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  • Kevin McCarthy’s Brief Speakership Meets Its End

    Kevin McCarthy’s Brief Speakership Meets Its End

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    Kevin McCarthy began his 269th day as House speaker by recounting all the times he proved his doubters wrong. In January, after a series of humiliating defeats, the California Republican hung on to become speaker of the House. In the months since, he reminisced, he has narrowly averted the twin crises of a national-debt default and, this past weekend, a government shutdown. “I just don’t give up,” McCarthy told reporters after making one more plea to his party to keep him in his post.

    Today, McCarthy’s streak of defying his skeptics came to an end as a group of his GOP critics joined Democrats to vote him out of the speakership after fewer than nine months in office. The unprecedented move could paralyze the House for days or even weeks, as Congress faces a November 17 deadline for funding the federal government.

    Whether McCarthy is done for good as speaker remains unclear. The vote to remove him will trigger a new election, and McCarthy was coy with reporters earlier in the day about whether he’d try to reclaim the gavel. Assuming he doesn’t, his tenure atop the House—the briefest in nearly 150 years—was as historic as it was short-lived: He won the office after fighting through more ballots than any speaker in a century, and he was the first to be removed in the middle of a term by a vote of the House.

    Few of McCarthy’s 54 predecessors had assumed the speakership with lower expectations. His years rising through the GOP leadership had left him with a reputation as a glad-handing lightweight with few convictions. And his majority seemed ungovernable from the start. He had just a five-vote margin over the Democrats, and was surrounded by hard-liners who demanded confrontation over compromise. McCarthy traded away much of his power as speaker during the marathon series of votes that ended, after 15 rounds, with his election. As part of the horse trade, McCarthy handed his Republican foes the means of his own destruction: the ability for a single member to call, at any time, a vote on whether to remove the speaker.

    “From day one, he knew and everyone knew that he was living on borrowed time,” Representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia told me recently.

    McCarthy’s most ardent Republican critic, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, had made the speaker’s ouster his singular mission even before McCarthy made a surprise reversal on Saturday to avert a government shutdown. Gaetz ultimately persuaded seven Republicans to join him in voting to remove McCarthy via a procedural maneuver known as a motion to vacate the chair.

    Read: Kevin McCarthy finally defies the right

    Democrats faced their own conundrum: Was the speaker they knew a safer bet than a replacement they didn’t? Whichever Republican succeeds McCarthy is likely to be just as conservative and just as beholden to the hard-line faction that deposed him—if not more so. Yet Democrats ultimately decided that McCarthy was not worth rescuing; all 208 in attendance today voted to remove him.

    The speaker had lurched to the right far more often than he governed from the center; he had joined the bulk of the GOP in forgiving former President Donald Trump for his role in fomenting the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, and just a month ago buckled to conservative demands to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. “It is now the responsibility of the Republican members to end the House Republican Civil War,” the House minority leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, declared after a lengthy Democratic Party conference this morning, urging members to support McCarthy’s removal as speaker.

    In the end, McCarthy almost survived only because Democrats struggled to get their members to the Capitol in time for the crucial votes. McCarthy, however, had suffered too many Republican defections for it to matter. The process began with a vote on a motion to table Gaetz’s motion to vacate the chair. Eleven Republicans voted with the entire Democratic caucus to clear the way for McCarthy’s ouster, more than twice as many members as the speaker could afford to lose within his own party. “The office of speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant,” Representative Steve Womack of Arkansas, presiding over the vote, said after the 216–210 roll call concluded.

    No obvious successor has emerged. McCarthy’s top lieutenant, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, is popular with conservatives but is now undergoing treatment for blood cancer. Majority Whip Tom Emmer or GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik could also emerge as alternatives, but neither has been openly campaigning for the job.

    Ever the optimist in public, McCarthy seemed to sense before the votes that the run of good fortune and political survival that had taken him to the nation’s third-highest office would not last much longer. He had struck a defiant tone, defending to the end his decision to keep the government open even if it cost him his job. “If you throw out a speaker” for averting a government shutdown, he warned reporters and, implicitly, his Republican colleagues, “then I think we’re in a really bad place.”

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    Russell Berman

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  • Speaker in Name Only

    Speaker in Name Only

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    Having at long last put down a rebellion from within his party, Kevin McCarthy is now House speaker. He finally has the gavel he’s long coveted, but the job he secured after 14 consecutive drubbings is not the one he envisioned.

    Last night, he suffered one more indignity to get it, perhaps the most stunning in a week’s worth of humiliations. McCarthy had to literally beg his most hated Republican foe, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, for the deciding vote, and a fight nearly broke out on the House floor. But after 14 failed votes, it was finally over.

