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Tag: McCarthy’s allies

  • Why Kevin McCarthy Can’t Lose George Santos

    Why Kevin McCarthy Can’t Lose George Santos

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    The Republican Party has had no better friend than Nassau County in the past few years.

    Of America’s largest counties, few have turned more sharply toward the GOP than New York City’s neighbor to the east. This collection of Long Island suburbs swept Democrats out of local office in 2021, and last fall, Nassau County voted resoundingly Republican in New York’s gubernatorial race. Most important for the national GOP, the county helped elect three Republicans to Congress, including two candidates who flipped Democratic seats in districts that President Joe Biden had carried in 2020.

    Representative George Santos was one of those recent winners, and now Nassau County Republicans are worried that his abrupt fall from grace will cost the GOP far more than the seat that his lies helped the party pick up in November. They want Santos to step down, even though that means his seat would be vacant until a special election later this year, which the Democrats would aggressively contest. Local Republicans are flummoxed that national party leaders, starting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, haven’t joined their united call for Santos to resign. And they see McCarthy’s continued tolerance of Santos as an attempt to hold on to a Republican vote in the near term without enough consideration for whether he’d lose it—and cause Republicans to lose many others—in the longer term.

    Tom Nichols: Amazingly, George Santos is a member of Congress

    “It’s the right thing to do morally, ethically, and politically,” former Representative Peter King, a Long Island Republican who represented the district next to Santos’s in the House for 28 years, told me about trying to oust Santos. “If you want to keep controlling the Congress, you can’t just have the short-sighted view that you need his vote next week or next month. You’re gonna lose all the votes in two years when you’re no longer in the majority.”

    With 2024 in mind, and as the list of Santos’s biographical fabrications grows (seemingly by the day), Nassau County’s GOP machine has treated the congressman-for-now as a boil to be lanced.

    “As far as I’m concerned, he’s nonexistent. I will not deal with him. I will not deal with his office,” Bruce Blakeman, the Republican who was elected Nassau County executive in 2021, told me. Last week, Blakeman joined a group of local GOP leaders, including county Republican Party Chairman Joseph Cairo and Representative Anthony Garbarino, in demanding that Santos resign.

    Yet for the moment, the political imperatives of Long Island Republicans no longer align with those of McCarthy, who plainly cannot afford to lose Santos’s vote with such a narrow margin in the House. Santos backed McCarthy in all 15 ballots for speaker earlier this month, and McCarthy’s allies rewarded him with a pair of committee assignments earlier this week. The new speaker said that Santos has “a long way to go to earn trust” but has made no move to sanction him.

    “The voters of his district have elected him. He is seated. He is part of the Republican conference,” McCarthy told reporters last week.

    Democrats have already filed a complaint about Santos with the House Ethics Committee, and he is under investigation by federal and local prosecutors in New York who are reportedly looking into whether he committed financial crimes or violated federal campaign-disclosure laws.

    Santos has defied calls to resign, and McCarthy might need his vote even more should another House Republican, Representative Greg Steube of Florida, miss an extended period of time after he sustained serious injuries from a 25-foot fall off a ladder earlier this week.

    McCarthy’s office did not respond to requests for comment. The National Republican Congressional Committee, which traditionally backs GOP incumbents, echoed McCarthy’s ambivalence toward Santos. “Voters in New York will have the final say on who represents them,” NRCC spokesperson Jack Pandol told me by email. “Rep. Santos will have to earn back their trust as he serves them in Congress.”

    Steve Israel: How a perfectly normal New York suburb elected a con man

    King and others in Nassau County are trying to impress upon McCarthy that the longer he stands by Santos, the more damage he will do to a Republican brand that has been on the rise. “The only reason Kevin McCarthy has the majority is because of the very close marginal seats that Republicans won in New York,” King said. “We can lose all of them in the next election.”

    Even if McCarthy wanted to force Santos out, however, there’s not much he can do. He could try to expel him, but that would take the support of two-thirds of the House, and members of both parties might be leery of setting precedent by kicking out a member who has not been charged, much less convicted, of a crime. King suggested that McCarthy insist on an expedited investigation by the Ethics Committee—the panel’s probes tend to drag on for months—but there’s little history of that either.

    Election to the House “is an unshakable contract for two years,” Doug Heye, a former House GOP leadership aide who has advised lawmakers ensnarled in ethics investigations, told me. “Unless two-thirds of the House say, ‘Get out of here,’ or you give it up yourself, nothing happens.”

    Santos has almost no incentive to leave of his own accord anytime soon, especially now that Long Island Republicans have all but foreclosed the possibility of his winning renomination to his seat. “He’s not going to have a career. He’s not going to have a public life, and he’s going to be ostracized in his own community,” Blakeman told me. Santos was wealthy enough to lend his campaign $700,000. But his present personal finances are, like so much else about his life, a mystery, so he may need the paychecks that come with a $174,000 annual salary. And his seat could be a crucial bit of leverage in potential negotiations with prosecutors, Heye noted; resigning his seat, in that scenario, could help him avoid other penalties, including prison time.

    As his struggle just to get the speakership demonstrated, McCarthy doesn’t exactly have an ironclad grip on his conference. The Republicans from Nassau County seem to realize that the new speaker has limited sway over Santos. But McCarthy’s decision to protect and even validate Santos’s standing inside Congress is at odds with a party clinging both to its House majority and to its precarious stronghold on Long Island. “I’ve dealt with people with all sorts of issues,” Blakeman told me,” and enabling them is not a good thing.”

