The event quickly spiraled after a request to pray for Kirk from Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado led to objections from Democrats and a partisan shouting match.
Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, a close friend of Kirk’s, told Democrats on the floor that they “caused this” — a comment she later said she stood by, arguing that “their hateful rhetoric” against Republicans contributed to Kirk’s killing.
Johnson banged on the gavel, demanding order as the commotion continued.
“The House will be in order!” he yelled to no avail.
The incident underscored the deep-seated partisan tensions on Capitol Hill as the assassination of Kirk revives the debate over gun violence and acts of political violence in a divided nation. As Congress reacted to the news, lawmakers of both parties publicly denounced the assassination of Kirk and called it an unacceptable act of violence.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) said he was “deeply disturbed about the threat of violence that has entered our political life.”
“I pray that we will remember that every person, no matter how vehement our disagreement with them, is a human being and a fellow American deserving of respect and protection,” Thune said.
Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), whose husband, Paul, was attacked with a hammer three years ago, also denounced the fatal shooting.
A few hours after the commotion on the House floor, the White House released a four-minute video of President Trump in which he said Kirk’s assassination marked a “dark moment for America.” He also blamed the violent act on the “radical left.”
“My administration will find each and every one of those that contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it,” Trump said as he grieved the loss of his close ally.
Elise Stefanik and I had been speaking for only about a minute when she offered this stark self-assessment: “I have been an exceptional member of Congress.”
Her confidence reminded me of the many immodest pronouncements of Donald Trump (“I would give myself an A+”), and that’s probably not an accident. Stefanik has been everywhere lately, amassing fans among Trump’s base at a crucial moment—both for the GOP and for her future.
Stefanik spent October presiding over the leaderless House GOP’s search for a new speaker—a post that Stefanik, the chair of the conference, conspicuously declined to seek for herself. In a congressional hearing last month, she pressed three of America’s most prominent university presidents to say whether they’d allow students to call for Jewish genocide; directly or indirectly, her interrogation brought down two of them. And for the past several weeks, Stefanik has been making an enthusiastic case for Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
She campaigned with him in New Hampshire last weekend, defending his mental acuity in the face of obvious gaffes (“President Trump has not lost a step,” she insisted) and rejecting a jury’s conclusion that he sexually abused E. Jean Carroll. She parrots his baseless claims that the 2020 election was “rigged” and that the defendants charged with storming the Capitol to keep him in office are “hostages.” After a GOP congressional candidate was caught on tape mildly criticizing Trump, Stefanik publicly withdrew her endorsement. Barely an hour after the networks declared Trump the winner of the Iowa caucus—before Iowans had even finished voting—she issued a statement calling on his remaining opponents to drop out of the race.
I spoke with Stefanik about her fierce defense of Trump, which has won her praise from the former president. In New Hampshire, he called her “brilliant” and lauded her questioning of the university presidents as “surgical.” (He did, however, butcher her name.) Just about everyone can see that Stefanik has been mounting an elaborate audition. The 39-year-old clearly didn’t pass up a bid for House speaker because she lacks ambition. On the contrary, she seems to have a bigger promotion in mind: not second in line to the presidency, but first. In our conversation, Stefanik didn’t make much effort to dispel the perception that she wants to be Trump’s running mate. “I’d be honored to serve in any capacity in the Trump administration,” she told me, repeating a line she’s used before.
Her displays of fealty aside, Stefanik has a lot going for her. She has become, without question, the most powerful Republican in New York, where her prodigious fundraising helped give the GOP a majority. Stefanik’s House GOP colleagues say she is extremely smart, and she still draws compliments for her behind-the-scenes role during last fall’s speakership crisis, when she ran a tense and seemingly endless series of closed-door conference meetings. Whether or not her declining to run for speaker was tied to the vice presidency, it was politically shrewd. “It didn’t work out well for most others,” joked Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, who briefly served as acting speaker and similarly turned down a chance to win the job permanently. “She saw the writing on the wall,” a fellow New York Republican, Representative Andrew Garbarino, told me. “She was smart enough to say, ‘I’m not popping my head up only to get it chopped off.’”
The fervor that Stefanik brings to her Trump defense has made her a favorite for VP among some of his staunchest allies, including Steve Bannon, who remains a force in MAGA world. “She’s a show horse and a workhorse, and that in and of itself is pretty extraordinary in modern American politics,” Bannon told me. “She’s at, if not the top, very close to the top of the list.”
Stefanik may not be subtle, but she’s made herself relevant in a party still devoted to Trump. Her future success now depends on his—and whether he rewards her loyalty with the prize she so clearly wants.
Stefanik routinely boasts that she was the first member of Congress to endorse Trump’s reelection. That’s true as far as 2024 goes, but it neatly obscures the fact that she did not back his primary campaign in 2016. Nor did she show much support for Trump’s movement as it took root in the GOP.
After graduating from Harvard, Stefanik began her political career in the George W. Bush White House and later served as an aide to Paul Ryan during his vice-presidential run. In 2014, at age 30, she was elected to the House—the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at the time—and carved out a reputation as a moderate in both policy and tone. She made an abrupt turn toward Trumpism during the former president’s first impeachment hearings, in 2019, and eagerly backed his reelection the following year. In 2021, she replaced the ousted Trump critic Representative Liz Cheney as conference chair, making her the fourth-ranking Republican in the House.
Not one for public introspection, Stefanik has never fully explained her transformation into a Trump devotee beyond saying she was impressed by his policies as president. The simplest answer is that she followed the will of her upstate–New York constituents, who came to embrace Trump after favoring Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. “I reflect, I would say, the voters in my district,” she told me shortly before the 2020 election.
To say that Stefanik displays the zeal of a convert doesn’t do justice to the phrase. She has become one of Trump’s foremost defenders and enforcers in Congress. At first “it was surprising,” former Representative Adam Kinzinger, a Republican colleague of Stefanik’s for eight years, told me of her Trump pivot. “Now it’s just gross.”
Kinzinger and Stefanik had both served as leaders of a group of moderate House Republicans, but they took opposite paths during the Trump years. Kinzinger voted to impeach Trump after January 6 and left Congress two years later. “In her core, she’s a deep opportunist and has put her personal ambition over what she knows is good for the country,” Kinzinger said. Although Stefanik has been in Trump’s corner for more than four years now, Kinzinger said she “has ramped up her sycophancy” as the chances of Trump’s renomination—and the possibility of her serving on the national ticket—have come more fully into view.
Close allies of Stefanik naturally dispute this characterization; they told me that although they think she’d make an excellent vice president, she has not once brought up the topic with them. “He’s going to have great options, but Elise will be at the top of that list,” Majority Leader Steve Scalise told me. When I asked Stefanik whether she was campaigning to be on Trump’s ticket, she replied: “I’m focused on doing my job.”
Other contenders frequently mentioned as possible Trump running mates include South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem; Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who served as one of Trump’s White House press secretaries; Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina; and the businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.
One senior Republican who is friendly with both Stefanik and Trump lauded her leadership skills and political acumen but doubted that Trump would pick her. “She doesn’t have executive experience,” the Republican told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about Stefanik’s chances. A Trump-campaign spokesperson did not return a request for comment.
Even as they praise her, Stefanik allies occasionally describe her in ways that suggest she lacks authenticity. “She’s a highly intelligent, calculated individual,” Chris Tague, a Republican in the New York legislature, told me. Representative Marc Molinaro, a member of New York’s House delegation, described Stefanik as “a calming force” inside a House Republican conference often marred by infighting. When I noted that this characterization seemed to be at odds with her combative style in public, Molinaro explained that Stefanik’s “outward persona” helps her keep the conference from getting out of hand. “We all know Elise. She’s strong. She’s tough,” he said. “She didn’t need to be that person, because we know she can be that person.”
Still, Kinzinger said, unlike some Republicans in Congress, Stefanik does not speak differently about Trump in private than she does in public. “I got that wink and nod from a lot of people, not from her,” he said. “She’s smart enough to know that if she says something in private, it could get out.”
