The Irrational, Hypocritical, And Unbearable Nancy Mace

Tim Scott YouTube

“Matt Gaetz is a fraud. Every time he voted against Kevin McCarthy last week he sent out a fundraising email,” observed Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) after Gaetz and a small band of Republican rebels forced Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to go through 15 rounds of voting to secure the speakership earlier this year.

“What you saw last week was a constitutional process diminished by those kinds of political actions,” argued Mace at the time.

Just about nine months later, both Gaetz and Mace were panhandling for campaign funds after they, alongside a handful of other Republicans and the entirety of the Democratic caucus, ousted McCarthy.

“Today I voted for the Motion to Vacate and remove the Speaker. This isn’t about left vs right. This isn’t about ideology. This is about trust and keeping your word. This is about making Congress do its job,” wrote Mace in an email with a giant “Donate Today” button affixed to its header on Tuesday.

Nancy Mace fundraising off her vote to remove McCarthy as speaker, per screen shot a source sent me pic.twitter.com/UKfPubzdM9

— Melanie Zanona (@MZanona) October 3, 2023

In explaining her decision to plunge the House into chaos and make a national embarrassment of her party, Mace lodged a few picayune complaints against McCarthy — his recent negotiation of a continuing resolution to keep the government open and supposed failure to pass bills championed by the two-term congresswoman, for example.

“There has also been no action on many issues we care about and were promised. We were promised we would move on women’s issues and legislation to keep our communities safe. Those things never happened,” she said. “If we want to win another election anytime soon then we need to include women in our party. The only way to get women to vote for our party is to fight for them, and that’s what I’m doing.”

“Congressional Backbencher Frustrated by House Leadership” is a headline as old as America’s constitutional government. No speaker could tick off every wish list item for every member of his caucus given unlimited time and unified government, much less with the Senate and White House under the control of the opposite party and only nine months at the helm.

Members of sound mind typically understand, though, that the failure of the House to act on the bills they want pushed through, when they want them pushed through, can best be blamed on structural barriers — deadlines, partisan control, intra-party factions, and other demands — not the man holding the gavel. The gears of the federal government turn slowly, as they’re designed to.

But Nancy Mace — whose campaigns have benefited from millions of dollars gifted to her by and at the urging of McCarthy — is no rational political creature.

After the January 6 Capitol riot in 2021, Mace professed to believe that former president Donald Trump needed to be held “accountable,” and opined that “his entire legacy was wiped out.”

But then, she voted against impeaching him for his conduct.

Then she filmed a degrading campaign video in front of Trump Tower insisting on her Team Trump bona fides.

Now, she delights in receiving texts from the former president’s errand boys praising her for her defense of the legacy-less Trump. “Of course,” Mace told a messenger instructed to pass a message of thanks for her slavish devotion to him earlier this year.

Mace pairs these appeals to Trump loyalists with Trump-like calls for the GOP to cease standing up for unborn life and its pro-life constituency, feverishly accepting the premises of progressives in the media.

Earlier this year, Mace joined NBC’s Andrea Mitchell to call her colleagues unserious for voting on bill to restrict the use of taxpayer dollars for abortion as well as to enshrine the rights of children born during an attempted abortion.

“This is probably not the way to start,” asserted Mace about the measures, implying that these very basic safeguards against Democratic extremism endangered the “rights of women.”

Mace’s Jekyll and Hyde act between presenting herself as “one of the good Republicans” in left of center media and then engaging in performative acts of service for nihilists on the right was on display even this week. On Monday, the congresswoman joined The View to bash her own party over abortion, again. Two days later, she was dancing on McCarthy’s grave with Gaetz and Steve Bannon on the latter’s fever dream of a show.

If you’re wondering which Mace is the real one — the moderate trying to help the GOP see reason, or the bomb-throwing far-right darling — the answer is neither. Both facades are merely vessels used by the congresswoman to further Mace’s ultimate aim of drawing attention to and celebrating herself.

And at any and every given point in time, she’ll take the shortest possible path — collateral damage to the GOP and country be damned — to get there.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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