Today, Kevin McCarthy Seeks Revenge

Plus: Two unqualified lawmakers snag Intelligence Committee posts.

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) faces a primary challenge today in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District. It will be the first stop on former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s tour of vengeance against the eight Republicans who removed him from power last year.

Mace is facing off against Catherine Templeton, who was a staffer for Nikki Haley during her time as governor of South Carolina. Mace accused Templeton of being “a puppet in Kevin McCarthy’s bitter revenge operation.” For his part, McCarthy has not been shy about his view of Mace following her betrayal, saying she needs help to “straighten out her life.”

McCarthy has donated $10,000 to Templeton through his Majority Committee PAC. American Prosperity Alliance PAC, another McCarthy-linked group, donated $15,000 in March to South Carolina Patriots PAC, a committee supporting Templeton.

Top Republicans have also joined in on pugio-ing Mace. Rep. Joe Wilson, the longest-serving House Republican from South Carolina, endorsed Templeton last week. Not long after, Mace confronted Wilson in what appeared to be a tense conversation on the House floor. 

Still, Mace has a significant lead in the primary: A late May poll from Emerson College had her edging out Templeton by 25 points, with around a quarter of respondents still undecided. 

This isn’t just about McCarthy getting back at his deposers. Mace has behaved so chaotically since coming to Washington that it’s surprising she hasn’t drawn more primary challengers. Ideologically directionless, she has made up for her missing political agenda by pursuing attention and virality as goals in their own right. At the same time, her office has undergone more tumult than Constantinople or the Cleveland Browns’ quarterback position: Mace’s entire staff in the Washington office has turned over since the start of this Congress. Her chief of staff, who has the longest tenure in her D.C. office of any of her employees, started only last November. A former chief of staff almost ran against her in the current primary.

According to Legistorm, a website that provides data and analytics about members of Congress, Mace ranks third among lawmakers with the highest staff turnover rates. While it might seem alarming, this stat makes a lot of sense when you read some of the reporting that’s been done on her management style. Mace has run her office worse than her party has run its majority in the House. 

While plenty of embarrassing anecdotes and stressful life developments have been reported out over the past year, the most concerning stories about Mace have been about her management style. Slate’s Jim Newell had the latest on Monday, writing:

Staffers recalled onslaughts of text messages from her at 4 or 5 in the morning about what they were doing to get her on the news that day. They could be berated for using the wrong Instagram filter—“if it was in the wrong hex code of blue, I was going to hear about it,” one staffer said—and Mace had a rule that staff had to respond to her, no matter what, within eight minutes.

After a communications staffer ran afoul of the eight-minute rule on Christmas Eve 2022, Mace tried to get her then chief of staff, Dan Hanlon, to fire him. When Hanlon wouldn’t do it, Mace tried to get her then deputy chief of staff, Richard Chalkey, to do it; Chalkey also refused. Mace had also attempted, and failed, to get them to fire the same comms staffer the previous month, after he’d told a reporter that Mace was unavailable because she was traveling. This was true: She was unavailable because she was traveling—in Spain, with dozens of other members, on a sponsored trip—but she claimed that the admission had put her and her family in danger.

There are plenty more eyebrow-raising details in Newell’s piece, including Mace’s attempt at intimidating a former staff member with the police. It’s worth the read. 

Polls close at 7:00 p.m. in South Carolina. By tomorrow, we should have a good idea of whether McCarthy’s revenge tour puts more of an emphasis on revenge or tour, as well as how high this district's tolerance is for pure chaos.

Unintelligent Design

House Speaker Mike Johnson appointed two more Republicans to the House Intelligence Committee last week: Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) and Ronny Jackson (R-Texas). The decision is one of Johnson’s most radical yet, and it highlights the Republican majority’s hostility towards U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Almost two years ago, Perry sued the Justice Department after the FBI seized his cell phone while investigating his role in the plot to overturn the 2020 election. (Witnesses have described him as a “central to the planning of January 6.”) In a statement announcing his appointment, Perry implied that he is excited to antagonize the agencies under the committee’s purview.

My great thanks to Speaker Johnson for selecting me to sit on the House Intelligence Committee. I’m humbled by his confidence in me, my service to our Nation, and my experience in this arena. I look forward to providing not only a fresh perspective, but conducting actual oversight—not blind obedience to some facets of our Intel Community that all too often abuse their powers, resources, and authority to spy on the American People.

Jackson, meanwhile, was demoted by the U.S. Navy from retired admiral to retired captain after an inspector general report found that he regularly drank alcohol and consumed sleeping pills on the job while also improperly prescribing medications. The report also detailed how Jackson “made sexual and denigrating statements about one of his female medical subordinates to another of his subordinates” and on one occasion in 2014 “pounded on a female subordinate’s hotel door, woke her, and told her, ‘I need you.’” (Jackson has been married since 1993.) Despite the demotion, Jackson’s official House website bio still touts him as a “retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral.” 

Given their backgrounds, Jackson and Perry would likely not qualify for the kind of security clearance that government employees and civilian contractors must get before they can handle our national security secrets. Yet as members of the committee, Jackson and Perry will have access to those secrets and oversight over the intelligence community. That doesn’t seem to bother Johnson, but it has irked the committee’s chairman, Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who learned of the appointments from press reports. For additional context, Turner is more like the old-style Republicans for having pushed back on his own party’s hostility to the intelligence community, their opposition to its judgments, and their dismissal of its foreign policy expertise.

The duo’s placement on the Intelligence Committee might serve as an appeasement to increasingly hostile conservatives in the House, who’ve made a habit of derailing regular business. But these types of concessions are like bandages on a dog. They don’t really work without the cone.

Sneaker update

Tomorrow on Capitol Hill, the bipartisan Sneaker Caucus is holding its second annual Sneaker Day. Lawmakers will get to compare their kicks, and prizes will be handed out for the best sneakers. 

Sneaker Day on Capitol Hill isn’t quite the same as Pitti Uomo, the twice-annual menswear tradeshow in Florence, Italy that will also take place this week. But I will ignore Congress’s besetting fashion sin, the inappropriate pairing of sneakers with business attire, and give my own definitive ranking of the day’s best sneakers in Thursday’s newsletter. If he attends, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) is the smart bet for top honors. 

I won’t confer an equal and opposite title for worst sneakers—unless, that is, someone dares to wear the infamous Air Felon Ones. Sign up for Bulwark+ if you don’t wanna miss out.