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Tag: Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida

  • George Santos Was Finally Too Much for Republicans

    George Santos Was Finally Too Much for Republicans

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    So long, George Santos, we hardly knew ye—and that was pretty much the problem.

    This morning, House members evicted one of their own for only the sixth time in history, terminating the congressional career of the Long Island Republican barely a year after he won election on a campaign of lies and alleged fraud. The vote to expel Santos was 311–114, easily clearing the two-thirds threshold needed to pass. As with most other consequential votes this year, a unified Democratic caucus carried the resolution along with a divided GOP, whose members struggled with the decision of whether to trim their already narrow majority by kicking Santos out of Congress. A slim majority of Republicans stood by Santos, while all but four Democrats voted to expel him.

    Santos’s tenure was as memorable as it was brief; to the bitter end—and it was bitter—he seemed to be auditioning for a reality show, or perhaps the title role in a sequel to Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can. Ultimately, a Republican Party that has largely embraced a former president indicted in four separate criminal cases was unwilling to offer the same support to a freshman member of Congress whom a large majority of GOP lawmakers would not have recognized before January. The vote suggested that some ethical line remains that a Republican politician cannot cross without reproach—at least if that person is not named Donald Trump. Where exactly that line sits, however, is unclear.

    Republicans largely stood by Santos through earlier efforts to oust him this year after a federal grand jury indicted him on charges of wire fraud, money laundering, false statements, and theft of public funds; just a month ago, the House overwhelmingly rejected an expulsion resolution across party lines. Then came a damning report by the House Ethics Committee that alleged in striking detail just how flagrantly Santos had deceived his campaign donors. He used campaign funds on OnlyFans and Botox, among other salacious tidbits investigators uncovered. “Representative Santos sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit,” the report concluded. “He blatantly stole from his campaign.”

    David A. Graham: The non-end of George Santos

    Santos denounced the report and generally denied the allegations, but he has refused to offer a specific defense of his actions. Still, Republican leaders resisted expelling him. Speaker Mike Johnson privately urged Santos to resign in order to spare his party the difficult vote of removing him. But Santos, who had already announced that he would not seek a second term next year, was done with party loyalty. “If I leave, they win,” he told reporters, accusing his colleagues of “bullying” him.

    Johnson tried to pressure Santos, but he would not lobby other Republicans to expel him. He described the expulsion resolution as “a vote of conscience”—which is Capitol code for “vote however you want.” But in the hours before today’s vote, he and Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters that they would vote to save Santos.

    The reason GOP leaders would protect Santos was plain: With such a small majority, they couldn’t spare a single vote, even one as ethically and legally compromised as his. “Do you think for a minute if Republicans had a 25-seat majority, they would care about George Santos’s vote?” Representative Pete Aguilar of California, the House Democratic caucus chair, asked earlier this week. “They needed him to vote for Speaker McCarthy. They needed him to vote for Speaker Johnson. That’s the only reason why he’s still a member of Congress.”

    A few House Republicans acknowledged that the party could ill afford to jettison Santos when it has had enough trouble passing bills as is. The contingent pushing most aggressively for expulsion was Santos’s New York Republican colleagues, who were both personally appalled that he had slipped into Congress alongside them and most likely to suffer politically from his continued presence. A handful of GOP-held seats in Long Island and upstate New York—including the one formerly held by Santos—could determine whether Republicans keep control of the House next year.

    Santos won his competitive seat in 2022 after somehow evading the scrutiny that usually accompanies closely fought House races; not until weeks later did The New York Times report that he had almost entirely invented his life story. Santos had lied about attending a prestigious prep school and earning degrees from Baruch College and NYU. He lied about working on Wall Street for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. He said that his grandparents survived the Holocaust and that his mother was working in the Twin Towers on 9/11. Both were lies. “He has manufactured his entire life,” Representative Marc Molinaro, a fellow New York Republican, said yesterday in a floor speech arguing for Santos’s expulsion.

