Leubsdorf: McCarthy beholden to Trumpists

But the second part, setting two-year parameters for curbing government spending to prevent a year-end governmental shutdown, had barely been passed when both Senate and House Republicans began to punch holes in it, reviving the prospect of the crisis that both leaders had hoped to avoid.

The same far-right House Republicans who opposed the original deal — and McCarthy’s speakership — said they’d oppose any funding bills that don’t cut overall spending by 2 percent, more than the debt ceiling bill specified. They took that stand knowing that Democratic control of the Senate would make it impossible to achieve.

Their demands — and the leverage they hold because of the GOP’s bare five-vote House margin — forced McCarthy and other GOP leaders to renege on the spending levels to which they had agreed.

As a result, the likelihood that the Biden-McCarthy agreement would prevent a government shutdown this fall has become an unlikelihood.

The underlying problem, of course, is that McCarthy, despite his success in helping pass the debt ceiling measure, again seems mainly able to control his fractious majority by acquiescing to such demands.

Look at recent events:

• The House censured Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, claiming he “purposely deceived his Committee, Congress, and the American people” by contending “there was evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia.”

The resolution, by Trumpist newcomer Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, ignored the evidence of Russian collusion found by special counsel Robert Mueller and in an extensively detailed bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee — under Republican leadership.

• It considered and then sidetracked — but only temporarily — Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert’s resolution impeaching Biden for “high crimes and misdemeanors” for failing “to uphold Federal immigration law” and acting “in a manner grossly incompatible with the rule of law and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.”

In essence, it elevated disapproval of Biden’s immigration policies into an allegation of a constitutional violation — ironically at a time his policies are beginning to work.

• The No. 3 GOP leader, New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, joined one of its most extreme members, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, in sponsoring measures to “expunge” the record of Trump’s two impeachments, as if that will make them go away.

The common thread here is a Republican political effort to tar Biden and the Democrats — without evidence — with the same sorts of misdeeds for which Trump was impeached and now faces criminal charges.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi was right when she accused the Republicans of turning the House into a Trump-led “puppet show.”

McCarthy yielded to demands made by opponents of his speakership. As a result, he remains beholden to the Republican party’s most extreme Trumpist elements, subject to a vote to topple his speakership if he crosses them.