OPINION:
When Rep. Matt Gaetz and his band of political misfits cashiered former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy last year, they assured us they were leading Republicans out of the wilderness and finally into the promised land.
It was a messy and chaotic fight on the House floor in the middle of a session piled high with serious problems Congress should have been solving. And since voters had put Republicans in charge of the House of Representatives, there was reason to believe Republicans might have a hand in solving some of those problems.
But once the nasty floor fight was all over, Mr. Gaetz assured us, the next speaker of the House would be the Moses Republicans have been seeking for so long.
In fact, when current Speaker Mike Johnson received the gavel, he invoked Moses, whose visage gazes down on the House floor in probable disgust from the balcony above. Mr. Johnson would later invoke Moses in an astonishing speech that leaked online about his ascension to House leadership.
“The Lord impressed upon my heart a few weeks before this happened that something was going to occur,” he told a gathering of Christian lawmakers. “And the Lord very specifically told me in my prayers to prepare but wait. I had this sense that we were going to come to a Red Sea moment in our Republican conference and the country at large.”
The Lord, he said, “was going to choose a new Moses.” And that Moses, in Speaker Johnson’s telling, turned out to be, well, Speaker Johnson.
Pro tip: When you are trying to sort out the voices in your head, beware of any voices that sound like Matt Gaetz. To be sure, God works through some curious people. But even God’s sense of humor has its limits.
Now, I don’t want to be too harsh about Mr. Gaetz. The best thing you can say about Matt Gaetz is that everybody in Washington hates him. And that is some seriously high praise.
He is the skunk at every party. He often appears to be aiming in the right direction — sometimes even for the right reasons. And he has quite the knack for finding the light of any television camera within a hundred miles.
Even Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer knows never to get between Mr. Gaetz and a TV camera.
Thanks to the prophesies of Mr. Gaetz and the “Red Sea” leadership of Mr. Johnson, Republican voters have been screwed again.
Against the wishes of a majority of Republicans in the House, the House voted to send $60 billion more for President Biden’s war in Ukraine — even as Congress refuses to stop the invasion at our own southern border.
Relying on a majority of support from Democrats in the chamber, Speaker Johnson parted the Red Sea to deliver Democrats’ top priority while Republicans’ top priority was once again ignored. In other words, voters gave Republicans the majority in the House, but Democrats still control the chamber and the legislation that comes out of it.
It is worth noting that Mr. Johnson’s use of House Democrats to push the Democrats’ priorities is precisely the same tactic Mr. Gaetz used to dump Mr. McCarthy and install Mr. Johnson. Mr. Gaetz and Mr. Johnson should both get Employee of the Year parking spots in the Democrats’ parking lot outside the House chamber.
For Republicans, the war funding vote wasn’t so much a Red Sea moment as a mass drowning.
For them, the Red Sea was not so much parted as Speaker Johnson launched a creaking ship filled with the entire Republican Party far out to sea, where he scuttled the ship and drowned all aboard, except for Mr. Gaetz and Speaker Johnson, who grabbed the only lifeboat and rowed back to land to declare victory.
Hilariously, Mr. Gaetz is suddenly as responsive as a scam roofer in a Florida retirement community after he has been caught.
“I am not here to defend Speaker Johnson’s choices or his actions,” he wrote on the Internet, explaining why he suddenly opposes coordinating with Democrats to defenestrate Mr. Johnson.
“However, when I filed the motion to vacate the previous speaker, we had a four-seat majority,” he said.
“My sincere worry is that one or two or three of my Republican colleagues would be susceptible to a bribe and will hand the House over the Democrats.”
Which, of course, is exactly what has happened thanks to Mr. Gaetz himself.
• Charles Hurt is the opinion editor at The Washington Times
Please read our comment policy before commenting.