Stefanik is also smart enough, Kinzinger told me, to understand that Trump’s claims about the 2020 election, which she now recites, are not true. “She knows the drill,” he said. “She would say exactly what I would say if she had the freedom to do it, but she’s all in.”
To interview Stefanik is to strike a sort of deal: access in exchange for browbeating. She answered my questions even as she rebuked me for asking about such trifling matters as election denialism and January 6. “Everyday Americans are sick and tired of the biased media, including you, Russell, and the types of questions you’re asking,” Stefanik told me. I started to ask her about her recent appearance on Meet the Press, where she had casually referred to the January 6 defendants as “hostages”—an unsubtle echo of Trump’s language. The comment prompted a predictable round of shocked-but-not-surprised reactions from Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans. A New York Democrat, Representative Dan Goldman, introduced a resolution to censure Stefanik over the remark.
Even though Stefanik made a show of protesting my line of inquiry, she beat me to the question. I had barely uttered “Meet the Press … ” before she started speaking over me: “I know—you’re so predictable—what you’re going to ask. You’re going to ask about the January 6 hostages.” Bingo. Without missing a beat, Stefanik proceeded to read aloud snippets from New York Times and NPR reports about poor conditions and alleged mistreatment of inmates charged with January 6 crimes. “The American people are smart. They see through this,” she said. “They know that there is a double standard of justice in this country.”
Stefanik was trying to argue that these news reports justified her use of a term usually reserved for victims of terrorism. The specifics of the reports weren’t really the point. More than anything, she seemed to want to demonstrate that, like Trump, she wouldn’t back down or apologize. She sounded almost cheerful, like a happy warrior for Trump—his pugnacious defender who would engage with the biased mainstream media without giving in to them, without conceding a single premise or hemming and hawing through an interview.
Stefanik was riding high in MAGA world when we spoke. Her Meet the Press appearance was “a master class,” Bannon told me. In addition to the “hostages” line, she refused to commit to certifying the 2024 election, generating outrage that only added to the performance. “This is what we’re thinking. This is us. This is who we are,” Susan McNeil, a GOP county chair in Stefanik’s district, told me, referring to Stefanik’s comments about certification. “Do I trust this election right now? No.”
“For her to stand strong and make those statements? Good. You’re not being bullied,” McNeil continued. “You’re not gonna get pressured to cave in to saying something that you’re not ready to dignify with an answer yet.”
Stefanik has no interest in appearing humble or self-deprecating. When I brought up the Meet the Press interview, she used the same word that Bannon had to describe her performance. “It was a master class in pushing back” against the media, she told me, “and it has been widely hailed.”
Cooperating with this story, like appearing on the D.C. establishment’s favorite talk show, seemed to be part of Stefanik’s unofficial, unacknowledged audition for VP. It was a low-risk bet. A positive portrayal might impress the media-conscious Trump. If, on the other hand, she didn’t like how the piece turned out, she could hold it up to Trump supporters as confirmation that the press has it out for them. Stefanik’s team lined up nearly a dozen local and national validators to speak with me, including Bannon, Scalise, and Representative James Comer, who heads the committee leading the Biden-impeachment inquiry.
Trump clearly prizes loyalty above just about anything else. Mike Pence displayed that quality in spades, until suddenly, at the most climactic moment of Trump’s presidency, he did not. To test whether Stefanik’s allegiance had a limit, I asked whether a Trump conviction for any of the crimes with which he’s been charged would affect her support in any way. “No,” she replied without hesitation. “It’s a witch hunt by the Department of Justice. I believe Joe Biden is the most corrupt president not just in modern history, but in the history of our country.”
Stefanik was more circumspect when I asked her what she would have done differently from Pence had she been responsible, as vice president, for presiding over the certification of Electoral College ballots on January 6. Trump had pressured Pence to throw out ballots from states where he was contesting the vote. Pence had refused. Given Stefanik’s apparent interest in Pence’s old job, it seemed relevant.
At first, she dodged the question by claiming that the election was rigged and referring to a speech she delivered on the House floor in the early hours of January 7, when she voted against certifying Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania. But that speech was worded far more carefully than the outright claims of fraud that Stefanik makes today. Back then, she couched her objections as representing the views of her “concerned” constituents. She didn’t say the election was stolen, nor did she say what action Pence should have taken.
When I pressed her on Pence’s decision not to intervene and what she would have done, Stefanik replied simply, “I disagreed, and I believe it was an unconstitutional election.” She would go no further than that.
At some point over the next several months, Stefanik’s dual roles as Trump booster and protector of the vanishing House majority could come into conflict. She has made clear that she wants Republicans to unify around Trump, and sooner rather than later. Control of the House, however, might well be determined in her deep-blue state, where the nation’s most vulnerable Republicans represent districts that Trump lost in 2020. Embracing Trump this fall could cost some of them their seats.
Now the longest-serving Republican in the New York delegation, Stefanik serves as a mentor for several of the state’s more recent arrivals to the House. She has helped get them seats on desired committees, and, during the speaker battle in October, she arranged for the various candidates to sit for interviews with the delegation. But Stefanik has also worked to keep them in line.
“She’s not afraid to be blunt,” Garbarino said, recalling times when Stefanik chastised him for a public statement she didn’t like. Her message? “We don’t have to do everything publicly,” Garbarino said. “Sometimes it’s better if you say this stuff behind the scenes to somebody instead of smacking them in the face publicly about it.”
Stefanik has taken the lead in fighting Democratic attempts to gerrymander New York in their favor, part of an effort to reclaim the House majority. (A recent state-court ruling didn’t help her cause.) To that end, she is working to ensure that none of the state’s GOP House members tries to save their own seat at the party’s expense or says anything in public that could undermine a potential Republican legal challenge. “She’s cracking the whip,” one Republican strategist in the state told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Stefanik’s toughest task, though, might be getting her colleagues to support Trump. Two swing-district Republicans in New York, Representatives Nick LaLota and Brandon Williams, have endorsed Trump as he easily captured the first two primary states. But others in the delegation have yet to heed Stefanik’s call. In interviews, a few of them seemed hesitant even to utter his name. “I have avoided presidential politics, and Elise has always respected that,” Molinaro told me. As for Trump, he would say only, “I intend to support the presidential nominee.”
Garbarino used almost exactly the same words when I asked about the presidential race. Two other New York Republicans in districts that Biden won, Representatives Mike Lawler and Anthony D’Esposito, declined interview requests. When I asked Stefanik if they would back Trump, she offered a guarantee: “They’re going to support President Trump, who will be the nominee, as Republicans will across the country.”
Privately, Stefanik has delivered an additional message to vulnerable Republicans in New York, according to several people I spoke with. “Stefanik has been very clear to not attack President Trump,” the GOP strategist said. “Everyone knows that in New York.” As Stefanik sees it, criticizing Trump would hurt even swing-district Republicans, because the MAGA base is now a sizable constituency in districts that Biden carried. Still, other House leaders haven’t exerted nearly as much public pressure on rank-and-file Republicans. “We all each individually take different approaches to growing our majority,” Scalise told me. “I don’t tell anybody how to manage their politics back home.”
As Stefanik’s profile has grown, and as her rhetoric has become even Trumpier, Democrats have sought to turn her into a political liability for swing-district Republicans, just as they have the former president. After Stefanik’s “hostages” comment, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who also hails from New York, said that Stefanik “should be ashamed of herself.”
But then he pivoted to a political angle. “The real question,” Jeffries told reporters, “is why haven’t House Republicans in New York, like Mike Lawler or others, denounced Elise Stefanik, and why do they continue to rely on her fundraising support in order to try to fool the voters in New York and pretend like they believe in moderation?” None of the New York Republicans took the bait, choosing to remain silent rather than cross Stefanik. (“I didn’t see the clip,” Garbarino told me, in one characteristic dodge.)
Stefanik clearly welcomes these attacks. In the MAGA world she now inhabits, enraging Democrats is the coin of the realm. Taking their fire only pushes her closer to the place she really wants to be: at Trump’s side.
