervous breakdown over the recent play of... Source

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I have a dream. This nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. For what purpose does the gentleman from Kentucky rise? I rise on behalf of the Republican Party to nominate Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the 118th Congress. I've said it before and I'll say it again, democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Charles C.W. Cook sitting in for Rob Lorne. I'm James Lilacs, so let's have ourselves a podcast.

I can hear you! Welcome, everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast, episode number 623. I'm James Lilex, walking around in my deserted newsroom like Charles Foster Kane in the last reel of that movie. I'm joined by Chuali, Chuali C.W. Cook, as Kane's wife would have called him, and Peter Robinson in the non-dystopian portion of California. Welcome, gentlemen, and Happy New Year, this being our first gathering of the anim. Happy New Year. Happy New Year, this being our first gathering of the annum. Happy New Year. Happy New Year.

Well, Rob is off somewhere. For all I know, he's gathering vanilla extract in Madagascar, and he may dip in, he may not. But here we are. So that's serious. I saw on some thread somewhere that he is actually headed to Madagascar?

I read that correctly? Well, when that boy gets back, he is actually headed to Madagascar. I read that correctly. Well, when that boy gets back, he's going to have some explaining to do, even more than usual. So apparently the internet is a bit dotty where he is. But here we are. And since it's a new year, let's make a new resolution, break all of the tradition, and turn this into sports talk, hot rock and sports talk. Not really. There is sort of a cultural conversation going on about the NFL because there was that horrible, horrible moment, not a horrible hit. I mean, we've all seen hits that made you go, yeah, that wasn't one of those. But Darman

Hamlin stood up and fell down. And there was just an awful moment on the field where everybody was waiting. I've never seen anything like it. And there was also a moment that in some ways was remarkable to see the team members kneel and pray. A reminder that this is an America that still exists, that is right there in front of us. And there it was. And the game was canceled. I mean, the game was suspended. It might be outright canceled us and there it was and the game was canceled and it might be i mean the game was suspended might be outright canceled and there's implications for that but a lot of people are saying okay what does this say about america why i remember in my youth i was walking watching a hockey game and a man was decapitated and they brought out the zamboni

and cleaned it up and continued to play are we weaker weaker for this? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't. That is a true story? No, no, no, of course not. No, but I mean, there have been people who have suffered extreme injuries, cardiac events and the rest of it, and they continue to play. I don't think this is. Things do happen.

Things do happen in the hobby rink in Minnesota, I've been told. Right, they do. So is this a sign that we become more safety conscious, more wimpy or something like that? Or is it just actually pointing to the severity of the incident and frankly, noting that the steam had been taken out of all of them? And I don't think it's unreasonable for them in their grief to not want to continue to play. So Charlie Cook, what do you say? One of the fascinating things about Charlie is that he was raised in a very traditional English manner and he has now become extremely American and a great sports fan. I will come in a moment to a piece he just wrote, but Charlie, what about this incident? Well, I think it will suggest that we have moved further towards the safety-est side of the aisle if we draw broad conclusions

from this where they don't belong. So the fact that the players didn't want to play the game is understandable. There is, in all of football's long history, only one other incident equivalent to this. Worse than this, happily it turned out, in which in 1971, a player for the Detroit Lions had a heart attack and died. The game was finished, but there were only 62 seconds left on the clock, which was not the case on Monday's game. Now, the heart attack that was suffered in 1971

and the cardiac arrest that DeMar Hamlin suffered are not the same thing. It's important to distinguish between that. We can do that in a minute. But on the question, I think if we were to draw from this that other games should be cancelled, that the season should be cancelled, that the season should be cancelled, or even that this in some way implies that the NFL isn't doing enough to protect the

lives and safety and health of its players, then yes, we should come down hard on those who are making such arguments because this was a freak occurrence right there's never been a cardiac arrest before in the nfl and it by all accounts seems to have been an incident called commotio cordis which to simplify it happens when a person is hit very hard on the outside of their body next to the heart at the exact wrong moment with sufficient velocity to stop the heart there's a 20 millisecond window apparently in every heart cycle in which if you are hit in exactly the wrong place you can drop dead. And that seems to be what happened. The chances of it happening again are tiny. The number of times it happens in America every year is about 15. It's never

happened before. It probably will never happen again. And I think as such, it would be a huge mistake to draw conclusions. But I don't take from them stopping the game as they did, that we've entered some sort of new, you know, wussy era. But Charlie, isn't it also important to note, you raised the question of whether the NFL is doing enough to take care of its players. You know more about this than I do, but the players are represented by a union. The union insists on certain kinds of medical... But what we saw with our own eyes is that both sides of that field were lined with medical professionals. People ran out to the field immediately and they had paddles and this and that and an ambulance came. I mean, if you're going to have a freak cardiac arrest,

