The story of how Speaker Kevin McCarthy handed 40,000 hours of security footage from Jan. 6 over to a white supremacist vandal keeps reeking to an ever higher heaven. From the New York Times:
The most conservative Republican members of Congress — many of whom have worked to downplay or deny the reality of the Jan. 6 attack — have been pushing Mr. McCarthy for weeks to release the video after he promised to do so during his campaign for speaker. Mr. McCarthy has shown little appetite for the kind of aggressive public re-litigation of what happened that day that some of his colleagues have called for, but he is sensitive to the dangers of angering his hard-core base by seeming to drop or disregard the matter[...]“I promised,” Mr. McCarthy said on Wednesday in a brief phone interview in which he defended his decision to grant Mr. Carlson exclusive access to the more than 40,000 hours of security footage. “I was asked in the press about these tapes, and I said they do belong to the American public. I think sunshine lets everybody make their own judgment.” Still, the sunshine Mr. McCarthy referred to will, for now, be filtered through a very specific prism — that of Mr. Carlson, a hero of the hard right who has insinuated without evidence that the Jan. 6 attack was a “false flag” operation carried out by the government.
Historians have described three events in American history as "corrupt bargains." The first and original was the settlement of the presidential election of 1824, when the election was thrown to the House and John Quincy Adams prevailed over Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay, among others. Once he won in the House, Adams appointed Clay as his secretary of state, which set the Jacksonian partisans howling about a quid pro quo. The other two instances were the 1877 congressional compromise that settled the 1876 presidential election, which for all intents and purposes simultaneously ended any federal role in Reconstruction; and Gerald Ford's decision to pardon Richard Nixon. (Evidence of an actual "bargain" in the Adams and Ford episodes is wanting.)
But now we can add a fourth corrupt bargain to the roster: namely, the arrangement that McCarthy made with the Angry Children's Caucus in order to become speaker. McCarthy essentially has copped to this one, even fundraising off his abject surrender.
Of course, for good or ill, the three previous corrupt bargains played for mortal stakes. The presidency was at stake in the first two and (arguably) in the third as well. In 1877, the country deliberately opened the door for eight decades of Jim Crow. In this latest corrupt bargain, what was at stake was McCarthy's political career—a cheap return in exchange for a continuing threat to the republic's existence.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
