McCarthy deal with Fox seen as capitulation to GOP MAGA wing in speakership deal

After first letting his fundraising mailer do the talking, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is now speaking up to defend his decision to hand over more than 40,000 hours of Capitol surveillance footage to Fox's Tucker Carlson. McCarthy explained to The New York Times on Wednesday that he released the footage because he promised, and said the tapes belong to the American public. I think sunshine lets everybody make their own judgment. Making this footage to the American public is not the same as releasing it to Tucker Carlson, but I digress. The promise McCarthy is referring to is actually one of the concessions he agreed to last month in a deal with a group of far-right Republicans, people who stood between him and the House Speaker's gavel. The holdouts were led by Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, who, after the first few rounds of votes, went on Fox and was not shy about how he felt about Kevin McCarthy. Kevin McCarthy has been in the leadership for 14 years, and he has sold shares of himself to special interests, to political action committees, and so that's why I don't think he is an appropriate choice.

It took two more excruciating days of votes, time that, by the way, none of us will ever get back, and several rounds of promises to convince Matt Gaetz and his gang to budge. Many of these promises that McCarthy made had long been on the right-wing wish list, kicking Congresswoman Ilhan Omar off the Foreign Affairs Committee as political payback for the previous demotions of Marjorie Taylor Green and Paul Gosar, creating a partisan committee to investigate the so-called weaponization of the federal government, and doling out plum assignments, including seats on the House Rules Committee. And it worked. Kevin McCarthy gave the MAGA wing of the party enough to win the Speaker's gavel, if you can call it a win. And Matt Gaetz is delighted. Bravo, Speaker McCarthy. This was not an agreement that we had at the beginning of last week, but as the week progressed, Speaker McCarthy, to his great credit, understood this was important to a great many of us.

So Speaker McCarthy is now delivering, bigly, for the MAGA wing of his party, even if it's bad for Congress and even if it's bad for democracy, and maybe even if it's bad for Kevin McCarthy, because, as he said himself, he promised. And Kevin McCarthy is a man of his word, you know, except for the time he said that Trump bore responsibility for the deadly attack on the Capitol and then turned right around and instead pledged fealty to Trump down at Mar-a-Lago. And also, that time he told Liz Cheney he would talk to Trump about resigning and then never did. And that time he told his House colleagues that he thought Trump was on Vladimir Putin's payroll before claiming it was just a bad attempt and a joke. Other than that, he is totally trustworthy. Now, if you are wondering whether you will get to see that January 6 security footage without Tucker Carlson's edits, the answer is maybe. Speaker McCarthy tells The New York Times that he plans to make the footage more widely available after Tucker Carlson airs his version of this footage first, because he gave it to Tucker first and, well, he is a man of his word.

Alex Wagner