They’re busy stealing the next election.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is now signaling he won’t comply with a subpoena issued by the House select committee examining Donald Trump’s effort to overturn his presidential reelection loss. The California Republican will be joined in this defiance by other colleagues who played important roles in the attempted subversion.

The same Kevin McCarthy very well may be House speaker in 2024. If Congress doesn’t revise the antiquated process that governs how Congress counts presidential electors, he could play a critical role influencing which electors get tallied, potentially swinging the outcome.

If he can, he will. I think that’s all too obvious.

“McCarthy and his allies in Congress are actively concealing the plot that almost succeeded due to the [Electoral Count Act of 1887],” legal scholar Matthew Seligman, an expert on the ECA, told me. “Anybody who would conceal their own role in such a scheme can’t be trusted to count the right electors next time.”

It’s true that the committee’s subpoena of GOP House members is an extraordinary event. But the information that those members are concealing has to do with an even more extraordinary event.

Consider McCarthy himself. He’s refusing to divulge information about his direct communications with Trump at the very moment Trump was essentially weaponizing a mob to intimidate his vice president and GOP lawmakers into subverting the electoral count, to keep himself in power illegitimately.

In other words he’s being consistent about attempting to make Trump president by cheating and lying.