I don’t have a lot of time for commenting on it, but I wanted to make sure you knew this — because until today, I did not.
That’s because my main source of South Carolina news, and SC angles on national news, is The State. And while you can go thestate.com looking for the information and find it, I still look at the paper through the lens of the print edition. No, I don’t read the dead-tree version literally — I dropped that years ago. I read all the newspapers to which I subscribe on my iPad. But some apps are better organized than others, and while I find the NYT‘s very helpful, I’m not pleased with the way The State‘s is organized. So I look at the e-edition each morning, before moving on to NYT and The Washington Post and the Boston Globe for national and international news and commentary.
And as near as I can tell, the fact that Ralph Norman is one of the 20 or so GOP crazies repeatedly sabotaging Kevin McCarthy’s bid for U.S. House speaker has not appeared in those reproductions of the print edition. (Maybe it’s been in those “Extra” pages that the app provides, but I don’t read those pages, because I read other papers for more timely news on those topics.)
I learned that this morning from The New York Times. You might always want to peruse this item, which breaks down every vote in the nine ballots.
By the way, in case you wondered, he’s the ONLY member of the SC delegation doing this. The other Republicans are dutifully lining up behind the guy who they think will win. Which doesn’t make them profiles in courage or anything, but it does make Norman alone.
Now, let’s get something straight: I’m no fan of Kevin McCarthy. I not only don’t want him to be speaker, I am embarrassed that such a person is in position to be seriously considered.
He is unsuitable for the position, to say the least.
But these Republicans who keep voting against him are doing so because they don’t think he’s unsuitable enough. So I wanted to make sure you knew Ralph Norman was one of them.
I suppose I should enjoy the situation. As David Frum wrote in The Atlantic (in a piece headlined “No Tears for Kevin McCarthy“):
Because the people attempting to inflict that defeat upon McCarthy include some of the most nihilistic and destructive characters in U.S. politics, McCarthy is collecting misplaced sympathy from people who want a more responsible Congress. But the House will function better under another speaker than it would under McCarthy—even if that other speaker is much more of an ideological extremist than McCarthy himself.
The defeat of Kevin McCarthy in his bid for the speakership of the House would be good for Congress. The defeat of Kevin McCarthy would be good for the United States. It might even be good for his own Republican Party.
McCarthy is not in political trouble for the reasons he deserves to be in political trouble. Justice is seldom served so exactly. But he does deserve to be in trouble, so justice must be satisfied with the trouble that he’s in….
We could talk about this back and forth all day, but I just wanted to make sure that as we watch this, my fellow South Carolinians know that Ralph Norman is one of those “most nihilistic and destructive characters in U.S. politics”…