the safest place to do it in the world is on the field during an NFL football game. I'll take a note of that, yes. Please do. But I mean, the suggestion that this game is too violent and too dangerous, that's a separate argument. But the suggestion that this incident

proves anything of that nature is ridiculous on the face of it isn't it yes it is there is nowhere potentially in the entire world that demar hamlin could have been where he would have received better care because he collapsed a few feet away from a whole bunch of trained professionals, a whole bunch of AED equipment, and other defibrillating equipment and was then rushed to what I learned this week, happens to be one of the premier cardiological units in Cincinnati Hospital in the world. So he was fortunate. I asked the question on my own podcast yesterday of a cardiologist I had on as a guest, what would have happened if this had been an amateur player playing in a field that was more remote? And the answer is he'd have died. One of the things that was notable about this,

and it's, well, not notable in the fact that it was kind of boring, was when they went back to the studio, none of the people in the studio really had anything to say. And they said it over and over again. They were sad, they were hopeful, there were prayers, tears, et cetera,

but they kept going back to them and they had nothing to say until people eventually turned them off. That is now is the case with some people in sports. Some people with sports have a remarkable facility with the language, which brings us to a piece that Charlie wrote about coach leech. Charlie, tell us exactly who this man was and why he was so special and deserved the,

the remarkably wonderful piece that you wrote. Thank you. Mike leech coach le, was a college football coach who coached various teams for 21 seasons as head coach. And he had a winning record. He developed the air raid offense approach of playing, which essentially eschews the huddle and a large playbook in favor of a mostly passing game executed quickly and in a muscular fashion. But the reason he was much beloved across the sport was that he was a maverick. He was, he'd have liked to have thought, a pirate. He did not take the usual trajectory

into college football head coachdom. He actually trained to be a lawyer at Pepperdine and then decided he probably didn't want to do that. So he went and got a master's degree in sports science and then worked his way up through the ranks of various college football teams. And that different entry was reflected in really an eccentric way of seeing the world. His interviews were legendary. He would digress, given half a chance, into almost any topic you could think of, be it pirates or Jackson Pollock or Geronimo or

a topic he really dug into toward the end of his life. died unfortunately at 61 he was far too young uh the perils of a traditional wedding um there are some great accounts of him being in the tape room or the training facility and the players trying desperately not to say anything that could possibly take him off topic, because they knew that if they mentioned the weather or Michelle Obama or cars or gravity that he would digress for hours. But of course, we didn't get to see that. We did get to see it on TV, where he would muse aloud about which of the mascots in the Pac-12 would prevail in a fight to the death. Or he would answer a question about his receiver's total inability to catch the ball during a given game

with a meditation on what might happen if they forgot how to catch the ball over a sustained period of time and thus evolution kicked in and they lost the ability to use their arms and ended up looking like T-Rexes in, in the middle of Mississippi. You know, this was, this was a guy who broke the mold in a way that was salutary because sports interviews are so dull and formulaic. Yes. Unless Mike Leach is on the other end of the microphone, or I should unfortunately say was on the other end of the microphone.

And it's worth saying, in my opinion, at least I'll trot this out and see what you make of it, Charlie and James. I live in the middle of Silicon Valley where we're used to hearing the word innovation so often that we don't even really hear it anymore, innovation disruption. But the notion that football, a game that is a century old, could be rethought, that there was something that someone could see in the game, develop a new strategy at this late date, and yet Leach did it. The notion of the pass, of passing almost exclusively, of skipping the huddle, of what now has become reduced to the kind of trite phrase, the hurry up offense. But when he was developing this a decade or what, I guess a decade and a half

ago, it was really something new in the game. As far as I can tell, this man who every time he opened his mouth seemed like an entertaining fool was in fact the most insightful coach, the coach who brought the newest insights, the freshest strategy to the game since Bill Walsh. He was actually a remarkable figure in the history of the game. Will you buy that, Charlie, James? Oh, I certainly think he was. I think it is paradoxical that he managed to change the game while considering it to be almost too simple to talk about. Yes, exactly.

I mean, one of my favorite parts of researching this piece was learning from former players of his that he would baffle and in some cases annoy them by answering their questions with the sort of insight you would expect from a seven-year-old. So he would be asked by a wide receiver, well, what can I do to improve my catch rate? And he would say, just run into open space and catch the ball. He'd be asked by the quarterback, well, what can I do to improve my passer rating? And he would say, just throw to the person who's effing open.