    Publicly, the Republicans who voted with Santos—mainly staunch conservatives—argued against his removal on procedural grounds. The only other lawmakers the House has expelled were either members of the Confederacy during the Civil War or convicted of crimes in court. Ousting Santos based on accusations alone, these Republicans said, would set a dangerous new precedent and overturn the will of the voters who sent him to Congress. Yet none of them was actually willing to vouch for him. “I rise not to defend Geroge Santos, whoever he is,” Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida said in a floor speech, “but to defend the very precedent that my colleagues are willing to shatter.”

    Maria Konnikova: What psychology can teach us about George Santos

    Santos was a performer until his very last moments in Congress. “I will not stand by quietly,” he declared on the House floor. It was one statement of his that was indisputably true. Santos was a ubiquitous presence in the days leading up to the vote, willing to attack anyone standing against him. During a three-hour appearance on X (formerly Twitter) Spaces, he accused his colleagues of voting while drunk on the House floor. When one Republican, Representative Max Miller of Ohio, called Santos a “crook” to his face, Santos replied by referring to him as “a woman-beater,” dredging up allegations that Miller had physically abused his ex-girlfriend. (Miller denied the accusations.) Finally, Santos attempted one last bit of retribution by filing a motion to expel Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, the Democrat who pleaded guilty last month to a misdemeanor charge for falsely pulling a fire alarm en route to a House vote.

    “It’s all theater,” Santos declared yesterday with no hint of irony, on his penultimate day as a member of Congress. He had scheduled a press conference outside the House chamber, using the Capitol dome as a picturesque tableau. In the background, however, was a different icon: a garbage truck, presumably there to take out the congressional trash.

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    Russell Berman

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  • Jim Jordan Could Have a Long Fight Ahead

    Jim Jordan Could Have a Long Fight Ahead

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    Updated at 3:46 p.m. ET on October 17, 2023

    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.

    Read: Steve Scalise bows out

    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.

    Lee Drutman: Matt Gaetz is half right

    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.

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    Russell Berman

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  • Steve Scalise Bows Out

    Steve Scalise Bows Out

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    When Representative Steve Scalise emerged yesterday from the private party meeting where House Republicans narrowly nominated him to serve as the next speaker, he sounded anxious to get started. “We need to send a message to people throughout the world that the House is open and doing the people’s business,” Scalise told reporters.

    The Louisiana Republican wanted an immediate floor vote so that his members could formally elect him in a party-line tally. He had reason to hurry: The pile of problems—both global and domestic—that Congress must address is growing fast, and the House can do nothing without an elected speaker. The federal government will shut down on November 17 if lawmakers don’t act. Ukraine needs more funding from the U.S., and Israel, suddenly at war with Hamas, could soon as well.

    Scalise’s Republican foes, however, weren’t giving in. He needed the support of 217 of the House’s 221 GOP members in order to win the speakership, and defections began popping up almost immediately. Today more Republicans came out in opposition to his bid, and this evening Scalise announced that he was withdrawing from the race. His time as the Republican nominee lasted less than a day and a half.

    Read: ‘We put sharp knives in the hands of children’

    What began as a personal vendetta against former Speaker Kevin McCarthy by a single Republican backbencher, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, has spiraled into a much broader crisis—not only for the slim and fractured GOP majority but for the country and its allies around the world. “It’s very dangerous what we’re doing,” Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told reporters yesterday. “We’re playing with fire.” How the impasse ends, and when, could determine whether federal agencies stay open and whether the U.S. lends more support to its allies overseas.

    Here are three major issues that could hinge on the outcome of the speaker fight:

    A government shutdown

    In what became his final act as speaker, McCarthy averted a government shutdown by relying on Democratic help to pass a temporary extension of federal funding. But the Californian ended up sacrificing his dream job to keep the government’s lights on for a grand total of seven weeks. The supposed goal was to buy time to negotiate budget bills for the remainder of the fiscal year, but Republicans have already wasted nearly two of those weeks bickering over McCarthy and his replacement. “There’s no way we’re going to have a budget,” Representative Lois Frankel of Florida, a Democratic member of the House Appropriations Committee, told me.

    Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, whom Scalise defeated for the speaker nomination, conceded as much, reportedly telling Republicans that they would need to pass another temporary extension once the House resumes normal operations. Jordan’s proposal called for the House to extend funding for another six months, which under the budget agreement Congress enacted in June would trigger an automatic 1 percent spending cut across the board.

    The best hope to avert a shutdown might be if Republicans are forced instead to elect a caretaker speaker such as Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, who is currently the acting speaker pro tempore, or Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the House Rules Committee chair, who has good relationships with members of both parties. Some lawmakers have suggested that either Republican could serve for a few weeks or months, helping to resolve the funding crisis before giving way to a longer-term leader.

    Funding for Ukraine

    Although he kept the government open before he was deposed, McCarthy refused to allow passage of $6 billion in additional aid to Ukraine sought by the Biden administration and bipartisan majorities in the Senate. Neither Scalise nor Jordan would commit to sending more money to Ukraine, bowing to pressure from GOP hard-liners who have demanded that the U.S. secure the southern border before approving another infusion of aid.

    Democrats feared that the election of either Scalise or Jordan could effectively end American aid to Ukraine. If Republicans are unable to secure enough votes on their own to elect a speaker, Democrats might agree to support a more moderate candidate on the condition that the House vote on an aid package, among other concessions. “I do think that a majority of House members want to continue to help Ukraine,” said Frankel, who sits on the subcommittee that oversees the foreign-aid budget. “The challenge is having a speaker who would bring up a bill to allow us to do that. That’s the danger of a Republican candidate for speaker making a deal with extremists who say, ‘Hell no.’”

    Funding for Israel

    Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel could reopen a path for Ukraine funding. Despite pockets of opposition on the far left and right, the Jewish state retains overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress; when Scalise left yesterday’s party meeting, he was wearing both American and Israeli flag pins on his suit jacket. Biden officials and congressional Democrats are already discussing a package that would combine funding for Israel and Ukraine, in the hope that yoking the two together would help the Ukraine aid win approval.

    Read: The Israeli crisis is testing Biden’s core foreign-policy claim

    The success of that strategy is not guaranteed, however. When the idea came up yesterday during a classified State Department briefing for members of Congress, Frankel told me that a Republican lawmaker, Representative Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, started shouting “No!” The outburst seemed to encapsulate a week of paralysis in a party that, until it picks a leader, can’t say yes to anything. “I’m semi-optimistic,” Frankel said with a sigh, “that at some point Republicans will come to their senses.”

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    Russell Berman

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  • Kevin McCarthy’s Brief Speakership Meets Its End

    Kevin McCarthy’s Brief Speakership Meets Its End

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Read: Kevin McCarthy finally defies the right

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

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

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

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

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

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    Russell Berman

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  • Kevin McCarthy Finally Defies the Right

    Kevin McCarthy Finally Defies the Right

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    The speaker made a last-minute reversal to avert a government shutdown. It could cost him his job.

    Anna Moneymaker / Getty

    Updated at 9:02 p.m. ET on September 30, 2023

    For weeks, Speaker Kevin McCarthy seemed to face an impossible choice as he haggled over spending bills with his party’s most hard-line members: He could keep the government open, or he could keep his job. At every turn, McCarthy’s behavior suggested that he favored the latter option. He continued accepting the demands of far-right Republicans to deepen spending cuts and dig in against the Democrats, making a shutdown at tonight’s midnight deadline all but a certainty.

    Read: Why Republicans can’t keep the government open

    With just hours to go, however, the speaker abruptly changed course, defying his conservative tormentors and partnering with Democrats to avert a shutdown. The House this afternoon overwhelmingly approved a temporary extension of federal funding. The Senate passed the bill in the evening, putting off a shutdown for at least 45 days and buying both parties more time to negotiate spending for the next fiscal year.

