The Exquisite Agony of Being Kevin McCarthy

On Inside the Hive, host Brian Stelter talks to Vanity Fair’s Abigail Tracy and veteran political journalist John Harwood about Kevin McCarthy’s failure to control his House GOP caucus as a government shutdown looms. 

“You talk to pretty much any lawmaker on the Hill, and there’s sort of just an acceptance, reluctant though it might be, but an acceptance that there will be a shutdown,” says Tracy, as a group of “rogue Republicans” keeps “making demands, shifting the goalposts, but nothing is going to placate them.”

Bomb throwers like Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert are “not serious people,” says Harwood, a Polis Distinguished Fellow at Duke University. “They’re on television, they have podcasts or whatever,” he adds, “but they’re not built to do what politicians have to do to make government work.”