And then he would talk about something else. And in a sense, that is disruption, to use the phrase that you did, is recognizing that perhaps the whole thing's become overcomplicated. Right. Maybe it is a game after all. Anyway, just brilliant. Just wonderful. To me, I just love seeing someone come along to something that we all thought we understood and turning it upside down.

And Mike Leach was one of the men who did that. I think that's exactly right. And it was funny into the bargain. There's always something new to be found in the game. That's the extraordinary thing about it. I mean, I'm biting all of my cuticles to the quick over the Vikings this weekend because we have to find out whether or not this really is the extraordinary scrappy team that we thought it was or complete fraud, an utter charade, the whole season that we've stumbled into this record that we have by a series of things

that have nothing to do with talent or skill or the esprit de corps, but it just happened this way and it's going to be undone and we're going to end in ignominy and misery as we always have. We'll see. All I know is that if Viking fans are screaming on Monday, I might want to tune that out with some good headphones. The new year, it is here. It's already days old. Have you made any big changes, small changes? Are you just settling back into a consistent routine? Well, chances are you could use some audio accompaniment on your journey, right? It's always nice to have tunes to accompany you doing whatever in the day. I know for me, for example, sometimes it isn't tunes. It's the show I listen to when I hit the treadmill. Treadmills are boring, but it's nice to watch an old show.

Judge Judy, Columbo. And I need good sound for that because the gym's got this thumping, thumping, thumping music I want to listen to. And that's why I'm so happy I've got my Raycons. A good pair of wireless earbuds is indispensable in 2023. For premium audio at the perfect price point, you got to go with Raycon. Raycon's everyday earbuds, they look, they feel, and they sound better than ever. With optimized gel tips for the perfect in-ear fit, these earbuds are so comfortable and they will not budge. Trust me on this one. It's not just the treadmill I do, it's some other hopping around and lifting heavy things and putting them down. A lot of rock and roll, and they never fall out, no.

And what's more, I don't have to worry about them going dead in the middle of a workout either, because Raycons give you eight hours of playtime and a 32-hour battery life. Raycons are priced just right. You get the quality audio at half the price of the other premium audio brands. It's no wonder that Raycons' everyday earbuds have over 50,000 five-star reviews. So what I like is the fact that you can customize the sound profile. So for example, if I'm walking around the street and I want to hear some noises around me, I can figure that out. If I want to immerse myself in something, oh, it can do that too. And it's got earbud tap function. So you can switch between the various modes that you want

with a little tap. Noise isolation, which is precious really when you're in a busy office building, if anybody is anymore. But if you are, you want to isolate, it's got that. And it has awareness mode. So you're walking down the street and there's sirens or crazy people or something like that. You can hear that too. It's got all the high-tech stuff you want. And that's why I like them. It's easy to switch between the two of them. And like I said, the battery, and it never falls out. What more do you want? Buy Raycon.com slash Ricochet today. That's right. Go to buy Raycon.com slash Ricochet, and you'll get 15% off your Raycon order. That's buy, B-U-Y, Raycon, R-A-Y-C-O-N.com slash Ricochet to score 15% off.

Buy Raycon dot com slash Ricochet. And we thank Raycon for sponsoring this Ricochet podcast. But enough of that sports talk. Let's go to the stuff that really matters, which is the interminable attempt to find leadership in the House, which, of course, has gripped the nation so much that it's practically pushed the January 6th stories off the page. Right. Well, to explain it all is Byron York. Who better?

The chief political correspondent for The Washington Examiner, Fox News contributor, and of course, you can listen to his podcast, The Byron York Show, right here on the Ricochet Audio Network. Byron, thanks for joining us. What's going on? The House, what? Tell us. Explain.

Thank you. You know, I was in an interview yesterday and I said, I know exactly what is going to happen, but I just can't tell you. And you'll be surprised. Look, I don't. What can I say? We're now in even more historic territory than we were a day before. We're speaking on the eve of the 12th ballot in this situation. And it's been very interesting. this whole thing has, as many things have in the past couple of years, shown a light on some

divisions among the conservative world. Some conservatives are saying, look, yes, this is messy, but democracy is messy, and this is fine. And others are saying, you know, this is pretty outrageous. And if you're not just bored silly by what's going on, you're probably disgusted. So I lean more toward the latter. I'm kind of bored silly and disgusted. But I don't know how it's going to end. Well, Byron, Peter here. Here's one of the things that I find especially striking.