Representative Adam Schiff was mingling his way through a friendly crowd at a Democratic barbecue when the hecklers arrived—by boat. Schiff and two other Senate candidates, Representatives Katie Porter and Barbara Lee, convened on the back patio of a country club overlooking the port of Stockton, California. Schiff spoke first. “It’s such a beautiful evening,” he said, thanking the host, local Democratic Representative Josh Harder.
It was hard to know what to make of the protest vessel, except that its seven passengers were yelling things as Schiff began his remarks. And not nice things. Although their words were tough to decipher, the flag flying over the craft made clear where they were coming from: FUCK BIDEN. Notably, of the three candidates, Schiff was the only one I heard singled out by name—or, in one case, by a Donald Trump–inspired epithet (“Shifty”) and, in another, a four-letter profanity similar to the congressman’s surname (clever!).
Schiff is used to such derision and says it proves his bona fides as a worthy Trump adversary. Given the laws of political physics today, it also bodes well for his Senate campaign. The principle is simple: to be despised by the opposition can yield explicit benefits. This is especially true when you belong to the dominant party, as Schiff does in heavily Democratic California. One side’s villain is the other side’s champion. Adam Schiff embodies this rule as well as any politician in the country.
In recent years, Schiff has had a knack for eliciting loud and at times unhinged reactions from opponents, even though he himself tends to be quite hinged. The 45th president tweeted about Schiff 328 times, as tallied by Schiff’s office. Tucker Carlson called the congressman “a wild-eyed conspiracy nut.” A group of QAnon followers circulated a report in 2021 that U.S. Special Forces had arrested Schiff and that he was in a holding facility awaiting transfer to Guantánamo Bay for trial (the report proved erroneous). Before Schiff had a chance to meet his new Republican colleague Anna Paulina Luna, of Florida, she filed a resolution condemning his “Russia hoax investigation” and calling for him to potentially be fined $16 million (the resolution failed).
This onslaught has also been good for business, inspiring equal passion in Schiff’s favor. A former prosecutor, he became an icon of the left for his emphatic critiques of Trump’s behavior in office, including as the lead House manager in Trump’s first impeachment trial. “You know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country,” Schiff said as part of his closing argument, a speech that became a rallying cry of the anti-Trump resistance. (“I am in tears,” the actor Debra Messing wrote on Twitter.) Opponents gave grudging respect. “They nailed him,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell told Mitt Romney, according to an account in a new Romney biography by my colleague McKay Coppins. Schiff’s own Trump-era memoir, Midnight in Washington, became a No. 1 New York Times best seller.
Representative Adam Schiff speaks to supporters at a barbecue hosted by fellow Democratic House member Josh Harder in Stockton, California. (Photographs by Austin Leong for The Atlantic)
You could draw parallel lines charting the levels of vilification that Schiff has encountered and his name recognition and fundraising numbers. Both the good and the grisly have boosted Schiff’s media profile, which he has adeptly cultivated. Schiff has come in at or near the top of the polls in the Senate race so far, along with Porter. A Berkeley IGS survey released last week revealed him as the best-known of the candidates vying for the late Dianne Feinstein’s job; 69 percent of likely voters said they could render an opinion of him (40 percent favorable, 29 percent unfavorable). He raised $6.4 million in the most recent reporting period, ending the quarter with $32 million cash on hand, or $20 million more than the runner-up, Porter. That’s more than any Senate candidate in the country this election cycle, and a massive advantage in a state populated by about 22 million registered voters covering some of the nation’s most expensive media markets.
“He’s become an inspiration and a voice of reason for many of us,” Becky Espinoza, of Stockton, told me at the Democratic barbecue.
Or at least the sector of “many of us” who don’t want him dead.
Schiff started getting threats a few months into Trump’s presidency. “Welcome to the club,” Nancy Pelosi, his longtime mentor, told him. He endured anti-Semitic screeds online and actual bullets sent to his office bearing the names of Schiff’s two kids. “I can’t stand the fact that millions of people hate you; they just hate you,” Schiff’s wife, Eve—yes, Adam and Eve—told her husband after the abuse started. “They just hate you.”
No one deserves to be subjected to such menace, and the threats can be particularly chilling for a member of Congress who would not normally have a protective detail. (Schiff’s office declined to discuss its security staffing and protocols.) Schiff is not shy about repeating these ugly stories, however. There’s an element of strategic humblebragging to this, as he is plainly aware that being a target of the MAGA minions can be extremely attractive to the Democratic voters he needs.
In June, congressional Republicans led a party-line vote to censure Schiff for his role in investigating Trump. As then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy attempted to preside, Democrats physically rallied around Schiff on the House floor chanting “shame” at McCarthy. On the day of his censure, Schiff was interviewed on CNN and twice on MSNBC; the next morning he appeared on ABC’s The View. “Whoever it was that introduced that censure resolution against him probably ensured Adam’s victory,” Representative Mike Thompson, another California Democrat, told me. A few colleagues addressed him that day as “Senator Schiff.”
I dropped in on Schiff periodically over the past few months as he traversed the chaos of the Capitol, weighed in on Trump’s legal travails, and campaigned across California. What did a Senate candidacy look like for a Trump-era cause célèbre who is revered and reviled with such vigor? I found it a bit odd to see Schiff out in the political wild—glad-handing, granny-hugging, and, at the barbecue in late August, nearly knocking a plate of brisket from the grip of an eager selfie-seeker. He has graduated to a full-on news-fixture status, someone perpetually framed by a screen or viewed behind a podium, as if he emerged from his mother’s womb and was dropped straight into a formal courtroom, hearing room, or greenroom setting.
I watched a number of guests in Stockton clutch Schiff’s hand and address him in plaintive tones. “After I stopped crying a little bit, I just wanted to thank him for all he did during impeachment and to just save our democracy,” said Espinoza, following her brief meeting with the candidate.
Nearby, David Hartman, of Tracy, California, put down a paper plate of chicken, pickles, and corn salad and made his way to Schiff. “I just want to shake the man’s hand and thank him,” Hartman told me, which is what he did. So did his wife, Tracy (of Tracy!), who was likewise surprised to find herself in tears.
“I’m like a human focus group,” Schiff told me, describing how strangers approach him at airports. “Sometimes I will have two people come up to me simultaneously. One will say, ‘You are Adam Schiff. I just want to shake your hand. You’re a hero.’ And the other will say, ‘You’re not my hero. Why do you lie all the time?’”
For his first eight terms in Congress, Schiff, 63, was not much recognized beyond the confines of the U.S. Capitol or the cluster of affluent Los Angeles–area neighborhoods he has represented in the House since 2001. “I think, before Trump, if you had to pick one of these big lightning rods or partisan bomb-throwers, you would not pick me,” Schiff told me.
Largely true. Schiff speaks in careful, somewhat clipped tones, with a slight remnant of a Boston accent from his childhood in suburban Framingham, Massachusetts. (His father was in the clothing business and moved the family to Arizona and eventually California.) A Stanford- and Harvard-trained attorney, Schiff gained a reputation as an ambitious but low-key legislator in the House, and a deft communicator in service of his generally liberal positions.
A Fox News reporter and other guests at the barbecue in Stockton.(Photographs by Austin Leong for The Atlantic)
After Trump’s election, however, Schiff’s district effectively became CNN, MSNBC, and the network Sunday shows, along with the scoundrel’s gallery of right-wing media that pulverized him hourly. This included a certain Twitter feed. The worst abuse Schiff received started after Trump’s maiden tweet about him dropped on July 24, 2017. This was back in an era of relative innocence, when it was still something of a novelty for a sitting president to attack a member of Congress by name—“Sleazy Adam Schiff,” in this case.
Schiff tweeted back that Trump’s “comments and actions are beneath the dignity of the office.” Schiff would later reveal that he rejected a less restrained rejoinder suggested by Mike Thompson, his California colleague: “Mr. President, when they go low, we go high. Now go fuck yourself.” Anyway, that was six years, two impeachments, four indictments, 91 felony counts, and 327 tweets by Donald Trump about Adam Schiff ago.
