The Republican House Has Returned to Washington. Will Kevin McCarthy Lead It?

The Republican House is ready to take over. Nancy Pelosi has already moved out of the Speaker’s office and the GOP’s ever-so-small majority will be sworn in to the new Congress Tuesday. But even with just 24 hours left until his party assumes power, Kevin McCarthy is apparently still short of the votes he needs to take over the gavel.

A group of nine extremely right-wing House Republicans wrote Sunday that McCarthy still has not done enough to win over their support. His most recent overtures in what has been a weeks-long lobbying effort came “almost impossibly late” to address their concerns, read a letter signed by noted ultra conservatives Paul Gosar, Scott Perry, and Chip Roy, among others.

McCarthy can only afford to lose four votes from his own party Tuesday when the decision comes to the House floor. On Sunday, he made a series of key concessions to the right flank of his party, including promising the creation of a select committee to investigate the “weaponization” of the FBI and Department of Justice, and giving House Republicans the ability to oust him in a snap vote at any time. Still, the remaining holdouts said McCarthy’s offers were “insufficient” and “vague” (one of their requests appears to be that they essentially want it to be even easier to oust the McCarthy as Speaker). For his part, McCarthy told Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman that he was feeling “actually really good” Monday. 

Should McCarthy repeatedly fail to win the speaker vote Tuesday, Republicans will need to quickly coalesce around another leader. So far, no alternative candidates with enough support to win over the Republican House have stepped forward. Though, if Tuesday does indeed fall into chaos, all eyes will be on someone like Steve Scalise, the Louisiana Republican who has quickly risen in the party’s ranks and is seen as the apparent successor to McCarthy.

Despite all this leadership drama, the contours of a Republican-led House are already taking shape. McCarthy’s offers to Republicans, which came in the form of a House Rules package, give an excellent window into how any Republican speaker would govern the body. The rules proposal called for eliminating legislative staff’s right to collectively bargain, undoing a hard fought change last summer that ushered in a wave of unions in Democratic congressional offices. 

McCarthy also called for reinstating a rule that would allow Republicans to use spending bills to slash salaries of, or even fire, specific federal employees. As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent pointed out, this could have major implications for the next Congress given the GOP’s appetite for political investigations and its ire towards agencies like the FBI and IRS. While any attempts to actually defund positions or Donald Trump-related probes would likely fail in the Democratic-controlled Senate, these maneuvers could go a long way to sabotage already tricky government funding negotiations.

The drama begins tomorrow.