It was nine days ago when Karl Rove, in a Wall Street Journal column, first noted that Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina had condemned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as a “thug” leading an “incredibly evil” government.
A day later, WRAL, the NBC affiliate in Raleigh, ran a report with a video recording of the congressman’s rhetoric. “Remember that Zelenskyy is a thug,” Cawthorn was seen saying. “Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies.”
In the days that followed, as Russia’s state-run media celebrated and promoted the GOP congressman’s claims, a variety of Republicans publicly disagreed with Cawthorn — but House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy was not among them.
Today, nearly two weeks after the North Carolinian first made the anti-Ukraine comments, the House’s top Republican finally had something to say about the matter. The Hill reported:
“Madison is wrong. If there’s any thug in this world, it’s Putin,” McCarthy said at a Capitol press conference when asked about Cawthorn’s comments, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. McCarthy cited the recent Russian attacks on a maternity hospital and a theater where civilians were sheltering in Ukraine as examples of brutality against the Ukrainian people by Putin.
At the same press conference, a reporter asked if McCarthy still supports Cawthorn’s re-election campaign. “Yes,” the would-be House Speaker replied.
In other words, as far as the minority leader is concerned, the controversy has run its course. As most elected officials in the United States rallied in support of our ally in the face of a brutal Russian invasion, Cawthorn publicly lashed out at Ukraine’s president.
The GOP congressman’s punishment — I’m using the word loosely — is having his party leader wait 12 days before telling reporters Cawthorn was “wrong,” as he proceeded to endorse his bid for a second term.
If this dynamic sounds at all familiar, it’s not your imagination: McCarthy also offered some criticism of two other far-right members of his conference — Arizona’s Paul Gosar and Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene — after they appeared at a white nationalist event last month.
But when it came time to consider more meaningful steps, McCarthy backed off and implicitly acknowledged the duo wouldn’t face any real punishments. In fact, the House Republican leader suggested Greene and Gosar will likely be rewarded with new committee assignments in the next Congress if there’s a GOP majority in the chamber. The trajectory of the Cawthorn story is the same: McCarthy was willing to say something critical, but he wasn’t willing to do anything else. There’s no great mystery as to why the Californian is so reluctant to act: McCarthy not only wants to lead his party to a majority after this year’s midterm elections, he also wants to be Speaker of the House. The only way to ensure that he can advance his ambitions is to stay in the good graces of his extremist members, some of whom may look to other possible intra-party candidates, especially if the GOP’s majority is small. Axios recently noted that the most extreme House Republicans are, for all intents and purposes, “untouchable.” McCarthy keeps proving the thesis true.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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