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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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  • The Humiliation of Kevin McCarthy

    The Humiliation of Kevin McCarthy

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    Shortly before 4 p.m.yesterday, Kevin McCarthy, the man who desperately wanted to be House speaker, had just suffered two brutally public rejections in a row. For some reason, he was unbowed. “We’re staying until we win,” McCarthy assured a crush of reporters waiting for him outside a bathroom in the Capitol.

    Moments earlier, McCarthy had sat and watched as a small but dug-in right-wing faction of his party twice defied his pleas for unity and ensured the 57-year-old Californian’s ignominious place in congressional history. Trying to avoid the first failed speaker vote in 100 years, McCarthy could afford to lose only four Republicans in the crucial party-line tally that opens each new Congress and allows the majority party to govern. McCarthy lost 19. The clerk called the roll again, and once again 19 Republicans voted for someone other than McCarthy. By the hyperpolarized standards of the modern Capitol, this was a rout.

    Outside the bathroom, McCarthy explained how the votes would wear down his opposition, how they’d come to see that there was no viable alternative to him. He pointed out that the Republican whom all 19 of his detractors had backed on the second ballot, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, didn’t even want the speaker’s job and was supporting him. “It’ll change eventually,” McCarthy said.

    He walked back to the floor and watched as the House rejected him a third time, now with 20 Republicans casting their votes for Jordan. When the chamber adjourned for the day at about 5:30 p.m., McCarthy had already left the floor, his latest bid for speaker thwarted at least momentarily, and perhaps for good.

    As the first day of the new congressional term began, McCarthy made a final defiant plea to Republicans inside a private meeting, the culmination of two months’ of negotiating and concessions. The pitch rallied McCarthy’s allies; Representative Ann Wagner of Missouri told me she had never seen him so fiery. But it also “emboldened the other side,” Representative Pete Sessions of Texas told reporters before the votes.

    Read: The Republican majority’s opening debacle

    Expected or not, the failed votes amounted to a stunning humiliation for McCarthy, who in recent days had been projecting confidence not only in word but in deed. More than measuring the speaker’s drapes, he had begun using them: McCarthy had already moved into the speaker’s suite of offices in the Capitol. If the House elects someone besides him in the coming days or weeks, he’ll have to move right back out.

    But yesterday was a broader embarrassment for a Republican Party that, at least in the House, has squandered most of the chances that voters have given it to govern over the past dozen years. A day of putative triumph had turned decidedly sour—a reality that many GOP lawmakers, particularly McCarthy supporters, made little effort to disguise. “This costs us prestige,” Sessions lamented after the House had adjourned. “The world is watching.”

    What the world saw probably left many viewers confused. Democrats, the party that voters had relegated to the minority, were giddy and celebratory. “Let the show begin!” one exclaimed after the House formally convened. Representative Ted Lieu of California posed outside his office with a bag of popcorn. During the three rounds of ballots, Democrats flaunted their unity, casting with gusto their unanimous votes for the incoming minority leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York. “Jeffries, Jeffries, Jeffries!” now-former Speaker Nancy Pelosi exclaimed in the fourth hour of voting.

    By that point, the House chamber had lost most of its energy. Lawmakers who had brought their children to witness their swearing-in as members of Congress had sent most of them away; there would be no swearing-in, because that, too, must wait for the election of a speaker. As the third ballot dragged on, a few Republicans seemed on the verge of nodding off, and others grew chippy. “Because I’m interested in governing: Kevin McCarthy,” Representative Bill Huizenga of Michigan snapped when it was his turn to vote again.

    McCarthy’s strategy entering the day had been to keep members on the floor, voting again and again, in hopes that his opponents would grow tired, or buckle under pressure from the House Republicans backing him. But when Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a McCarthy ally, made a motion to adjourn before the fourth vote could be taken, no one put up a fight. “We were at an impasse,” Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, whose defection to Jordan after voting twice for McCarthy might have helped prompt the adjournment, told reporters afterward. “Right now it’s clear Kevin doesn’t have the votes. So what are we going to do? Go down the same road we already saw with [the initial] ballots? It doesn’t make sense.”

    After the adjournment, members left for meetings that many hoped would break the stalemate in time for the House to reconvene today at noon. McCarthy was still gunning for the gavel, but his position seemed more precarious than ever. Republicans who had stuck with him for three ballots were openly discussing alternatives. Could Jordan, a fighter even more conservative than McCarthy and closer to Donald Trump, win over GOP moderates? Was Representative Steve Scalise, McCarthy’s deputy, an acceptable alternative? And while some Republicans still proclaimed themselves “Only Kevin,” others suggested that they might be open to someone else. “I’ve learned in leadership roles, never say what you’re never going to do,” Wagner told me before the voting began.

    If there was a consensus among Republicans last night, it was that few if any of them had any idea whom they could elect as speaker, or when that would happen. “I think everybody goes in their corner and talks,” Representative Ken Buck of Colorado, a conservative who voted for McCarthy, told reporters. I asked him if there was a scenario in which McCarthy, having lost three votes in a row, could still win. “Oh, absolutely,” he replied. Was that the likeliest scenario? Buck answered just as quickly: “No.”

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    Russell Berman

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