I guess there are a couple of things that I want to ask you about, but as best I can tell, and I confess, I got a little bit bored with this board and slightly disgusted with it myself a day and a half ago. So I haven't looked at the numbers for each ballot. But ordinarily, if you think back to the days when presidential nominating conventions, the great party conventions of 30, 40, 50 years ago, when it would take several ballots, often many ballots, to nominate a candidate for president, each ballot provided new information to those who were casting the ballots. There would be small shifts. You'd be able to see new candidates emerging, or you'd be able to see a coalescing position. That doesn't

seem to be happening here. Each ballot provides almost no new information. We know that Kevin McCarthy has about 200 people who are happy to vote for him. And then there are 20 people who, 20 Republicans who won't vote for him. And they break into two groups pretty neatly. Group number one, there are four or five who just don't like Kevin McCarthy. They try to put more sophisticated arguments on it than that. But Matt Gaetz just doesn't like Kevin McCarthy and won't vote for him. Then you've got, what, a dozen or 15 who are conservative, who are taking this moment to use their leverage to try to move the whole caucus in a more conservative direction.

And that's what we knew on the first ballot, and that's what we knew on the most recent, what was it, the 10th ballot last night? The 11th, I think. Am I missing something or is it just, we've just got, it's frozen here. We're not getting new information. Yeah, there's been almost no motion. The very first, I mean, the big news was really in the first ballot on Tuesday in which 19

Republicans didn't vote for Kevin McCarthy. And so the thought was maybe it would be four or five or six, but it was 19. And that was a big deal. And they were divided. Most of them voted for Andy Biggs, one of the rebels who had actually announced his candidacy. I think that was kind of the starting point for them. So 19. And then it grows to 20 when Byron Donalds, the one-term congressman from Florida, joined them. So there were 20. And then it grew to 21, sort of, or at least 20 and a half with Victoria Sparks, the Republican from Indiana, who's kind of famous as having been born in Ukraine and lived a lot of her early life in Ukraine and has been a valuable voice, I think, inside the Republican conference on the Ukraine

issue. She voted present, which was not doing kevin mccarthy a favor either but not voting totally against him and it hasn't changed what has changed is um for a while there the uh the resistance decided to all vote for byron donalds um well let's say no they started with with jim jordan And the word is that Jim Jordan doesn't want to be the Speaker. He really, really, really wants to be. He really, really means it. Yeah, he wants to be Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Now, my feeling is Jim Jordan does not want to be Speaker under these conditions. You know, does he never want to be

Speaker of the House? I would doubt that. But anyway, so they all vote for him for a while. And then they all start voting for Byron Donalds. Chip Roy, who's, I think, one of the sincere members in all this gets out of Texas, as I recall. Yes, of Texas makes kind of an impassioned nominating speech for Byron Donalds and talks about the content of character, not the color of his skin. Byron Donalds is a Black Republican from Florida. And so they all vote for Byron Donalds for a while.

And then there's this great interview outside the Capitol where reporters ask Byron Donalds, do you want to be Speaker of the House? And he says, nah, not really. And then they say, well, wait a minute, you voted for yourself. And he said, well, they nominated me. I voted for myself. It was pretty cool. So the rebel's choice for Speaker didn't want to be Speaker speaker but he did vote for himself because he thought it was quote pretty cool okay then they then they seem to cool on byron donalds is is and even though i

generally support people named byron i mean he'd only been in the house for one term hasn't been sworn in for his second term so they all kind of leave byron uh don Donalds and they've now gone, oh, gosh, I've just forgotten the name of the guy from Ohio who has a lot more experience, Hearn from Ohio. And they're voting for him. And Matt Gaetz, one of the sort of publicity seeking bomb throwers in this, has started voting for Donald Trump. So there's been one vote on several ballots for the former President Trump. And so I do think this choosing people who don't want to run, but who are serious leaders like Jim Jordan, people who don't really want it, but are kind of flattered by the attention like Byron Donald's or just off the wall choice like Donald Trump. I just think it indicates a lack of seriousness.

