Paul Ryan's departure as the Republican leader in the House of Representatives has created a moment for reflection. Thankfully, this has prompted some thinking on how everything he ever said about Fiscal Responsibility was totally bunk. But perhaps we haven't fully appreciated that Ryan's peace-out means Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican who's currently number two in the House, will likely take over leadership of the party's newfound minority in that chamber. It's worth remarking on because McCarthy is extremely bad at politics, something he showed off once again yesterday on The Fox News Channel:

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House GOP minority leader Kevin McCarthy states that if campaign finance crimes are a violation then lots of Congressmen (probably in his caucus) will have to go.pic.twitter.com/LQw3G9zM8w — Grant Stern (@grantstern) December 10, 2018

Well, if that's a crime, we're all going to jail!

What McCarthy seems to dismiss out of hand is the idea maybe the American public might be interested in getting all the crooks out, not just a president whom the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York has now fully implicated, in all but name, in a scheme to violate campaign finance laws. (McCarthy also seems to repeatedly refer to Rep. Adam Schiff, set to become the next chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, as "Shift.") If you're saying we should turf out all the members of Congress who are routinely breaking the law, most people would get to nodding pretty quickly.

What McCarthy is actually trying to do, just poorly, is call on the now-vintage tactic of suggesting something Trump did is what all politicians do—or, at least, that Democrats also do. All politicians lie! Yeah, but not 44 times publicly in one day. And certainly, it is not common for a member of Congress to allegedly oversee a hush-money scheme involving multiple alleged mistresses and a shell corporation in Delaware.

McCarthy with Paul Ryan Tom Williams Getty Images

(Fox & Friends showed McCarthy how it's done this weekend, as they got to spinning about the campaign finance violation. The Friends suggested President Obama also had one and only faced sanction by the Federal Election Commission, not the Justice Department. That is, it was handled as a civil, not criminal, case. That's true, except Obama's was a reporting error in the homestretch of the 2008 campaign. It was not a sophisticated scheme to allegedly conceal a bribe, paid to a third party for silence, that helped Trump's campaign by keeping the American public unaware of his transgressions.)

Anyway, this harkened back to the incident that cost McCarthy the Speaker job back in 2015 and put it on the table for Ryan.

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Notice how he just came out and said they used the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, as a political cudgel to beat Hillary Clinton with. It was about poll numbers, not justice or embassy security or whatever the hell else Trey Gowdy used to say. McCarthy was saying the quiet parts out loud before Donald Trump, but without the panache. He just came off desperate as he sought Sean Hannity's approval to become one of the two most powerful Republicans in the land.

This all made it that much more galling, however, when McCarthy played this card elsewhere in the interview this week:

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McCarthy urges House Dems to not investigate Trump: "I think America is too great of a nation to have such a small agenda. I think there are other problems out there that we should be focused on... we've investigated this for a long time." pic.twitter.com/KIzC0VCQd7 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 10, 2018

So determining whether the sitting president participated in a conspiracy with a hostile foreign oligarchy—with whom he could have compromising entanglements, financial or otherwise—to win the presidency is too "small" an issue for the nation? How about what lies at the root of the president's non-response to Saudi Arabia's brutal murder of a U.S.-resident journalist—a question that gets to whether American policy is being made to benefit Americans or the Trumps? How about whether the president participated in "dubious tax schemes" for decades, some of which amounted to outright fraud?

But the eight Benghazi investigations, none of which ultimately found anything to implicate Clinton and which McCarthy admitted were only convened to hurt her eventual run at the presidency, were totally cool. It's shameless, bad-faith politics.

In fairness to McCarthy, he wasn't the only Republican member of Congress to once again demonstrate how they've all bent the knee to Donald Trump, American president. Thanks to great reporting from CNN's Manu Raju, we know some Republican senators seem to believe it's acceptable to suggest the law does not apply to the president. Like, say, Orrin Hatch:

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Hatch dismisses allegations of Trump crimes over hush money.