“Adam is one of the least polarizing personalities you will ever find,” said another Democratic House colleague, Dan Goldman, of New York. “The reason he’s become such a bogeyman for the Republican Party is simply that he’s so effective.” Goldman served as the lead majority counsel during Trump’s first impeachment, working closely with Schiff. “We originally met in the greenroom of MSNBC in June of 2018,” Goldman told me. (Of course they did.)
Schiff understands that some of the rancor directed at him is performative, and likes to point out the quiet compliments he receives from political foes. Trump used to complain on Twitter that Schiff spent too much time on television—in reality, a source of extreme envy for the then-president. Schiff tells a story about how Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, came to Capitol Hill for a deposition from members of Schiff’s Intelligence committee in 2017. “Kushner comes up to me to make conversation, and to ingratiate himself,” Schiff told me. “And he said, ‘You know, you do a great job on television.’ And I said, ‘Well, apparently your father-in-law doesn’t think so,’ and [Kushner] said, ‘Oh, yes, he does.’” (Kushner didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
One of Trump’s most fervent bootlickers, Senator Lindsey Graham, walked up to Schiff in a Capitol hallway during the first impeachment trial and told him how good of a job he was doing. Schiff, who relayed both this and the Kushner stories in his memoir, says he gets that from other Republicans, too, usually House members he’s worked with—including some who lampoon him in front of microphones. A few House Republicans apologized privately to Schiff, he told me, right after they voted to censure him.
“The apologies are always accompanied by ‘You’re not going to say anything about this, are you?’” Schiff said. When I urged Schiff to name names, to call out the hypocrites, he declined.
I asked Schiff if he would prefer the more anonymous, pre-2017 version of himself running in this Senate campaign, as opposed to the more embattled, death-threat-getting version, who nonetheless enjoys so many advantages because of all the attention. He paused. “I’d rather the country didn’t have to go through all this with Donald Trump,” he said, skirting a direct answer.
As with many members of Congress seeking a promotion or an exit, Schiff gives off a strong whiff of being done with the place. “The House has become kind of a basket case,” he told me, citing one historic grandiloquence that he was recently privy to—the episode in which Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene called her colleague Lauren Boebert a “little bitch” on the House floor.
“And I remember thinking to myself, There used to be giants who served in this body,” Schiff said. He sighed, as he does.
I met with Schiff at the Capitol in early October, amid the usual swirl of weighty events: Feinstein had died three days earlier; news that Governor Gavin Newsom would appoint the Democratic activist Laphonza Butler as her replacement came the night before. That afternoon, Republican Representative Matt Gaetz had filed his fateful “motion to vacate” that would result in the demise of McCarthy’s speakership the next day. Schiff stood just off the House floor, colleagues passing in both directions, Republicans looking especially angry, and reporters gathering around Schiff in a small scrum.
No matter what happens next November, Schiff is not running for reelection in the House. He told me he has long believed that he’d be a better fit for the Senate anyway, where he has been coveting a seat for years. Schiff said he considered running in 2016, after the retirement of the incumbent Barbara Boxer (who was eventually succeeded by Kamala Harris).
A Democrat will almost certainly win the 2024 California race. Senate contests in the state follow a two-tiered system in which candidates from both parties compete in a March primary, and then the two top finishers face off in November, regardless of their affiliation. In addition to Schiff, Porter, and Lee, the former baseball star Steve Garvey, known also for his various divorce and paternity scandals, recently entered the race as a Republican. A smattering of long shots are also running, including the requisite former L.A. news anchor and requisite former Silicon Valley executive. Butler announced on October 19 that she would not seek the permanent job.
To varying degrees, all of the three leading Democratic candidates have national profiles. Lee, who has represented her Oakland-area district for nearly 25 years, previously chaired both the Congressional Progressive and Black Caucuses. Porter was elected to Congress in 2018 and has gained a quasi-cult following as a progressive gadfly who has a knack for conducting pointed interrogations of executives and public officials that go rapidly viral. A few of her fans were so excited to meet Porter at the Stockton barbecue that three actually spilled drinks on her—this according to the congresswoman, speaking at an event a few days later.
Schiff, Porter, and Lee all identify as progressive Democrats on most issues, though Schiff tends to be more hawkish on national security. He voted to authorize the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and supported the 2011 U.S. missile strikes against Libya. Lee, who opposed all three, recently criticized Schiff’s foreign-policy views as “part of the status quo thinking” in Washington. (Porter was not in office then.) Schiff expressed “unequivocal support for the security and the right of Israel to defend itself” after last month’s attacks by Hamas. Lee has been more critical of the Israeli government, and called for a cease-fire immediately after the Hamas attacks. As for Porter, she has been a rare progressive to focus her response on America’s Iran policy, which she called lacking and partly to blame for the attacks.
Although Schiff is best known for his work as a Trump antagonist—and happily dines out on that—he is also wary of letting the former president define him entirely. “This is bigger than Trump,” he reminds people whenever the conversation veers too far in Trump’s inevitable direction. Schiff dutifully pivots to more standard campaign themes, namely the “two hugely disruptive forces” he says have shaped American life: “the changes in our economy” and “the changes in how we get our information.” He reels off the number of cities in California that he’s visited, events he’s done, and endorsements he’s received as proof that he is a workmanlike candidate, not just a citizen of the greenroom.
A group of hecklers in a boat floats by near the barbecue. (Photographs by Austin Leong for The Atlantic)
Recently, he lamented that many of his Republican colleagues are now driven by a “perverse celebrity” that he believes the likes of Greene and Boebert have acquired through their Trump-style antics and ties to the former president. I pointed out to Schiff that he, too, has received a lot of Trump-driven recognition. Doesn’t being affiliated with Trump, whether as an ally or an adversary, have benefits for both sides?
“Well, I don’t view it that way at all,” Schiff said. “I don’t view it as having any kind of equivalence. On one hand, we’re trying to defend our democracy. And on the other hand, we have these aiders and abettors of Trump by these vile performance artists. It’s quite different.”
Schiff’s biggest supporter has been Pelosi, who endorsed him over two other members of her own caucus and delegation. This included Lee, whom Pelosi described to me as “like a political sister.” I spoke by phone recently with the former speaker, who was effusive about Schiff and scoffed at any suggestion that he benefited from his resistance to Trump and the counter-backlash that ensued. “If what’s-his-name never existed, Adam Schiff would still be the right person for California,” Pelosi said. It was one of two occasions in our interview in which she refused to utter the word “Trump.”
“I just don’t want to say his name,” she explained. “Because I worry that he’s going to corrode my phone or something.”
In one of my conversations with Schiff, I asked him this multiple-choice question: Who had raised the most money for him—Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, or Donald Trump? My goal was to get Schiff to acknowledge that, without Trump, he would be nowhere near as well known, well financed, or well positioned to potentially represent the country’s most populous state in the Senate.
“I’m not sure how to answer that,” he said. After a pause, he picked himself. “I am my own biggest fundraiser,” he declared. Okay, I said, but wasn’t Trump the single biggest motivator for anyone to donate?
“It’s the whole package,” Schiff maintained, ceding nothing. He then made sure to mention the person who’s been “most formative in helping shape my career and phenomenally helpful in my campaign—Nancy Pelosi.” He was in no rush to give what’s-his-name any credit.
On Friday, immediately after nominating Representative Jim Jordan as their latest candidate for speaker, House Republicans took a second, secret-ballot vote. The question put to each lawmaker was simple: Would you support Jordan in a public vote on the House floor?
The results were not encouraging for the pugnacious Ohioan. Nearly a quarter of the House Republican conference—55 members—said they would not back Jordan. Given the GOP’s threadbare majority, he could afford to lose no more than three Republicans on the vote. Jordan’s bid seemed to be fizzling even faster than that of Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, whose nomination earlier in the week lasted barely a day before he bowed out in the face of opposition from within the party.