    The question now is whether McCarthy’s pivot will end his nine-month tenure as speaker. By folding—for now—on the shutdown fight, he is effectively daring Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida and other hard-line Republicans to make good on their threats to depose him. “If somebody wants to remove [me] because I want to be the adult in the room, go ahead and try,” McCarthy told reporters before the vote. “But I think this country is too important.”

    The stopgap bill includes disaster-relief money sought by both parties, but McCarthy refused to add $6 billion in Ukraine aid that the Biden administration and a bipartisan majority of senators wanted. The Senate had been on the verge of passing its own extension that included the Ukraine money, but after the House vote it was expected to accept McCarthy’s proposal instead. Whether House Republicans agree to include Ukraine assistance in the next major spending bill is unclear, but Democrats and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are likely to make an aggressive push for it.

    McCarthy’s surprising about-face set off a wild few hours in the Capitol. Democrats were caught off guard and stalled for time to read the new bill, unsure if Republicans were trying to sneak conservative policy priorities into the legislation without anyone noticing. (In the end, only a single Democrat voted against it.) Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, a second-term Democrat, caused the evacuation of an entire House office building when he pulled a fire alarm just before the vote, in what Republicans said was a deliberate—and possibly criminal—effort to delay the proceedings. (Bowman’s chief of staff said that the representative “did not realize he would trigger a building alarm as he was rushing to make an urgent vote. The Congressman regrets any confusion.”)

    Annie Lowrey: How to end government shutdowns, forever

    On the right, the criticism of McCarthy was predictable and immediate. “Should he remain Speaker of the House?” one of his Republican opponents, Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, tweeted after the vote, seemingly rhetorically. Yet to more moderate Republicans, the speaker’s decision was a long time coming. McCarthy’s months-long kowtowing to the right had frustrated more pragmatic and politically vulnerable House Republicans, a few of whom threatened to join Democratic efforts to avert, or end, a shutdown. But many Republicans are even more furious at Gaetz and his allies. “Why live in fear of these guys? If they want to have the fight, have the fight,” former Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a moderate who served in the House with McCarthy for 12 years, told me. “I don’t understand why you would appease people who are doing nothing but trying to hurt and humiliate you.”

    This morning, the speaker finally came to the same conclusion. His move to relent on a shutdown only kicks the stalemate over federal spending to another day. Now it’s up to House Republicans to decide if McCarthy gets to stick around to resolve it.

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    Russell Berman

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  • Why Republicans Can’t Keep the Government Open

    Why Republicans Can’t Keep the Government Open

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    Yesterday was not a good day for House Republicans or for their struggling leader, Speaker Kevin McCarthy. In the morning, McCarthy was forced to scrap a procedural vote on a GOP proposal to avert a government shutdown that will commence at the end of this month if Congress doesn’t act. In the afternoon, a handful of conservatives tanked McCarthy’s bid to advance legislation funding the Pentagon.

    The failure of the proposal to prevent a shutdown was the more ominous defeat, both for Republicans and for the country. Yet even if McCarthy manages to pass a version of this, it will almost certainly be an exercise in futility. For starters, it would fund the government for a mere 30 additional days. And its basic provisions—cutting spending by 8 percent for all but the Defense and Veterans Affairs Departments, restarting construction of the southern border wall, cutting off pathways for asylum seekers—will likely be stripped out by Senate Democrats.

    Despite the GOP’s evident dysfunction, Representative Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota was in a chipper mood when he called me from the Capitol. The McCarthy ally was scurrying between meetings in an effort to help resolve the latest crisis threatening the speaker. “We’re a long way from landing the plane, but there are really productive conversations going on,” Armstrong told me. If the plane represents, in Armstrong’s metaphor, a functioning federal government, then House Republicans are still hovering at about 30,000 feet, with the runway coming rapidly into view.

