Did Kevin McCarthy Punch A Fellow Republican Lawmaker In The Kidneys? The Ousted House Speaker Claims He Didn’t, But If He Had ‘They Would Know’

Today’s Republican Party sure is violent. The GOP currently controls the House (by a slim margin), and polls for the 2024 election — a whole year away — slightly favor a return of Donald Trump. Has that made them happier? Hell no. On Tuesday, Bernie Sanders had to break up a fight between Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin and Teamsters president Sean O’Brien. The House isn’t doing so hot either. On the same day word of another, older altercation was made public involving recently ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Alas, he’s pleading innocent.

Per Mediaite, McCarthy responded to claims made by Senator Tim Burchett, one of eight Republican representatives who successfully voted to remove him from his gig back in October. Burchett accused McCarthy of shoving him, with a “clean shot to the kidneys,” while he and his security team were walking past him. When Burchett approached him about it, McCarthy told him called him “pathetic.”

“He’s a bully with $17 million and a security detail,” Burchett told reporters. “He’s the type of guy that when you’re a kid would throw a rock over the fence and run home and hide behind his momma’s skirt.”

But McCarthy is denying that he hit him — though if he had (which he didn’t) it would have been wicked nasty.

“I would not hit him in the kidney,” McCarthy said, before laying out his version of the story, in which their shoulders or elbows or both simply hit one another.

McCarthy added, “If I would hit somebody, they would know I hit them.”

So for those keeping score at home, McCarthy didn’t actually hit anybody. But he would and if he did they would stay plastered. Because they guy who got mad that a few Dr. Seuss books were being pulled from release over racist bits is tough.

(Via Mediaite)