So, well, and also here's the argument as I understand it. Again, correct me, correct the premise here, Byron, if I'm mistaken, but the argument runs as follows. And as far as I can tell, it's a pretty good argument. Look, we all know that Kevin McCarthy is not a policy wizard. We know that. We know he's not one of the most diehard conservatives, but at the same time, he's an extremely good politician. He's gotten himself reelected from California at a time when one seat after another fell to the Democrats. He's liked by everybody. Nobody has, aside from Matt Gaetz, nobody seems to have anything personal against him. He's a very skillful fundraiser. And this is just fine. Make Kevin speaker. He'll run the thing for the next two years. All we can get done is blocking

Joe Biden anyway. Kevin will be willing to fly around the country, stay in one Marriott after another to get fundraising events, to get ready for the next election, which is the one that we hope will produce results that will enable us to get something done. And in the meantime, precisely because Kevin isn't actually all that interested in policy, Jordan can operate a judiciary. Gallagher can get something done with this new select committee on China. The guys who really care about policy, Kevin will give them plenty of latitude to operate. What's wrong with that deal? Well, actually, I think that's a pretty good assessment of the views of a lot of the 200 supporters of Kevin McCarthy. You're right.

He's not a visionary. He's a really good, he's a very organized guy. So I think that's a pretty good description of the positive side of their motivations. But now they also have a negative side of their if the larger majority, if the 200 surrender to the 20, there'll never be an end to it. The 20 will be emboldened. Anytime there is a controversial vote or a close vote, which is going to happen a lot, given the narrowness of the Republican majority. Anytime there's a close vote, these guys are going to come in and make sort of demands and do what they can to screw things up if they want to. So I think that they're very upset about the possibility of rewarding the 20 with victory. Now, also, there is this idea, which I think you probably just got as I was talking about Biggs to Donalds to Hearn, that they don't have a candidate. And we've known that all along. And, you know, it's in an alternate universe.

It's possible to imagine that the 20 would say this guy is our candidate and we are going to show you pledges from 200 Republicans. Right. Right. Support Representative X. But they don't do that. And so really, I think maybe it was Jim Garrity who said this, I hadn't thought of it. But the most common in politics is you can't beat somebody with nobody. But in this case, they're beating Kevin McCarthy with nobody. Nobody. Okay, you said a moment ago, by the way, there are serious, we mentioned in passing Mike Gallagher, who's been on this podcast a number of times. Yeah. If Mike Gallagher said, okay, we're stuck for the good of the party, I'll do it.

He could, he might have a chance. There are, you could name half a dozen who are so widely respected and convey a certain seriousness toward policy that Kevin might not convey. You could actually think of candidates. It's just that none of them has come forward. Is that right? That is correct. That is correct.

And Gallagher is not obviously voting with this group. And by the way, the House Freedom Caucus is a lot bigger than, I should know how many people it has, but it has a lot more than 20. So they're not even carrying the whole Freedom Caucus, right? At least half of the Freedom Caucus is not going along with this group. And I think you have to look in this group and divide them into smaller subgroups, which is, I mentioned Chip Roy earlier. There's a group of sincere and serious people who are trying to reform the way the House operates. In my personal opinion, they've already won on that, and they could stop now, but they haven't.

But they are serious about reforming the way the House operates. And, you know, the short version is it's what Rand Paul always says, you know, Christmas is approaching. They're working on this enormous spending bill. And as December 22nd or December 23rd arrives, they come out of the door, hand you a 3000 page bill and say, vote for it. Right. And they want to stop that in the House. Obviously, they can't stop it in the Senate, but they want to stop that in the House. And that's good. And of course, McCarthy has agreed on that long ago. And so anyway, you have the serious ones and then you have the bomb throwers and the jerks. And I think that I think Matt Gaetz is in that category.

And Matt Gaetz has been very clear. He's he's never going to vote for for Kevin McCarthy under any circumstances. So, you know, it's not as if Kevin McCarthy could make some concession and Matt Gaetz would vote for him. And, you know, Matt Gaetz was on Laura Ingraham's program on Fox on Thursday night. And he absolutely came out and just made it totally clear, which is that he wants to cripple the office of Speaker of the House. And I'm going to actually, I'm looking at it right here. I'm going to read you the quote. Let's see. Okay, here he goes. He's on Ingram. And he said, he wants to reduce and functionally turn the speakership into a ceremonial position. His word, ceremonial position. Quote, as a matter of fact, if my colleagues get what they want from McCarthy,

the chairman of the Freedom Caucus will actually be more important than the Speaker of the House in determining the legislation that reaches the floor, how amendments are processed, and how spending occurs going forward. All right, so this is a power grab. This is a huge power grab on the part of him and a few others. And it's only made possible, of course, by the fact that the majority is so small. And they've only got a four-seat majority. And if that weren't the case, I mean, if they had 235 seats, we wouldn't be seeing this.