    Watch: The Republicans threatening to shut down the government

    The Democrats who run the Senate aren’t involved in the “productive conversations” Armstrong was referencing. If they were, McCarthy might already have lost his job. Before he can negotiate with the Democrats, the speaker must broker a peace among the warring factions of his own party, who cannot even agree on an opening offer. Groups representing the conservative Freedom Caucus and the more pragmatic Main Street Caucus announced a deal on Sunday to support the 30-day extension, with spending cuts and border restrictions attached. But almost immediately, hard-liners rejected the proposal as insufficiently austere. Led by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, several of these Republicans are threatening to oust McCarthy if he caves to Democrats on spending, and a few of them are openly itching for a government shutdown.

    Any five Republicans can torpedo proposals that don’t have Democratic support—as five GOP lawmakers did yesterday in blocking the defense bill—and any five could topple McCarthy by voting along with Democrats for a procedural tool known as a motion to vacate the chair. This has effectively made him a hostage of his caucus, with precious little room to maneuver.

    Even the relatively optimistic Armstrong acknowledged the difficulty of McCarthy’s position. “It’s a pretty untenable argument to say you don’t have enough Republican votes to pass anything and you can’t negotiate with Democrats on anything,” Armstrong told me.

    McCarthy has tried many times to shake off threats to his speakership, alternately daring members like Gaetz to make a bid to oust him and pointing out that with such a narrow majority, any other Republican replacement would find themselves in the same unenviable position. I asked Armstrong whether McCarthy should simply ignore the hard-liners in his conference and strike a deal with Democrats to keep the government open, come what may. “I’m not sure he should yet,” he said.

    House Republicans have received hardly any backing from their brethren in the Senate, who have shown no appetite for a shutdown fight and have been more willing to uphold the budget deal that McCarthy struck with President Joe Biden in the spring. By bowing to conservative demands for deeper spending cuts, the speaker is reneging on the same agreement, which allowed Congress to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a catastrophic default. “I’m not a fan of government shutdowns,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters yesterday. “I’ve seen a few of them over the years. They have never produced a policy change, and they’ve always been a loser for Republicans.”

    For now, McCarthy allies such as Armstrong are adamant that this spending battle must result in a change in administration policy. They have zeroed in on the border, seeing an opportunity to force Biden’s hand and take advantage of an issue on which even some Democrats, such as New York City Mayor Eric Adams, have been critical of the president. “If we can’t use this fight to deal with the single most pressing national-security issue and humanitarian issue of our time, then shame on us,” Armstrong said.

    Read: Kevin McCarthy is a hostage

    Yet House Republicans have found themselves isolated, and bickering over legislation that—like most of their proposals this year—stands no chance of becoming law. A bipartisan majority in the Senate is likely to simply return a temporary spending bill to the House without the conservative priorities, perhaps with additional funding to aid Ukraine in its war with Russia. What then? I asked Armstrong. “I would shut it down,” he replied.

    Democrats in the House, meanwhile, have watched the unfolding GOP drama with a mix of schadenfreude and growing horror. The Republican infighting could help Democrats win back a House majority next year. But a shutdown would not reflect well on either party, and voters could end up blaming Biden as well as the GOP for the fallout. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers would be furloughed, and millions of Americans might have to wait longer for Social Security checks and other needed benefits. “The rest of the world looks at us like we’re incompetent and dysfunctional,” Representative Gerry Connolly, a Democrat whose Northern Virginia district includes thousands of federal workers, told me. “How do you explain to our European allies that we can’t fund our government?”

    Connolly is in his eighth term and, like America’s allies, has seen this brinkmanship play out several times before. He told me that whereas earlier in the month he thought Congress had a 50–50 chance of keeping the government open, he now puts the odds of a shutdown at 90 percent. “Sometimes you feel like we’re going to avert this cliff, and then there are times that you go, ‘No, we’re going off this cliff,’” Connolly said. “This one feels like we’re going off the cliff.”

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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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  • Nothing Is Working for Kevin McCarthy

    Nothing Is Working for Kevin McCarthy

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    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.

    David Frum: No tears for Kevin McCarthy

    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.

    David A. Graham: Kevin McCarthy’s predicament is a warning

    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.

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    Russell Berman

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