Asked if he had any concerns, Hatch said: “The Democrats will do anything to hurt this president.” Told it was alleged by SDNY, Hatch told me: “Okay but I don’t care; all I can say is he’s doing a good job as President” — Manu Raju (@mkraju) December 10, 2018

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Hatch added this when asked if he was concerned about allegations.

“No because I don’t think he was involved in crimes but even then, you know, you can make anything a crime under the current laws; if you want to you can blow it way out of proportion you can do a lot of things.” — Manu Raju (@mkraju) December 10, 2018

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Hatch also told me: “President Trump before he became president that’s another world. Since he’s become president this economy has charged ahead. ... And I think we ought to judge him on that basis other than trying to drum up things from the past that may or may not be true.” — Manu Raju (@mkraju) December 10, 2018

This guy is ready, willing, and able to submit to authoritarianism. It doesn't matter what the president does because he's a Republican, and he gets it done for me and my donors. You can tell, because Hatch once had a radically different view of Presidential Misdemeanors:

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Orrin Hatch 2018: I don't care if the President's own DOJ has implicated him in felonies. What is a "crime" anyway?



Orrin Hatch 1999: "crimes of moral turpitude such as perjury and obstruction of justice go to the heart of qualification for public office" pic.twitter.com/8K8NVZSntj — Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan) December 10, 2018

But spare a minute for Chuck Grassley, too, who we recently learned is partly responsible for Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker's grotesque ascension to the the American political mountaintop.

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Grassley, the Senate Judiciary chairman, similarly dismisses the federal prosecutors’ argument: “They based it on what a liar says, so it hurts the credibility of it.” — Manu Raju (@mkraju) December 10, 2018

You can't trust a liar, said this adult man who serves as a U.S. Senator. That's why I'm with Donald J. Trump!

Many other United States Senators simply pretended they hadn't read anything about the indictments of the president's former campaign manager and personal lawyer. They seem to think this is a reasonable excuse to avoid answering the question, rather than a sign they are not doing their jobs.

All in all, it was not an encouraging day for anyone who believes there may be a point where Republicans will break with the president because he's simply been accused of too many crimes. After all, it wasn't just the campaign finance questions. In that disgrace of a Fox News interview, McCarthy also managed to downplay the fact that at least 16 of the president's associates had contacts with Russian officials during the campaign or transition, and pretty much all of them lied about it—often, to federal law enforcement.

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On Fox News, @GOPLeader Kevin McCarthy downplays Trump campaign's repeated contacts with Russians in 2016.



"If you're in an international city, people interact with a lot of individuals." pic.twitter.com/mfbP648CMh — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 10, 2018

Here's the next Republican leader in the House, dismissing these concerns out of hand. To do that, he fudged the facts.

While the House Republican investigation might have found No Collusion, and also that Trump is Our Most Beautiful President in History, People Are Saying It More and More, that has no bearing on reality. It's easy not to find anything if you don't look. The U.S. intelligence community assessment did not find definitively that the Russian meddling had no effect on, as McCarthy put it, "the election or the outcome." It offered no findings either way on that question. It is not at all a settled question whether the outcome in, say, Michigan—where Trump beat Clinton by just over 10,000 votes out of 4.8 million cast—was affected, particularly considering the Russians specifically targeted that state with their influence campaign.

McCarthy then sputtered through a claim that Russian operatives did not speak with the president himself—again, not something we know for sure, and not ultimately relevant. Did Putin have to touch the keyboard to play a role in the hacking campaign?

What's more to the point here is that congressional Republicans are showing zero signs, apart from the odd gesture like their condemnation of Saudi Arabia over the Khashoggi killing, that the midterm rout they just suffered is affecting their calculus. Maybe they're still confident enough in the election-system rigging they've done over the last decade to believe they won't be held accountable for continuing to serve as Trump Toadies. But it is still genuinely horrifying, even after all that's happened, to see their senior leadership hand-wave away the growing evidence that the President of the United States was involved in multiple crimes. Maybe they're still spooked from watching him stuff Jeb Bush in a locker three years ago.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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