Daily Wire: The cycle and the history is obviously against Republicans, especially in the House, which everybody has basically written off. What are the three things that you think Republicans and the House in particular should be doing differently?
McCarthy: First of all, you study history. So the party in off-year elections usually doesn’t do as well. If you look at New Jersey and Virginia, how those gubernatorial races go, it kind of gives you some indication. If Democrats win both, they usually flip. If Republicans win one, we flip. But there are some things internally that upset me that Republicans should be doing differently.
First, the use of discharge petitions. Now, a discharge petition is 218 people sign a discharge petition, your bill automatically comes to the floor. If you’re in the majority, that’s simply saying, “I’m going to turn the floor over to the Democrats.”
They should stop allowing that to happen. They have passed more discharge petitions in three weeks than happened in 30 years. They let a discharge petition authored by a squad member just pass.
Too many retirements; we’ve now set a new record. So that’s another indication. You’re not just running for higher office; you don’t like the job.
They’re fighting with the Republicans in the Senate too much. So what they’re doing in this is they’re setting every indication to the public that they can’t win or they can’t govern.
They should stick together. They should put an agenda together and they should stop recessing. Now, the Senate stayed in when the Democrats shut down the government, but the members of the Republicans in the House left.
Think about this. The voters gave you 24 months to be in the majority, and you just took two months of that and didn’t use it. If I was in the minority and I stopped the majority from being able to govern, that’s a victory. You could be in there passing bills that are 80 / 20 every day of the week. You gave up your majority for two months when you only have 24 months of it. This is the part that upsets me. And then I watched, like the week before, they fought on things that were never going to fly in the Senate, and they took up so much time with that. I want to see things that shift in the voters’ minds that they want to have you be in the majority. So you know what? Focus on the economy, focus on crime, and you can divide the Democrats on this and really show the public who they want to be governing.
Daily Wire: The complaints that you said are all complaints that I’ve heard from members, particularly leaving town. Why does that happen? Who in the architecture of power thinks that’s a good idea?
McCarthy: I don’t know, because I would not have allowed that to happen.
Because if you’re given this power for a short time, the public’s going to judge you on how you use it. If you’re in a sporting event, if you’re in a basketball game in the last seconds, are you going to quit? Are you going to set up and take that shot?
You want to show the public that, even if the Democrats are doing derelict things, that if you’re in charge, you don’t walk away. You put them in their place, and then you go show simple bills out there, and the Democrats vote “no,” you vote “yes,” and show the public the difference. I give the Senate credit. They stayed in session.
Daily Wire: The other one I hear a lot from members is frustration with the Senate, that they feel the Senate has expectations and priorities that aren’t aligned with theirs. I literally had a member last week saying, “The Senate’s going to screw us over on this particular thing again.” And my question is, why don’t Republicans in the House and Senate understand that voters in this midterm are going to vote based on you as a unit?
McCarthy: It’s always the old argument. The Senate is the enemy. The other party is my adversary; they get mad at us. You’re 100% correct. The public is not going to sit back and say, “Oh, it was the Senate. Oh, it was the House.” They could say, “Republicans, you were in charge. What job did you do?”
Recently, I watched as the Democrats shut down the government, and when the Senate passed the bill over to the House, the House Republicans voted no, and then a month later voted for the exact same thing by voice vote. But what they did there was take the shutdown. It’s a difficult job and a hard job to lead, but if you only take advice from the Freedom Caucus, you’re only going to end up in one or two places: in a cul-de-sac or in the minority.
You’ve got to understand the rules of the House are different than the rules of the Senate, but that’s why you’ve got to work together, achieve as many conservative aims as you can, pass that, and come back for what you didn’t get the next day. But fighting with each other lets the Democrats sit back and say, “They’re the problem,” instead of highlighting and putting the Democrats in a weaker position, or having them vote against popular bills.
Every day of delay has Virginia and national Democrats growing more skittish. Yet Democrats could still win two of the contested four seats even if they lose in court.