Yet, by this afternoon, Jordan had flipped dozens of holdouts to put himself closer to winning the speakership. The 55 Republicans who said last week that they wouldn’t support him had dwindled to 20 when the House voted this afternoon. He earned a total of 200 votes on the floor; he’ll need 217 to win. Jordan will now try to replicate the strategy that former Speaker Kevin McCarthy used to capture the top House post in January: wearing down his opposition, vote by painful vote. It took McCarthy 15 ballots to secure the speakership, but Jordan may not need that many. The Republicans who voted against him on the floor have not displayed the defiance that characterized the conservatives who overthrew McCarthy. Several of them have told reporters that they could be persuaded to vote for Jordan, or would not stand in the way if he neared the threshold of 217 votes needed to win.
Should he secure those final votes, Jordan’s election would represent a major victory for the GOP hardliners who, led by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, toppled McCarthy with the hope of replacing him with a more combative, ideological conservative. The switch would also give Donald Trump, who endorsed Jordan, something he’s never had in his seven years as the Republican Party’s official and unofficial standard-bearer: a House speaker fully committed to his cause. Although McCarthy and the previous GOP speaker, Paul Ryan, accommodated the former president, Jordan has been his champion; as documented by the House committee on January 6, Jordan was deeply involved in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election and urged then–Vice President Mike Pence to throw out electoral votes from states that Trump was contesting.
His election would look a lot like Trump’s, each the result of establishment Republicans falling in line with a leader many of them swore they’d never support. Throughout Trump’s four years in the White House, GOP lawmakers, aides, and even members of the Cabinet sharply criticized the president in private, either to reporters or to their own colleagues, while offering unequivocal support and praise in public. That dynamic played out for Jordan this afternoon, when the floor vote revealed that dozens of the Republicans who’d opposed him in a secret ballot were unwilling to put their names against him on the record.
Some of them had made awkward public reversals in the run-up to the vote. On Thursday, Representative Ann Wagner of Missouri was asked whether she would back Jordan in a floor vote. “HELL NO,” she told Scott Wong of NBC News. By Monday morning, she was saying that Jordan had “allayed my concerns about keeping the government open” and securing the southern border; she would vote for him. One by one, other senior Republicans who had initially said that they were determined to block Jordan’s ascent—Representatives Mike Rogers of Alabama, Ken Calvert of California, Vern Buchanan of Florida among them—declared that they, too, had come around.
By this afternoon, however, Jordan was still well short of the votes he needed. “I was surprised at the number. I think everyone was surprised,” Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, a Jordan supporter, told reporters after the vote. The big question now is whether Jordan can close the gap on subsequent ballots, or whether the small cadre of Republican holdouts will grow into a more formidable bloc against his candidacy. The safer assumption seemed to be that Jordan’s opposition would melt away. After all, this group of Republicans is a different breed than the recalcitrant conservatives who forced out McCarthy. The anti-Jordan contingent is, if not ideologically moderate, then far more pragmatic and committed to stable governance than the anti-McCarthy faction.
The lack of a House speaker for the past two weeks has paralyzed the chamber in the middle of ballooning domestic and international crises. The federal government will shut down a month from today if no action is taken by Congress, which has been unable to offer more assistance to either Israel or Ukraine in their respective wars with Hamas and Russia. A number of Jordan skeptics have cited the upheaval outside the Capitol as a rationale for resolving the impasse inside the dome, even if it means voting for a conservative they consider ill-suited to lead.
Democrats believed that the election of such a polarizing Republican could, along with the general collapse of governance by the GOP, help them recapture the chamber next year. But they were appalled that Republicans might elevate to the speakership a far-right ideologue many of them have labeled an insurrectionist. A former wrestler who brought a fighter’s mentality to Congress, Jordan rose to prominence as an antagonist of former Republican Speaker John Boehner a decade ago, pushing against bipartisan cooperation. “He is the worst possible choice,” Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, a 25-year veteran of the House, told me before the vote.
Jordan’s record, and the possibility that he would be an electoral vulnerability for the GOP, was clearly weighing on Republicans before the vote. As he walked into the chamber shortly after noon, Representative Anthony D’Esposito, a Republican who represents a swing district on Long Island, told reporters that he still hadn’t decided how to vote. He ultimately joined 19 other GOP lawmakers in backing someone other than Jordan. Other mainstream Republicans justified their vote for Jordan on the grounds that he alone had the credibility to persuade far-right Republicans to avert a government shutdown in the coming weeks and months. “If he says it, they think it’s a strategic move. If I say it, they call me a RINO,” one Republican told me on the condition of anonymity after voting for Jordan.
By the end of the vote, as many Republicans had opposed Jordan as had initially tried to block McCarthy in January, before the former speaker embarked on a five-day period of private lobbying and dealmaking to win the gavel. It was unclear whether Jordan would be able to do the same. He appeared relaxed as he sat through the nearly hour-long roll call, showing little reaction as his defections mounted. When the vote ended, he huddled with supporters, including McCarthy, and the House, having failed once more to elect a speaker, recessed so Republicans could figure out their next move.
“I made history, didn’t I?” Kevin McCarthy was saying Tuesday night, a few hours after he in fact did, by becoming the first speaker of the House to ever be ousted from the job. History comes at you fast—and then it hurtles on. By yesterday morning, the race to replace him was fully in motion, even as the wooden Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy sign still hung outside his old office.
Washington loves a death watch, which is what McCarthy’s speakership provided from its first wee hours. He always had a strong short-timer aura about him. The gavel looked like a toy hammer in McCarthy’s hands, the way he held it up to show all of his friends when he was elected. He essentially gave his tormentors the weapon of his own demise: the ability of a single member of his conference to execute a “motion to vacate” at any time. Tuesday, as it turned out, is when the hammer fell: day 269 of Kevin held hostage.
McCarthy tried to put on a brave face during Tuesday’s roll call. But he mostly looked dazed as the bad votes came in, sitting cross-legged and staring at the ground through the back-and-forth of floor speeches, some in support, some in derision.
“This Republican majority has exceeded all expectations,” asserted Elise Stefanik of New York, cueing up an easy rejoinder from McCarthy’s chief scourge, Matt Gaetz of Florida: “If this House of Representatives has exceeded all expectations, then we definitely need higher expectations!”
Garret Graves of Louisiana hailed McCarthy as “the greatest speaker in modern history,” which brought an immediate hail of laughter from the minority side. Otherwise, Democrats were content to say little and follow the James Carville credo of “When your opponent is drowning, throw the son of a bitch an anvil.”
Mike Garcia of California urged his fellow Republicans to be “the no-drama option for America,” which did not seem to be going well. Andy Biggs of Arizona concluded, “This body is entrenched in a suboptimal path.”
By 5 p.m., that path had led to a 216–210 vote against McCarthy—and the shortest tenure of a House speaker since Michael C. Kerr of Indiana died of tuberculosis, in 1876.
How should history remember McCarthy’s speakership? Besides briefly? McCarthy was never much of an ideological warrior, a firebrand, or a big-ideas or verdict-of-history guy. He tended to scoff at suggestions of higher powers or lofty purposes.
Insomuch as McCarthy had any animating principle at all, it was always fully consistent with the prevailing local religion: self-perpetuation. Doing whatever was necessary to hang on for another day. Making whatever alliances he needed to. Could McCarthy be transactional at times? Well, yes, and welcome to Washington.
The tricky part is, if you’re constantly trying to placate an unruly coalition, it’s hard to know who your allies are, or when new enemies might reveal themselves. That became more apparent with every “yea” vote to oust McCarthy—Ken Buck of Colorado, Nancy Mace of South Carolina. At various points, McCarthy had considered those Republicans to be “friends.” And “you can never have too many friends,” McCarthy was always telling people. In the end, he could have used more.