But Gates and others saw an opportunity in the narrowness of the majority, and here we are. So how does it end? I truly don't know. I think, you know... Byron, if you don't know, Kevin McCarthy, nobody knows. No, McCarthy, you know, I think that a lot of the opposition to McCarthy is just opportunistic. But the fact is McCarthy does not, Kevin McCarthy, the person, is not the only person who can be Speaker of the House. It doesn't absolutely have to be McCarthy.

So there's this never Kevin caucus, but there really shouldn't be an always Kevin caucus, because there could be other people. And so there could be, you know, there's Steve Scalise. I mean, he is in the leadership. Now there are members of the so-called chaos caucus who say they won't vote for any person who's currently in the leadership, which would include Scalise. So will they finally

settle on somebody else who can get 218 votes? If that happens, will they abide by all these concessions that McCarthy has made? I mean, I can't, you know, if they came to me and said, Byron, you can be Speaker of the House, we're all going to vote for you, I would immediately say, well, I'm not going to abide by all the concessions that McCarthy made. So, you know, in that sense, we could end up being back at step one in all of this so it could take whatever happens which we don't know it could take a while now i read someplace sorry we've pretty much aerated this topic i think we have ventilated this one i read someplace though final question on this i read someplace that next week is when staff paychecks stop arriving. That is to say the previous Congress authorized payments through such and such a date.

And now you can't get paychecks because the new Congress has not been seated. No new authorization can be given by the Congress of the United States because one chamber is, for official and legal matters, empty. If that's true, I have to believe the pressure. I read that and I believe that is true. And I think it would apply to members too who've not been sworn in. So there's no members of the House right now. And so this is kind of like a big experiment on whether we really need a House of Representatives. When we talk about people living paycheck to paycheck, we're talking about the members of the House of Representatives. Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of them do. I mean, you know, they have a hard life, especially the ones who live on the West Coast. But any of them

who live, you know, a good distance from Washington, D.C., it's really a very, very stressful, difficult life, which they like to do, but it's not easy and not cheap. And not cheap. And the pay is about $175,000 a year, which is well above the average for an American household. And yet, you'd have to say that some of these people are more talented than average, perhaps, and might have other career options. And for sure, if my friends in Congress are any indication, many of them are married to spouses who say, tell me again why we're doing this once or twice every week. And tell me again why we're doing this. I imagine that spouse's question would acquire a certain urgency if the paycheck dried up altogether.

So next week could get interesting. It could. And I do think that members of the 200 are, I talked about how angry they were getting about rewarding the rebels. I think a number of them are also pretty depressed because they, you know, they were going to be in the majority. And now Republicans have screwed it up so much. You know, I'd add one more thing. If you remember this giant spending bill, the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill that was passed on December 23rd, the Senate passed it. And McCarthy at the time was begging Mitch McConnell, don't pass the bill. Wait until January when we're in control of the House, and then we can exert some downward pressure on the spending, and let's get some Republican input into this bill. Don't pass

this bill that came from Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer. And McConnell said, basically, no, we're going to pass it. We have no proof that you guys in the House are going to be able to get your act together and even find a speaker anytime soon. Now, it seemed a little harsh, but it was absolutely correct.

Yeah. Yes. Mitch McConnell, yet again, says things that are very unpleasant to hear and correct. That's it. To what extent, Byron, do you think it matters who's the speaker, given that the underlying conditions are going to remain the same? Well, I think that, I mean, they basically have two jobs in the House right now, Republicans. And one, that's to block the Biden agenda, make sure it's just dead, the legislative agenda.

And two is to try to win the next election with more people, try to win bigger the next time around. And, you know, McCarthy is perfectly capable of doing the first, and as well, probably capable of doing the second. He did, you know, he did an excellent job in 2020, when it was thought that Democrats were going to pick up quite a few and quite a few seats. And in fact, Republicans picked up seats. So that was viewed as a real accomplishment from Kevin McCarthy. So how can they do this going forward uh they have zero majority um they're not gonna you know they're not gonna make anything law they just have to stop everything that biden can does can do which i think all republicans would say yes that's fine now could anybody do that

almost any sincere reasonably competent person could probably do that, do the first part. The second part about campaigning and organizing and moving money around and running 435 house races, it's not all that easy. And McCarthy's actually pretty good at that. Hey, sorry, hate to interrupt here. Actually, I don't because I'm telling you something you need to know about. Maybe you've heard it before, maybe you haven't, but I'm here to remind you that if you have your bowl and branch sheets, you're set, except maybe why not get another pair? Really? However you're spending this winter season, make sure you're getting your best sleep with a set of buttery soft sheets from Bowling Branch. And if you've got guests coming over, make sure they get the