    McCarthy’s victory on the 15th ballot concluded an extraordinary week of defeats that froze half of Congress and turned the California Republican into a national laughingstock. The denouement was the most dramatic scene yet, as the House reconvened for what McCarthy assured reporters would be the final victorious vote. Earlier yesterday, McCarthy had convinced all but six of his GOP opponents to support him, and he needed only to turn two more. But Gaetz, who had repeatedly vowed never to support him, waited until the very end and withheld his vote one more time. In full view of C-Span’s cameras, Gaetz refused animated appeals from McCarthy’s closest allies and even from the would-be speaker himself. McCarthy walked over to Gaetz, spoke to him for a few minutes and then, head down, slumped back to his chair. A furious Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama had to be physically restrained from lunging at Gaetz.

    Dejected and confused, McCarthy’s allies moved to adjourn the House until Monday. But while that vote was going on, McCarthy secured the acquiescence of Gaetz and the remaining holdouts. The House stayed in session and voted again. “Madam Clerk, I rise to say, ‘Wow,’” Democratic Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota said to laughter from a stunned chamber. On the 15th and last ballot, McCarthy’s remaining GOP opponents all voted “present” and allowed McCarthy to clear the majority threshold without their explicit support.

    With the speaker’s gavel in hand, McCarthy will soon find out whether it was all worth it. To end the crisis, he cut a deal that essentially traded away a sizable chunk of power from the position, placing the new speaker at the mercy of the very hardliners who had thwarted him.

    Read: Kevin McCarthy’s predicament is a warning

    Under the agreement McCarthy struck, any Republican will be able to demand a vote on his ouster. McCarthy is reportedly guaranteeing the far-right House Freedom Caucus enough seats on the Rules Committee to give the group an effective veto over most legislation that comes up for a vote. He’s committing the party to pursuing steep—and, in all likelihood, politically unpopular—budget cuts while ensuring a partisan brawl over the debt ceiling that could damage the nation’s economy.

    What transpired this week was the most prolonged stalemate to begin a new session of Congress since before the Civil War. McCarthy’s struggle to lock down the speakership illuminated just how much of a challenge any Republican would have in leading a narrow, deeply divided majority. But his capitulation to the far-right holdouts could make the House all but ungovernable.

    For many if not most of the renegades, that was precisely the point. They saw the modern speakership, whether in Republican or Democratic hands, as a vessel for corrupt deals that resulted in too much spending and a bloated federal government. If a byproduct of decentralizing power in the House is dysfunction, they reasoned, so be it.

    McCarthy’s concessions have frustrated and angered some of his fellow Republicans. At least one McCarthy supporter, Representative Tony Gonzales of Texas, vowed to oppose a package of House rules formalizing much of the agreement between the new speaker and the holdouts. But for the most part, more moderate House Republicans have given McCarthy wide latitude to negotiate.

    Earlier this week, it looked as if McCarthy’s bid for speaker had stalled and that, for the second time in eight years, he might be forced to withdraw his nomination in the face of conservative opposition. But having evidently determined that a weakened speakership was better than no speakership, McCarthy persisted, dispatching emissaries to a flurry of meetings between failed floor votes. Progress came slowly, and then nearly all at once. McCarthy suffered 21 GOP defections on eight straight votes between Wednesday and Thursday. “Mr. McCarthy does not have the votes today. He will not have the votes tomorrow, and he will not have the votes next week, next month, next year,” Gaetz said on the floor before the 12th failed vote yesterday afternoon. A group of McCarthy’s allies walked out of the chamber in disgust, and it was on that ballot that McCarthy turned his faltering candidacy around. He flipped 14 of the 21 defectors, who voted without enthusiasm for the GOP leader while citing the emerging agreement. After one more vote, Republicans successfully adjourned the House to buy time for absent members to come back last night.

    McCarthy will likely receive some credit for sticking it out. He can also take some solace in the fact that expectations for what House Republicans could accomplish with a narrow majority are already quite low. The mere fact of a Republican majority in the House alongside a Democratic-controlled Senate guarantees that neither party’s legislative wish list will make it to President Joe Biden’s desk.

    Ask most House Republicans what they realistically hope to do over the next two years, and the answer is some variation of the phrase “hold Joe Biden accountable.” In the near term, that means issuing subpoenas and holding hearings focused on everything from the administration’s Southern border policy to Hunter Biden’s personal life and business dealings. Some members of the House GOP conference want to pursue the impeachment of Biden Cabinet officials such as Homeland Security Secretary Alexander Mayorkas, and potentially even the president himself, but it was already questionable whether Republicans could muster the votes for those moves with such a small number of votes to spare.

    McCarthy must confront how to raise the debt ceiling and how to keep the government open when the current fiscal year ends on September 30. His opponents have extracted promises that he’ll seek deep spending cuts alongside each task, which will undoubtedly be opposed by Democrats, who hold an equal share of power in the Senate and in the White House. Even before reports of his concessions were confirmed, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, issued a statement warning that the GOP’s proposed budget cuts were “all but guaranteeing a shutdown.”

    For McCarthy, however, those are crises for another day. For now, he has won over just enough of his critics, and with it, the speakership. All he had to do was sacrifice power, and no small part of his dignity, to get it.

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    Russell Berman

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