“Kevin is a friend,” Marjorie Taylor Greene was saying outside the Capitol before Tuesday’s vote. She turned out to be steadfast. Reporters surrounded Greene like she was an old sage. “Matt is my friend,” Greene also said, referring to Gaetz. George Santos walked by behind the MTG press scrum, and three of the Greene reporters trailed after him. Lauren Boebert—whom Greene had once called a “little bitch” on the House floor (not a friend!)—followed Santos. Boebert wound up supporting McCarthy, sort of. “No, for now,” she said when her name came up in the voice vote.
McCarthy always tried to convey the impression that he was having fun in his job, and was aggressively unbothered by critics who dismissed him as a lightweight backslapper, in contrast to his predecessors, Paul Ryan the “policy” guy and John Boehner the “institutionalist.” Back in April 2021, I was sitting with McCarthy, then the House minority leader, at an ice-cream parlor in his hometown of Bakersfield, California. He used to come in here—a place called Dewar’s—for Monday-night milkshakes after his high-school football practices. He kept saying hello to people he recognized and posing for photos with old friends who stopped by our table. At one point that night, McCarthy turned to me and indicated that being someone people wanted to meet was one of the main rewards of his job.
He was always something of a political fanboy at heart, hitting Super Bowls and Hollywood awards parties. He liked meeting celebrities. He showed me pictures on his phone of himself with Kobe Bryant, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Donald Trump. We had just eaten dinner at an Italian restaurant, Frugatti’s, which featured a signature dish named in his honor—Kevin’s Chicken Parmesan Pizza. (He had ordered a pasta bolognese.)
“I know the day I leave this job, the day I am not the leader anymore, people are not going to laugh at my jokes,” McCarthy told me then. “They’re not going to be excited to see me, and I know that.” This was something to savor, for as long as it lasted. And that basically became the game: take as many pictures and gather as many keepsakes as he could to prove the trip was real.
“Keep dancing” became a favorite McCarthy mantra during his abbreviated time with the speaker’s gavel—as in, keep dancing out of the way of whatever “existential threat” to his authority came along next. McCarthy would contort himself in whatever direction was called for: promise this to get through the debt-ceiling fight, finesse that to keep the government open, zig with the zealots, zag with the moderates. Renege on deals, if need be; throw some bones; do an impeachment; order more pizza.
“Tonight, I want to talk directly to the American people,” McCarthy said on the morning of January 7. After being debased through 15 rounds of votes, he could finally deliver his “victory” speech as the newly (barely) elected speaker of the House. As a practical matter, it was after 1:15 a.m., and the American people were asleep. Everything about McCarthy’s big moment felt like an overgrown kid playacting. There he was with a souvenir hammer, after near-fisticuffs broke out between two of the crankier kids at the sleepover.
McCarthy would grab whatever sliver of a bully pulpit he could manage. “I never thought we’d get up here,” he said as he began his late-night acceptance speech. Immediately, everyone wondered how long he could possibly stay. And how it would end. This seemed to include McCarthy himself. “It just reminds me of what my father always told me,” he said. “It’s not how you start. It’s how you finish.”
McCarthy had moved into the speaker’s chambers a few days earlier, before it was officially his to move into. Why wait? He took a picture with his freshly engraved nameplate on the door. He invited his lieutenants over to check out his new office. Not bad for a kid from Bakersfield! He ordered more pizza. And Five Guys. Dancing requires fuel.
But throughout his tenure, McCarthy carried himself with a kind of desperate edge, which his critics sensed and held against him. “We need a speaker who will fight for something, anything, besides just staying or becoming speaker,” Bob Good of Virginia said in a floor speech on Tuesday.
This was late in the afternoon, when everyone still expected McCarthy to keep fighting. His supporters viewed his defeat as temporary. Gaetz stepped out onto the Capitol steps and was quickly engulfed by a scrum of boom mics, light poles, and onrushing reporters. Back inside, McCarthy grabbed the last word on the crazy spectacle.
“Judge me by my enemies,” the now–former speaker said, maybe trying to sound defiant.
The speaker’s abrupt impeachment probe against Biden is the latest sign that he’s still fighting for his job.
Chip Somodevilla / Getty
As Kevin McCarthy made his televised declaration earlier today that House Republicans were launching an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, the House speaker stood outside his office in the Capitol, a trio of American flags arrayed behind to lend an air of dignity to such a grave announcement. But McCarthy looked and sounded like a hostage, and for good reason.
That the Republican majority would eventually try to impeach Biden was never really in doubt. The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman predicted as much nearly a year ago, even before the GOP narrowly ousted Democrats from control in the House. McCarthy characterized the move as “a logistical next step” in the party’s investigation into Biden’s involvement with his son Hunter’s business dealings, which has thus far yielded no evidence of presidential corruption. But intentionally or not, the speaker’s words underscored the inevitability of this effort, which is as much about exacting revenge on behalf of the twice-impeached former President Donald Trump as it is about prosecuting Biden’s alleged misdeeds.
From the moment that McCarthy won the speakership on the 15th vote, his grip on the gavel has seemed shaky at best. The full list of concessions he made to Republican holdouts to secure the job remains unclear and may be forcing his hand in hidden ways nine months later. The most important of those compromises, however, did become public: At any time, a single member of the House can force a vote that could remove McCarthy as speaker.
The high point of McCarthy’s year came in June, when the House overwhelmingly approved—although with notably more votes from Democrats than Republicans—the debt-ceiling deal he struck with Biden. That legislation successfully prevented a first-ever U.S. default, but blowback from conservatives has forced McCarthy to renege on the spending provisions of the agreement. House Republicans are advancing bills that appropriate far less money than the June budget accord called for, setting up a clash with both the Democratic-controlled Senate and the White House that could result in a government shutdown either when the fiscal year ends on September 30 or later in the fall.
GOP hard-liners have also backed McCarthy into a corner on impeachment. The speaker has tried his best to walk a careful line on the question, knowing that to keep his job, he could neither rush into a bid to topple the president nor rule one out. Trump allies like Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Matt Gaetz of Florida have been angling to impeach Biden virtually from the moment he took office, while GOP lawmakers who represent districts that Biden won—and on whom the GOP’s thin House advantage depends—have been much cooler to the idea. McCarthy has had to satisfy both wings of the party, but he has been unable to do so without undermining his own position.
Less than two weeks ago, McCarthy said that he would launch a formal impeachment only with a vote of the full House. As the minority leader in 2019, McCarthy had castigated then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi for initiating an impeachment probe against Trump before holding a vote on the matter. “If we move forward with an impeachment inquiry,” McCarthy told the conservative publication Breitbart, “it would occur through a vote on the floor of the people’s House and not through a declaration by one person.” By this morning, the speaker had reversed himself, unilaterally announcing an impeachment inquiry just as Pelosi did four years ago this month. (McCarthy made no mention of a House vote during his speech, and when reporters in the Capitol asked about it, a spokesperson for the speaker told them no vote was planned.)
The reason for McCarthy’s flip is plain: He doesn’t have the support to open an impeachment inquiry through a floor vote, but to avoid a revolt from hard-liners, he had to announce an inquiry anyway. Substantively, his declaration means little. House Republicans have more or less been conducting an impeachment inquiry for months; formalizing the process simply means they may be able to subpoena more documents from the president. The effort is all but certain to fail. Whether it will yield enough Republican votes to impeach Biden in the House is far from clear. That it will secure the two-thirds needed to convict the president in the Senate is almost unthinkable.
McCarthy’s announcement won praise from only some of his Republican critics. Barely an hour later, Gaetz delivered a preplanned speech on the House floor decrying the speaker’s first eight months in office and vowing to force a vote on his removal if McCarthy caves to Democrats during this month’s shutdown fight. He called the speaker’s impeachment announcement “a baby step” delivered in a “rushed and somewhat rattled performance.” A longtime foe of McCarthy’s, Gaetz was one of the final holdouts in the Californian’s bid to become speaker in January, when he forced McCarthy to grovel before acquiescing on the final ballot. “I am here to serve notice, Mr. Speaker,” Gaetz said this afternoon, “that you are out of compliance with the agreement that allowed you to assume this role.”