If the new map doesn’t go into effect, Democrats still have a good chance at toppling GOP Reps. Rob Wittman and Jen Kiggans. But GOP Reps. John McGuire and Ben Cline will likely be safe.
The GOP South. It’s been a week since SCOTUS ruled in Louisiana v. Callais. And Republican-controlled southern states — under pressure from Trump — have moved extremely fast in response.
GOP lawmakers in Tennessee have already circulated a map designed to draw Rep. Steve Cohen out of his Memphis seat with negligible impact to the state’s other Republicans.
Louisiana Republicans are likely to redraw at least one of the Bayou State’s two Democrats out of the House.
Alabama GOP officials are pressuring the Supreme Court to lift an order that forces the state to keep its congressional map until 2030. This would allow the Republican-run legislature to at least draw Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures out of his seat, stretching from Mobile to the Georgia border. In theory, Republicans could also go for Democratic Rep. Terri Sewell, whose district is anchored in Birmingham.
South Carolina is mulling a new map to eliminate iconic Democratic Rep. Jim Clyburn’s deep blue seat. Clyburn is the only elected Democrat remaining in the Palmetto State delegation.
Mississippi’s Republican Gov. Tate Reeves told the Daily Caller he’s considering a push to eliminate Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson’s seat in the western part of the state. Mississippi already had its primary, so this is very likely a 2028 move.
None of these Republican-drawn maps are final yet. The Florida map is subject to multiple lawsuits. Yet even if the map stands, Jeffries and Democratic leaders think they can snatch a few light red seats from the GOP. South Carolina Republicans are far from assured of passing their map.
Nationwide, a number of seats are trending in the Democrats’ direction. If the current political environment continues to worsen for the GOP, Democrats may even pick up or hold onto seats that Republicans redrew.
There’s this phrase I heard over and over again growing up in a Southern Baptist Church - “don’t be unequally yoked.” It’s a reference to a verse from 2 Corinthians 6:14, “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?” In my experience it is always used in the context of finding a spouse. The admonition is to find someone to marry who has the same faith background as you. The worry for my evangelical group leaders was that if one of us married a non-believer, our spouse might lead us down a path toward secularism.
But the general admonition is the same in many faith communities: try to marry someone who shares your faith background. That’s certainly a well-established norm in Jewish communities. According to Kiddushin 68b, marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew is prohibited under Jewish law. In Islam, there’s not an outright prohibition on marrying a non-Muslim, but the Quran only permits people to marry other “People of the Book.”
There are theological reasons for this, as was commonly invoked in my evangelical upbringing. Each spouse can edify the other’s faith and grow closer together as they grow closer to God. But there’s also a really important sociological reason for it, too: kids who are raised by two parents who share the same faith background are more likely to be raised in a consistently religious home. This likely increases the chances a faith is passed down from one generation to another. This is a powerful reason religious groups might discourage interfaith marriages.
The ARDA is hosting the most recent wave of the Pew Religious Landscape Study, which was conducted in 2023-2024 and it has a whole host of insightful questions about who folks are marrying and how much they talk about faith in their home. It includes a variable indicating whether respondents’ current religion matches that of their partner’s. If a Catholic married a Protestant, that would not be defined as a match. If a mainline Protestant was married to an evangelical, that’s still a match because they are both Protestants. A Muslim marrying a Jew wouldn’t be a match and so on. You get the picture.
The groups most likely to marry someone of the same faith background are Hindus (86%), evangelicals (83%) and Latter-day Saints (81%). They are followed closely by Black Protestants at 79%. Then there’s a pretty noticeable gap and a whole bunch of traditions are clumped right around 70% including Catholics and the non-religious.
“This book will not tell you how to die. Some cheerleaders of war can always get out a pamphlet telling the best way to go through that small but necessary business at the end. PM may have published it already in a special Sunday issue with pictures. They might even have it bound up as a companion piece to the issue I read in November 1941 entitled ‘How We Can Lick Japan in Sixty Days’. No. This book will not tell you how to die. This book will tell you, though, how all men from the earliest times we know have fought and died. So when you have read it you will know that there are no worse things to be gone through than men have been through before.”
