MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace denounced the Republicans who are holding up the work of the House of Representatives by refusing to elect a Speaker, linked their efforts to the January 6, 2021 insurrection, and ostensibly likened them to Vladimir Putin.
Speaking on “Deadline: White House” about how House Republicans and especially the “Never Kevin” caucus are blocking the election for Speaker, Wallace said, “I do believe that we shouldn’t cover it as chaos, or a blip.”
“This was the plan all along,” she said of Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, and their cohorts in the House. “This is what they wanted the world to see. And that’s sick. I’m sure the only other people cheering what America looks like right now live in Moscow. But the idea that there’s something that will culminate in governing again, seems like, we should abandon that.”
Wallace’s condemnation was not lost on her guest, fellow MSNBC anchor Alicia Menendez.
Wallace had been talking about the January 6, 2021 insurrection minutes earlier, and agreed with Menendez that blocking of the election of a Speaker is linked to the insurrection.
“The reason I’m happy that you’re talking about the 6th is they’re all connected,” Menendez said
“These are two wild days,” Wallace noted as they waited for the final tally of the ninth vote, which was clearly not going to grant McCarthy the Speaker’s gavel.
“There are multiple ways to undermine democracy,” Menendez continued. “You undermine democracy by attempting to steal a fair and free election, you can undermine democracy with a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. You can also undermine democracy by saying, ‘this is an institution that has functioned in a certain way for a certain period of time and we are going to pull apart at the functioning of that because we are not fundamentally interested in it.’ I mean, they are not disparate things. They’re all connected.”
Wallace agreed, adding, “it’s why I keep coming back to appeasement. Kevin McCarthy knew that.”
“The argument Kevin McCarthy, and frankly, Sean Hannity’s making right now is, you know, the 10% don’t have the right to overrule the 90%. Well, how about the majority of Americans voted for Joe Biden? They didn’t deserve to have their votes, discounted either.”
Menendez noted that House Republicans “did not come back from these midterm elections saying, ‘Oh, we got to get our acts together.'”
“One of our theories has been either there would be you know, legal accountability and we would see that and that would somehow be a change of course or that we would see electoral accountability – we saw electoral accountability and that was not enough for them.”
The House is now on the tenth vote for Speaker, and McCarthy appears to have lost that one as well. An eleventh vote later Thursday is possible..