If McCarthy has become a hostage of the House hard-liners, then Gaetz is his captor—or, more likely, one of several. Publicly, the speaker has dared Gaetz to try to overthrow him, but caving on impeachment and forsaking a floor vote suggests that he might not be so confident.
The speaker is as isolated in Washington as he is in his own conference. Senate Republicans have shown no interest in the House’s impeachment push, and they are far more willing to adhere to the terms of the budget deal that McCarthy struck with Biden and avert a government shutdown. Perhaps McCarthy believed that by moving on impeachment now he could buy some room to maneuver on the spending fights to come. But the impetus behind today’s announcement is more likely the same one that has driven nearly all of his decisions as speaker—the desire to wake up tomorrow morning and hold the job at least one more day.
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.
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.
At this point in the unending search for a House speaker, Donald Trump’s candidacy is making as much progress as Kevin McCarthy’s.
The former president (and half-hearted 2024 White House applicant) today secured his first vote as the House slogged through its seventh fruitless attempt to elect a leader. The semi-serious effort to elevate Trump, put forward by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, came at the expense of McCarthy, the Trump-endorsed Republican leader whose bid hasn’t improved in the past six ballots. McCarthy twice more lost 21 Republicans and fell well short of the 218 votes he needs for a majority.
Today’s votes were notable because they were the first since McCarthy reportedly made an offer to his GOP opponents that seemingly encompassed all of their public demands. The two sides have engaged in intense negotiations over the past day, keeping McCarthy’s candidacy alive and offering perhaps a slim hope that he can win over enough of the holdouts to become speaker. But none of that progress was evident in the tallies this afternoon.
McCarthy’s concessions represented the equivalent of giving away the remaining trinkets in an already ransacked store. He had previously agreed to significantly lower the threshold of members needed to force a vote to remove him as speaker, known as a “motion to vacate.” After setting the minimum at five members, McCarthy gave in to the renegades’ demand that a single member could trigger that vote—restoring the standard conservatives had used in 2015 to push Speaker John Boehner out of office. His allies could argue that with so much opposition to McCarthy already, there was little difference between a threshold of five and one.
But according to reports, McCarthy went even further. He agreed to give the House Freedom Caucus designated seats on the powerful Rules Committee, a panel traditionally controlled by the speaker that decides whether and under what parameters legislation can come to a vote on the floor. He also reportedly promised to allow members to demand virtually unlimited amendment votes on spending bills; that change could open up a process that in recent years has been centralized by the leadership, but it could also lead to free-for-alls that drag out debates on bills for days or weeks.
The concessions are sure to frustrate McCarthy supporters who believe the wannabe-speaker had already surrendered too much to his opponents. Representative Ann Wagner of Missouri told me that the threshold for the motion to vacate should be a majority of the Republican conference. Lowering it to five, she said, was akin to the speaker having “a knife over your head every day.” Earlier this week, I asked Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, a McCarthy supporter who has spoken of partnering with Democrats on a consensus pick for speaker, whether he might desert McCarthy if the GOP leader kept empowering his far-right critics. “It depends on what it is,” Bacon told me. “But I think we went too far as it was already.”
McCarthy was betting that Republicans closest to the political center would stick with him if it meant finally ending a leadership crisis now on its third day. And yet, even this most generous offer to his foes was not enough, and none of the 21 holdouts crossed over to McCarthy’s corner.
McCarthy downplayed today’s first vote before it even began, telling reporters, “Nothing is going to change.” For McCarthy, maintaining the status quo might count as progress. His lingering fear is likely that the bottom will fall out among supporters who are growing tired of the stalemate and are looking to alternatives. Representative Ken Buck of Colorado told CNN that Republicans could nominate McCarthy’s lieutenant, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, by the end of the day if a deal wasn’t struck.
McCarthy’s allies had hoped for another delay to buy time for negotiations, perhaps even through the weekend, but Republicans evidently determined they could not muster the voters to adjourn for a third time in 24 hours. The desire for delay revealed a tactical reversal by McCarthy born out of desperation. At the outset of the voting on Tuesday, his stated goal had been to keep lawmakers on the House floor, casting ballot after ballot until either his far-right opponents or possibly the Democrats got tired enough to let him win. But six consecutive defeats, during which McCarthy lost rather than gained support, disabused him of that idea. Beginning yesterday afternoon, McCarthy tried to adjourn the House to give him more time for backroom negotiations, having apparently realized that his repeated public floggings were doing him no good.
Democrats reluctantly agreed to adjourn after the sixth vote yesterday afternoon, but when McCarthy allies sought to close down the House again in the evening, the Democrats fought back. The vote to adjourn became something of a circus. McCarthy’s critics on the right splintered, with four of them voting alongside Democrats to keep the House in session and one arch-conservative, Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, switching his vote at the last minute. With the outcome in doubt, both parties began shoving late-arriving members—some still wearing their winter coats—to the front of the chamber to cast their votes before the House clerk, Cheryl Johnson, gaveled the motion closed. When Johnson shouted the final tally over the din of the House—the motion to adjourn passed, 216–214—McCarthy and his allies cheered. McCarthy had won his first vote in his bid for speaker, one that staved off his next public abasement for at least another day.
Earlier yesterday, the House took three more failed speaker votes that were nearly identical to the three failed votes it took on Tuesday. The lone differences were that the anti-McCarthy GOP faction nominated a new candidate, Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, and McCarthy lost 21 Republican votes instead of the 20 defections he had suffered previously. Representative Victoria Spartz of Indiana switched her vote from McCarthy to “present,” telling reporters after that the party needed to have more conversations about the way forward. “What we’re doing on the floor is wasting everyone’s time,” she said.
Spartz’s protest made little difference. The House met again for more time-wasting this afternoon, and the best that McCarthy could accomplish was not losing any more votes. His candidacy survived a seventh losing ballot, and the House moved quickly on to an eighth and then a ninth (during which Gaetz abandoned his support for Trump and voted for Representative Kevin Hern of Oklahoma instead).
Those votes proceeded no better and no worse for McCarthy, who now seems to be one or two more defections away from a final defeat. He is hanging on for now, but the deadline for him to strike a deal or exit the race is fast approaching.
Among the things Jaime Herrera Beutler remembers about January 6, 2021, is that her husband managed to turn off the television just in time.
He was at home with their three young children in southwestern Washington State when the riot began. It had taken him a few moments to make out the shaky footage of the mob as it tore through the Capitol. Then he started to recognize the hallways, the various corridors that he knew led to the House floor, where his wife was preparing to break from her party and speak in favor of certifying the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden. He grabbed the remote before the kids could register what was about to happen.
It was a few moments later that Herrera Beutler, huddled among her Republican colleagues, heard the door. “I will never forget the pounding,” she told me recently: Boom, boom, boom.
Before January 6, Herrera Beutler was a purple-district congresswoman who had spent most of her 12-year tenure removed from controversy, passing legislation on bipartisan issues such as maternal health and endangered wildlife while maintaining a social conservatism that kept her in good standing with the base. In the weeks that followed the insurrection, however, when she and nine other House Republicans voted to impeach President Donald Trump, the 44-year-old found herself the pariah of a party whose broader membership, for most of her career, had not precisely known she existed. Today, when the 118th Congress is sworn in, she, like all but two of the Republicans who voted to impeach, will find herself out of office.
In an interview with The Atlantic about her six terms in the House and the Trump-backed primary challenge that ousted her, Herrera Beutler remained convinced of Trump’s culpability for the events of January 6. Yet she appeared still bewildered that a crisis of such magnitude had come to pass, and that not even her own constituents were immune to Trump’s propaganda about the 2020 election and the insurrection itself. “I didn’t know that I had so many people who would be like, ‘What are you talking about? This was a peaceful protest,’” she told me. “I had no idea the depth of misinformation people were receiving, especially in my own home.”
