Shortest Speakership on record?

Is Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) tenure as Speaker of the House over a full month before it could possibly have begun? He made the mistake of pulling back the curtain a little bit regarding the House Select Committee on Benghazi:

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee,” McCarthy said on Fox News’s “Hannity.”

“What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable,” McCarthy continued.

“But no one would have known any of that had happened had we not fought and made that happen,” McCarthy said on Fox while making his pitch to become the next Speaker.

Uh, oops? The Benghazi investigation, correct me if I’m wrong, is supposed to be about figuring out how things went so wrong during the Benghazi consulate attack. They’re not really about that, but Republicans still need to cling to the idea that they’re about that in order to maintain some semblance of credibility. Saying that the committee is about damaging Hillary Clinton’s presidential aspirations is not helping the cause.

There’s been an outpouring of anger over McCarthy’s comments. Senate Democrats are calling for the committee to be disbanded and several may quit the committee anyway to try to deprive it of its bipartisan veneer (which may not be a great idea, actually). The people are restless, if we can judge by the reception that Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) got earlier today when she tried to justify the committee’s existence at the Washington Ideas Forum. But most importantly for McCarthy, his fellow Republicans are pissed. The first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club, that sort of thing. And those are the people who will be electing the next Speaker.

There doesn’t seem to be a strong current of support for putting somebody else in the Speaker’s chair, yet. That said, maybe McCarthy should try not expressing any more off-the-cuff opinions until the Speaker election is held on October 8.

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