The House of Representatives won’t have Kevin Owen McCarthy to kick around anymore. The eight-term Republican congressman from California announced on Wednesday that he would be stepping down from Congress, just over two months since his ouster after 10 months as speaker. Rather than finishing out his now-final term, McCarthy said in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he will be leaving before the end of the year.
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 has opted to chase power elsewhere. It is the choice of a coward.
The op-ed is also oddly self-congratulatory for someone leaving office with no real victories to his name.
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. “It often seems that the more Washington does, the worse America gets,” he writes, adding that the “challenges we face are more likely to be solved by innovation than legislation.” He doesn’t name these challenges, but he puts solving them squarely on the plate of “everyday men and women who are raising families, showing up for work, volunteering, and pursuing the American Dream with passion and purpose” rather than the officials they elected to handle it for them.
The op-ed is also oddly self-congratulatory for someone leaving office with no real victories to his name. He patted himself on the…
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