Throughout our conversation, it was clear that the insurrection’s fallout hadn’t changed Herrera Beutler the way it had Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, the two Republicans who sat on the January 6 committee and who have publicly committed themselves to keeping Trump out of office. These and other Republicans who retired or lost their seats after voting to impeach Trump have seemed liberated to speak about the GOP’s widespread delusion over election fraud. But Herrera Beutler is different: refusing to say that the forces of Trumpism have triggered a fundamental shift in her party, even as her own career was upended by them. Despite two years of hindsight, she seems to have rationalized her party’s continued promotion of lies concerning January 6 as a function of tactical error—believing that had Republicans and Democrats agreed to proceed with witnesses during Trump’s impeachment trial, and had she communicated the stakes differently back home, her base would have rejected the conspiracy theories and accepted Trump’s guilt. “I know a majority of the Republicans who disagree with me on impeachment, had they seen and talked to the people that I had, and had they seen what I saw—I have no doubt about where they would have come down,” she said. “I really don’t.”
That Herrera Beutler has arrived at this conviction might seem naive but is in many ways understandable. For the better part of 12 years, she has been reinforced in the idea that the Republicans in her district are ideologically independent, cocooned from the national party as it leaps from one identity to the next. In her first bid for Congress, at the height of the Tea Party wave, she easily beat challengers from the right to become, at just 31 years old, the first Hispanic to represent Washington State in Congress. She had barely unpacked before the media christened her the future of her party. To the disappointment of the Republican leadership, however, the young and charismatic statehouse veteran wasn’t terribly interested in developing a national profile. Over the next several years, Herrera Beutler instead oriented her office around the hyperlocal work her constituents seemed to prefer—efforts such as expanding the forest-products industry and protecting the Columbia River’s salmon and steelhead runs from sea lions.
On January 6, Herrera Beutler’s career moved onto alien terrain. Immediately after the insurrection, she directed her staff to start making calls, to find out where Trump had been during the rioting and why. Late that afternoon, she texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows for answers—“We need to hear from the president. On TV,” she sent, to no response—and, on January 11, two days before the impeachment vote, she privately pressed Kevin McCarthy for his impression of Trump’s culpability. During their conversation, the House minority leader confessed that the president had refused his pleas over the phone to call off the rioters—that as they smashed the windows of McCarthy’s office, Trump accused him of not caring enough about purported election fraud. For Herrera Beutler, it was enough to prove Trump’s guilt. In a press release the next day, and later a town hall back in her district, she invoked the conversation with McCarthy to explain her decision to vote to impeach.
At the time, she hadn’t thought twice about airing the details of the Trump-McCarthy call. In the context of the various other things that she and the public had learned by that point, she told me, “I didn’t think it was unique or profound.” In fact, for McCarthy’s reputation, it was. The California Republican would soon make something of a penance visit to Trump at Mar-a-Lago, despite having been, according to Herrera Beutler and other (anonymous) Republican members who were privy to details of the call, terrified and livid at the height of the insurrection, acutely aware of Trump’s real-time recognition of the danger and refusal to do anything about it. Before long, Herrera Beutler’s revelation about the Trump-McCarthy call became the lead story on CNN. Jamie Raskin, the House Democrat managing Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, suddenly wanted to know everything about this congresswoman he had hardly heard of.
For Herrera Beutler, the attention was unlike anything she’d experienced. “I wasn’t trying to insert myself into the national conversation,” she told me. “I wasn’t trying to be the, you know …” She trailed off, seemingly trying to say something like the truth teller. She was open to testifying in the impeachment trial and contacted Nancy Pelosi’s counsel about how to proceed, according to reporting by Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian in Unchecked, yet the House speaker’s attorney never relayed the message to Raskin and his staff. With zero surefire commitments from Republican witnesses to Trump’s conduct during the riot, and facing pressure from his own party not to gum up the 46th president’s honeymoon period with proceedings against the 45th, Raskin rushed the trial to a close.
If Herrera Beutler had pushed more publicly to testify, would Raskin have charged ahead and subpoenaed others? Would it have changed the final vote in the Senate? It’s impossible to say. But for Herrera Beutler, the outcome remains bound up in regret. She said it was “overwhelming” when she began to realize “that good people, honest people, amazing people that I knew” believed, for example, that antifa had orchestrated the riot. “Because, at that point, what could I do?” In retrospect, she believes that pushing ahead with a full trial, before public opinion about January 6 could “bake,” as she puts it, might have plugged the flow of conspiracies in her district and elsewhere. The implication, left unsaid, is that it also might have changed the outcome of her primary. “Had we made everything as public as we could at that moment, I think that we could have come to a better agreed-upon actual history of what happened,” she said. “That’s the only thing that I wish I had known—I moved into this thinking we all had the same information, and we didn’t.”
Though she said she appreciates the “sense of duty” of the lawmakers on the January 6 committee—whose final report was published just before we spoke—Herrera Beutler was pessimistic about the resonance of their work. “The challenge for me with the committee was that the 70 million people who voted for Trump are never going to get anything out of that,” she said. “And that’s who I wanted to move.”
This past August, a Trump-backed Republican and former Green Beret named Joe Kent, who had promoted the former president’s lies about the 2020 election, defeated Herrera Beutler in the Third Congressional District’s jungle primary. (Two months later, Kent narrowly lost the general election to Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who will be the first Democrat in the seat since Herrera Beutler took office in 2011.) On the one hand, Herrera Beutler seems clear-eyed about the forces behind her loss. “It’s just turned into such a tit-for-tat on personality things, and I think my base has definitely at times wanted to see more of that from me,” she said. “And that’s probably part of why the guy in my race made it as far as he did, because that was his oxygen—scratching that itch and making people feel justified in their ideas.”
On the other hand, Herrera Beutler at various times in our conversation expressed an optimism about the future of Republican politics that seemed unmoored from the fact that her party’s base had rejected her. In criticizing both Republican and Democratic lawmakers she called “members in tweet only,” she said she often wondered what their constituents think “when they don’t get anything done—like when they can’t help a local hospital with a permit, or when Grandma can’t get her spouse’s disability payment from the VA.” “I don’t know if they just speechify when they go home,” she said, “but I know that the American people are going to get tired of that. It’s just a question of when, and under what circumstance.” The broader results of the midterm elections, in which numerous Republicans in the mold of Kent ultimately lost to Democrats, would seem to prove her point. But the results of countless Republican primaries, including the victories of election deniers such as Kari Lake in Arizona, indicate that the “when” is likely still far off.
Perhaps one reason Herrera Beutler insists that a “restoration is coming” for the Republican Party: She’s probably going to run again. She won’t say so definitively; she told me she’s looking forward to living in one place with her family and “just being functional.” “I mean, would I be shocked if I ran for something? At some point in my future? No,” she said. The sheer possibility might explain her unwillingness to speak candidly about her party’s current leaders, even two years after the cumulative letdown of January 6. Reports have suggested that her long and friendly relationship with McCarthy, for instance, ruptured after she inadvertently exposed his two-faced response to the insurrection. Bade and Demirjian have written that the House Republican leader exploded at Herrera Beutler, making her cry. (In a joint statement, McCarthy and Herrera Beutler denied that this happened.) When I asked Herrera Beutler for her thoughts about McCarthy’s current bid for the speakership, she demurred, saying, “I don’t want to be the one who comments on that.”
It wasn’t her place, she reasoned. She no longer has a voice in how the House Republican conference chooses to lead. And in the end, even if she is reluctant to acknowledge it, few things constitute more of an indictment of her party than this. All of the qualities that once fueled Herrera Beutler’s rise are still there. She is still a young Hispanic woman in a party that skews old, white, and male. She still rhapsodizes about individual liberty, still considers herself a social conservative in a moment when the Republican stance on abortion seems as unpopular as it ever has. But in little more than a decade, Herrera Beutler has gone from being the future of the party to a casualty of one vote.
Three thousand miles away from Capitol Hill, she begins the work of moving on. She wants to continue to serve the public, she told me, but as a private citizen for the first time since her 20s, she’s still trying to figure out what that means. “I need a cause, something that gives me something to fight for,” she said. “And I just don’t know yet what that’s going to be.”
