Kevin McCarthy speaks

The slight Democratic majority in the House of Representatives was poised to pass the current iteration of the Bummer Beyond Belief spending blowout last night when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy took the floor at 8:38 p.m. (Eastern). McCarthy turned in the longest speech in House history — 8 hours and 32 minutes — to delay the vote until a few minutes after 5:00 a.m. this morning. He has just wound it up.

Congratulations are in order, and not just because McCarthy set the House record in a good cause. You can feel the heartburn in the New York Times story posted at 5:32 a.m. (Eastern) about McCarthy’s performance. You can feel the heartburn in the AP story with the headline deriding McCathy’s speech as a “rant.” Anything that makes mainstream media political reporters feel so bad must be good.

If the Senate ever returns to the old-fashioned Senate filibuster, McCarthy will be the indispensable man. He rightly cited “Mr. Smith” in the course of his remarks. McCarthy even looks a little like Jimmy Stewart. That must cause heartburn among the bien-pensants as well.

How was McCarthy able to speak at such length under House rules and the heavy hand of the Speaker of the House, a/k/a she who must be obeyed? The Times story offers this brief explanation:

While the House has no equivalent to the Senate filibuster, Mr. McCarthy used the so-called magic minute rule, which allows the House speaker, the majority leader and the minority leader to talk for as long as they want. Ms. Pelosi famously used the tactic when she was minority leader in 2018, speaking for just over eight hours about the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers.

In his speech McCarthy made many good points about the destructiveness of the Biden administration has done all by itself and also working with narrow Democratic majorities in Congress this year. The Times story disapprovingly refers to these points as “grievances.”

It is amazing how much damage Democrats have done in such a short period of time. I appreciate McCarthy’s effort to draw attention to this chapter of the Biden disaster.

Quotable quote: “My one minute is almost done.”

UPDATE: The BBB spending blowout passed the House before 9:00 a.m. on a vote of 220-213. All Republican members and one Democrat — Rep. Jared Golden — opposed passage of the bill. If only this level of bipartisan opposition could be maintained in the Senate, it would be RIP for this monstrosity.

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