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But at the same time, one of the requests was to be able to remove the speaker or have a vote on removing the speaker at the behest of one representative. I mean, isn't there a point at which that becomes so unstable that it becomes counterproductive? Well, that's a really interesting thing. That's the so-called motion to vacate the chair. And it would under the requests or the demands of the rebels, they would allow one individual lawmaker to actually set in motion the process to remove the speaker. Now, that seems outrageous, but it was actually the way the House operated until Pelosi's second go-around in 2018. The reason I think it was in the rules that way was it was never used. It was used once in 1910 when Joe Cannon, the tyrannical Joe Cannon, was the speaker.

And it was used to, I don't think it deposed him, but it did knock him down a few notches. And then it was not used again until 2015 when Representative Mark Meadows filed a motion to vacate the chair against John Boehner, which did not directly result to his leaving, but it was one of the factors that led to Boehner just finally chucking it all and leaving. And then I think when people saw the Meadows thing and the whole mess that transpired with the motion to vacate the chair in 2015, and this was all Republicans or what you want to call them, Tea Party Republicans, it's obviously pre-Trump. I think there was this feeling that, you know, we should probably require more people to be on board to have a motion to vacate the chair. And so under Pelosi, it was a much larger number. And

with the McCarthy negotiations, McCarthy demanded that it be five people. You know, we've already got five people right now who would do something like that. There's no functional difference between five and one. There's a difference between 120 and one, but not five and one. So I think McCarthy has actually agreed to the one person motion to vacate the chair. And, you know, somebody is going to do it. We saw it in 2015. We hadn't seen it for a century before that. But somebody is going to do it. There it is. Byron, unfortunately, the clock has filed a motion to vacate the guest.

So we have to say goodbye. But we have to tell everybody, of course, that the Byron York show can be found at the Ricochet Audio Network. And, you know, we'll see you at the Examiner and Fox and the rest of it. And we'll have you back here, perhaps, when this is all sorted out and you can tell us exactly again what happened. I know more than I did before. For some reason, listening to a guy who's there and understands it is more instructive than following random people on Twitter. So thank you for joining us today. And we'll talk to you again soon. Thank you all. Byron, I'm keeping an eye on you. And if you ever stumble, I'll let you know. But for now, you remain what you have been for some years now, which is the best political reporter in the country.

Thanks for joining us. Thank you so much. Always appreciate it. Peter, keeping his eye on Byron. Sounds like one of those tech overlords is always watching what you do, right? You know, a few decades ago, private citizens used to be, well, what's the word? Private, right? What's changed?

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but our little corner of the web has real people who, well, they actually get out of the house sometimes. That's true. That's right. Real people in real actual physical locations. I know it sounds revolutionary at this point in history, but yeah, that's what we do. When you join Ricochet, you have an invitation to some of our exclusive member only meetups. It's particularly fun. I was in New York last year. And as I mentioned before,

I met all kinds of people got COVID and I do it again in a second, even with the COVID. But are you worried about that these days? So you can maybe think about Sarasota, Florida, January 14th. Susan Quinn's got something lined up. Quiet Pie, a reservation center part in Vacaville, California, on January 28th. John Gabriel. Oh, my gosh. John Gabriel is descending from the heavens to having one of these things.

Well, Phoenix meetup in March. That'll be great. We're talking about Twin Cities meetup. I'm going to be there. Fresh fish. He's thinking about that. Anyway, go to Ricochet.com and take a look at all of the list of Twin Cities meetup. I'm going to be there. Fresh fish. He's thinking about that. Anyway, go to Ricochet.com and take a look at all of the list

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Anyway, do that and join Ricochet while you're at it. Before we go, a couple of things. Peter, Pope Benedict had his internment. Tell us why Benedict was important. He was Pope for just a short time and stepped down to the consternation and surprise of many, but he was critical in what ways? Well, I'll be recording it in just a few minutes, half an hour from now or so. I'll be recording a whole special edition of Ricochet on this very subject with Father Paul Scalia. Well, so here's what's

in my mind about it. The first is his scholarship. And I'll tell you why that was important. But let me tell you about it for a moment. If you read, he produced over 60 books. And these were not light books. These were not pamphlets. He produced 60 works of real academic heft. If you survey his academic output, you realize that this man knew all of ancient history. He had read in modern history, modern developments, he had read all of Marx in the original German. He read all of Freud. He knew Darwin. He was a scripture scholar who was perfectly at home in Hebrew and ancient Greek. So, in his very person, he refuted the argument. He welcomed arguments in general, but the one argument that he refuted in his very person was that Christian faith or Catholic belief is dying out as education

