Welcome to the Eric Erickson Show podcast, Hour One.

Hello America. Greetings. It's Eric Erickson here nationwide. Glad to have you with me today.

The phone number, 877-973-44425 if you want to be on the program.

We got a lot to talk about and it's like Groundhog Day.

They're doing it all over again.

The House has just convened. We'll see whether or not they adjourn.

If Kevin McCarthy adjourns, it's probably a sign of real weakness that he hasn't been able overnight to get votes in his direction.

Let's step back for a moment on the Kevin McCarthy situation and look at an angle that hasn't come up.

Here's the thing.

There's a lot of commentary overnight on television yesterday and in the run-up to this vote,

that the 19 to 20 Republican members of Congress who are opposing Kevin McCarthy,

that it is about ego, it's about hubris, it's about grandstanding, it's about stunts,

that they're clowns, they're terrorists, they're the Taliban. We've been through this all before.

If you remember back in 2012, Barack Obama referred to these conservatives in Congress as the

ones who wanted to shoot the hostages, and they were able to get sequestration.

The very same voices on the right aligned with Kevin McCarthy were aligned against these conservatives in 2012 when they were able to get sequestration.

The first time Congress passed legislation for real world, real time cuts and spending.

Not future cuts in growth, but actual cuts in spending.

They went through the same attacks, the same accusations, the same comparisons to the Taliban

terrorists at the time, and they won then.

There's a larger issue here, though, that I want to focus on. We are told the country

is polarized. I'm a little bit disappointed with Fox News and with CNN in their coverage of this.

...