House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has asked right-wing backbenchers clamoring to punish the 13 House Republicans who voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill (you know, the one 19 Republican senators, including Mitch McConnell, voted for earlier) to cool their jets until his conference can get through trying to sabotage and demonize the Build Back Better reconciliation bill expected to come to the House floor this week or next. It’s a classic kick-the-can-down-the-road tactic from McCarthy, who has spent most of this year selectively caving to pressure to forgive MAGA Members of Congress of all sorts of outrages while punishing and purging anyone who has displeased Donald Trump. But it didn’t satisfy Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who really wants John Katko of New York — the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee — to be stripped of that status.
Her specific complaint about Katko, however, immediately qualifies for the Hall of Fame of unintentionally hilarious jokes by politicians:
So I have three questions:
- Who gets to explain to Greene that certain incidents that especially affected New York on September 11, 2001 provided the entire rationale for creating a Department of Homeland Security and a House Committee on Homeland Security? I guess an ancillary question is where MTG was on that fateful date. Maybe working out?
- Who gets to explain to Greene that New York is indeed a border state, or perhaps explain that the United States has more than one border? Or perhaps that Katko’s district sits along the border?
- Who gets to tell Rudy Giuliani that his status among Trump hard-liners is now so diminished that one of his allies has forgotten or never knew he became a national hero after September 11, and converted that deserved fame into capital he is still spending? Greene’s comments might even suggest Rudy is now better known as Trump’s feckless lawyer than as America’s Mayor.
If there is a silver lining here, it’s that hard-core conservatives appear to have implicitly conceded the Global War on Terror has truly and finally ended.
