The morning after House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy shocked Congress by announcing he was dropping out of the race to become the next Speaker of the House, CBS This Morning and NBC’s Today sprinted over to their analysts to tear into the “really pathetic” conservatives for creating a “chaotic” situation for the House that shows they’re “impossible to run.”
Appearing in the 7:00 a.m. hour on CBS This Morning, co-host Charlie Rose asked Face the Nation moderator John Dickerson “[w]hat’s happening to the Republican Party” and if “the tail [is] wagging the dog” to which Dickerson quipped: “There’s wagging all over the place. I mean, the dogs are running amuck.”
Later in the segment, Rose’s fascination with the situation continued when he lamented to Dickerson: “So, can anybody control these people that represent the freedom caucus? Can anybody in the Republican Party deal with them.”
Following a short response from Dickerson that “it doesn’t look like anybody can,” Rose hyped the doomsday prospect that conservatives “are willing to take the House down.” With little assurance for the liberal host, the Sunday morning talk show host alluded to the fact that “they think the House has been selling out Republicans and conservatives for the last many years and finally their chance to stop that.”
In the next hour, Republican pollster, CBS News contributor, and McCarthy friend Frank Luntz lambasted how the situation is “chaotic” with the reluctance of conservatives to accept McCarthy being “really pathetic.”
The tirade from Luntz was only just beginning as he further complained that “[t]he inability of House Republicans to unite has now become a poison and those people listening today should understand that when members come out and say we weren't respected or we weren't appreciated, House Republicans are not functioning this morning.”
Luntz also opined that the House GOP caucus hasn’t “functioned for some time because there’s a segment there that simply believes it is better to blow up the process than fix it and better to pull people apart than to find some way to collaborate and to cooperate and to work together.”
His attack on conservatives shifted moments later to their calls for someone new who hasn’t been in party leadership or in Washington for a considerable amount of time as both extremely unreasonable and unwise:
They talk about we need a new face. The problem is this is not a debating society or the Kiwanis Club. This is House Speaker of the United States of America. You don’t want a new face. You want somebody who knows the rules and procedure and you want someone who knows what regular order actually is and you want someone who can listen, not just to a narrow group of people but to the entire Congress...If we put someone in there who has been in office for two or on four years and doesn't know the process to run the House of Representatives.
Over on NBC’s Today, the tune was quite similar as Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd told co-host Savannah Guthrie that “nobody” wants the position because “[t]he place is impossible to run right now” and will be “during a presidential election year, particularly the primary.”
Adding that he believed “McCarthy was gonna be Boehner 2.0” and “I think a lot of conservatives saw that and I think that's why they were trying to torpedo this thing.”
