Ben Cline wants to have it both ways, our friend Gene Zitver, the author of ClineWatch, noted in a weekend column on the House Speaker vote fiasco.
Republicans were eventually, after 15 ballots, able to get enough votes to elect Kevin McCarthy Speaker, but it took three days and a near-fistfight on the House floor to get it done.
Twenty far-right members of the House Republican caucus raked McCarthy over several barrels to extract concessions that will almost certainly neuter him for the next two years, if the slick Californian lasts that long.
Even after getting what they wanted from McCarthy, hilariously, the hardliners held out for an extra few ballots, just because they were having fun effing with him.
Cline, surprisingly, didn’t join in the fun. The Sixth District Republican was among the 147 Republicans who voted to decertify the 2020 election two Jan. 6ths ago, but Cline was a good boy in 2022, casting all 15 of his House Speaker votes for McCarthy.
No doubt he hopes McCarthy pats him on the head and tells him what a good boy he was in so doing.
The votes for McCarthy earned Cline sharp criticism on social media from the Never Kevins in the Sixth, which prompted him to post a video to social media to try to shore up the base.
In the video, Cline said he was “getting ready to head back from the swamp to Virginia’s beautiful Sixth District” – this is known in the carny pro wrestling business as working for the “cheap pop,” incidentally.
He then congratulated McCarthy, and in the same breath congratulated the Freedom Caucus, characterizing the effort to string out the House Speaker election as being about “reform” and “rules changes” aimed at allowing House Republicans to advance a “more conservative agenda.”
“That’s going to help us to make sure we secure the border, balance the budget, restore American energy independence,” Cline said. “You know, we’re gonna get these things done for the American people because that’s what we were sent here to do. I’m anxious to get to work. God bless you.”
Looks like somebody wished he’d stayed home last week.
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Chris Graham
