Former GOP Representative David Jolly predicted on Sunday how House Speaker Kevin McCarthy can survive his tenure as the top House Republican.
McCarthy, a California Republican, is tasked with managing the Republican Party’s slim majority in the House of Representatives as congressional negotiators begin to try to strike a deal on a government funding bill before the looming September 30 deadline or face a government shutdown. This would require McCarthy to either reach a deal that the entire GOP conference supports or turn to moderate Democrats for a compromise.
Jolly—an ex-Republican who represented a deeply competitive congressional district including St. Petersburg, Florida, from 2014 to 2017, but has turned against the GOP in recent years—predicted how McCarthy will navigate this challenge during an appearance on MSNBC on Sunday morning.
Jolly predicted that McCarthy will ultimately have to “compromise with Democrats” to pass a government funding bill because he believes some of the most conservative members of the Republican conference “want to play with fire” on the matter. He also compared the situation to the debt ceiling when McCarthy struck a bipartisan deal with Democrats to avert a default, striking outrage from some House conservatives.
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“Kevin McCarthy is dealing with a caucus where he can only afford to lose five votes, and you can simply not move your entire caucus toward compromise, and Kevin McCarthy can’t do it without jeopardizing his speakership,” Jolly said.
However, the former lawmaker warned that compromising with Democrats is the “death knell” in “Republican parlance,” leaving him with one option to avoid facing backlash among the most conservative House Republicans, who negotiated a measure in the House rules allowing them to move to vacate the speaker position at any point.
“His option is impeach Joe Biden. This goes all the way back to the 15 votes it took for him to become speaker, and what did he promise? He promised the Republican impeachment caucus that they could go after Joe Biden, and the politics are going to be there. The pressure is going to be there, and so the way he holds his speakership is going to be by investigating Joe Biden,” Jolly said.
He later added: “And so how does he survive as speaker? He then goes after Joe Biden with a full blown investigation regardless that the facts don’t support it.”
Meanwhile, Jolly told Newsweek in a telephone interview Sunday morning that McCarthy is “definitely playing with fire.”
“The reality is it’s a five vote caucus, so if he moves too far towards investigations, he isolates those—call them moderate conservatives—they don’t care to go back to districts and defend impeaching Biden,” he said.
Still, Jolly noted that McCarthy “doesn’t have a choice” after doubling down on his deal to investigate Biden after the debt ceiling vote. He added that McCarthy “knew he would have to placate” the conference’s right flank when trying to secure enough votes to win the House speaker race in January.
The former congressman said investigating Biden will mobilize Republicans, but cast doubt that would be enough to win key elections in 2024.
“What it does allow is for Joe Biden and Democrats to draw a contrast next November that in Republicans, you have a group chasing innuendo to try to get a president. And in Democrats, you have a domestic policy agenda focused on lifting up people,” Jolly said. “That’s a very favorable contrast for Democrats.”
Newsweek reached out to McCarthy’s office for comment via email.
Ahead of the September 30 deadline, both McCarthy and Biden have expressed support for a stopgap funding package that would extend current levels of federal funding to December so lawmakers have more time to negotiate a package.
However, the House Freedom Caucus said they would not support such a measure in a letter last month, writing they would “refuse to support any such measure that continues Democrats’ bloated COVID-era spending and simultaneously fails to force the Biden Administration to follow the law and fulfill its most basic responsibilities.”
