As the House’s top Republican faced loss after loss in his chaotic bid to become speaker on Tuesday, the California congressman was subjected to a deluge of memes and taunts for his inability to rally the far-right faction of his party as he inherits a razor-thin majority in the 118th U.S. Congress.
This, despite his willingness to concede numerous points, including various rule changes requested by members of the House Freedom Caucus—who have opposed McCarthy for being too moderate—as conditions of his speakership.
“This once-in-a-century humiliation of a party’s nominee for Speaker is chickens coming home to roost for McCarthy, who whitewashed right-wing insurrectionism on the House floor,” Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin tweeted during the vote. “Nobody’s getting killed now, but the House GOP now sleeps in the bed they made with Trump and Bannon.”
Many others were in agreement.
“Feel like I’m living in a Worldstar video the way McCarthy is getting beat down right now by his own party on the House floor,” opined freshman Democratic Congressman Maxwell Alejandro Frost.
Others tipped their hats to media claims that enough “tired” Democrats unwilling to sit through hours of McCarthy’s repeated defeats—up to three at the time of this writing—would leave the chamber, giving McCarthy enough support to overcome the 19 Republicans obstructing his speakership.
“People saying that Dems are going to get tired and leave to make McCarthy speaker really don’t know about the recuperative powers of watching a guy who threw his hat in with people who came to your office to kill you suffer repeated humiliations,” tweeted Elie Mystal, a journalist for the liberal magazine The Nation.
Some lambasted McCarthy even before entering the chamber, including California Democrat Ted Lieu, for whom a picture spoke a thousand words.
“About to go to the House floor,” he tweeted above a picture of himself holding a bag of popcorn.
Some of it, McCarthy did to himself. After Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan delivered a rousing speech nominating McCarthy for speaker, Florida Representative Matt Gaetz—and later, Texas Republican Chip Roy—nominated Jordan for speaker.
After his third round on the ballot, Jordan actually received 20 votes from his colleagues for the nomination, indicating that the conservative movement to oppose McCarthy had actually grown.
“Three ballots. Three losses for McCarthy,” tweeted Freedom Caucus member Andy Biggs. “He is obstructing Congress from getting its legislative work done!”
Still, McCarthy persisted—even as his losses continued to mount.
“The funny thing about this insistence on just voting again and again is that Kevin McCarthy is just gonna be taking L’s again and again,” tweeted The Daily Beast’s Matt Fuller.
