Gaetz Calls McCarthy’s Eight-Hour Speech a ‘Really Long Death Rattle,’ Slams ‘Poor Leadership’
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) took House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to task on Friday over his “poor leadership and poor strategy.”
Appearing on War Room: Pandemic with recently indicted Steve Bannon, Gaetz expressed frustration at the 13 House Republicans who voted to pass the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that was signed into law by President Joe Biden this week.
Bannon played a clip of Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) telling Fox News that she believes passage of the bipartisan bill reduces the likelihood of Democrat being able to pass the larger Build Back Better Act via the budget reconciliation process. The House passed the bill on Friday morning, but it faces an uncertain future in the Senate, where all 50 Democrats would need to be on board.
Gaetz reacted to Malliotakis with disgust.
“Thank you, Fox News, for demonstrating what abject weakness looks like from elements of the Republican caucus.”
He called the 13 Republicans who voted for the bipartisan bill “turncoats.”
“Here’s the key mistake,” Gaetz said. “They thought that by passing a bad spending bill, they could stop a worse spending bill. They thought that it would create leverage. The reality is that it created momentum. There was never a circumstance in today’s Washington where we were gonna win one and the Democrats were gonna win one. They were gonna win it all, or we were gonna win it all.”
House Democrats originally planned to bring the Build Back Better Act to a vote on Thursday night, but McCarthy spoke on the floor and railed against the bill and discussed completely unrelated matters for more than eight hours.
“And you know what’s so frustrating?” said Gaetz. “We had the ability to block everything. America would not be waking up to this attack on the dollar, attack on energy, attack on folks through the IRS, if we would’ve blocked the infrastructure bill.”
He continued, “So while we heard Leader McCarthy speak for a great duration of time, it was like a really long death rattle. The outcome was already determined as a consequence of poor leadership and poor strategy. If we’d made the right strategic choices, we could’ve stopped this, but we didn’t because we confused leverage for momentum.”
Watch above via Real America’s Voice.