spreads around the world, that it's fundamentally a kind of artifact of medieval peasant life. This argument, I once had Christopher Hitchens look at me in disgust at a dinner and say, Peter, you of all people, how can you believe this claptrap? Well, Benedict makes the counter argument. You can be an extremely erudite man and believe it. For us as Americans, he found America extremely interesting. He was fascinated by the United States. I always felt that he understood us better than other popes. He was fascinated with the United States for one particular reason. He understood and wrote about the collision between the church, which was still largely medieval in outlook, and the emerging modern world in the 19th century. One of the developments that made the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s possible was the American experience.

French Revolution tries to overthrow faith. The American Revolution is quite different. It's open to faith. And by the time we get to the mid-20th century, Catholicism is established and flourishing in this country alongside still healthy Protestant churches, alongside healthy Jewish communities. And this notion of religious plurality, that it could work was an important way. He writes about the 20th century that the church and the modern world found ways of speaking to each other again. And the example of the United States was one reason they were able to do so, in his view. There, that's enough for now.

For some reason that I'll explain later in my website, I was doing a little dive into a man named McAdoo, who was the director of the railroads in World War I after they were nationalized and was also secretary of the treasury for a while. He was the son-in-law of Wilson, and he was played by Vincent Price in the biography of Woodrow Wilson, a Zanuck pig. Really? Never heard about and looks absolutely dreadful and was the most expensive movie at the time and bombed. But when talking about McAdoo, some of the things that he had left behind were a law firm now ensconced in a very tall tower in Manhattan and also a small town in Texas. So I was keen to see what that looked like. So I found on Google Street View, McAdoo, Texas. It's one of those very small little towns, so insignificant that the Google streetcars have not been back since 2007. So for all I know, it's been scoured by fire, no longer stands at all. But in 2007, it was a smattering of houses

and four streets and two churches, Baptist Church and a Methodist church on either side of the street. And there weren't, as far as I could tell, pocked walls where people had been firing bullets and mortars at each other across that road. No, they coexisted in that pluralistic America that you talk about that Benedict recognized, which is a great thing. Hey, one of two things could happen. We could either go to Charlie right now and reduce him to a cultural stereotype by asking him about the Prince's new book and Megan and the rest of it, or we could leave that for one of his podcasts where I'm sure

he's keen to tell you all about it. I don't like the, I don't like to, I really don't want Charlie's podcast to flourish. I want this podcast, I want him to come crawling to us week after week saying, is Rob out of town? Is Rob and Matt a guest? Could I please come guest host for? That's what I want,

James. All right. I have a minute. One minute. Prince Harry has written a book. Charlie, go. Well, the great advantage of me answering this question within your one minute window on this podcast, rather than reserving it to the 45 or 50 minutes that I use on my own podcast is that the length of my primal scream can be that much shorter. He shouldn't have written this book. And in another era, he'd have either been offed by the king or sent to the front somewhere to have his head lopped off by a cannonball. He's a terrible person and

he is making worse and worse decisions. Is he just a foolish young man? Is he just a foolish young man? Or is he undermining the institution? Well, I think he is. Is he doing serious damage? No, he's probably not doing serious damage. He's certainly undermining it to some extent. Is he a silly young man? Well, the reason that this is a little bit odd is that he's regressed. Most people that you read about, they spend their time as a silly young man, and then they grow up. But Prince Harry seems to have gone the other way. He was, by all accounts, brave and responsible when he was fighting in Afghanistan. And then he came back, and he's become a joke.

That's normally not the way around these things happen. Well, you can catch something sad about it almost, isn't there? There is, there's something very pathetic about it. And I don't care at all. And the extent to which these people occupy the popular culture is annoying to me. But then again, you know, it's not like anybody's got my head strapped down like Malcolm McDowell and Clockwork Orange forcing me to examine them and look at them and watch their antics. I see them come. I turn the other way. You, on the other hand, dear listener, you should go directly to Bowling Branch, to ExpressVPN, to Raycon and Factor 75.

Lots of great products there who have been advertising on this show. And we thank them for that. And, you know, every one of those products make your life better, more comfortable. There we have it. Charles, thank you uh maybe rob next time maybe not peter best wishes to california and we'll see all of you in the comments at ricochet 4.0 next week boys ricochet join the conversation