Why speaker fight is about more than McCarthy

As Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become speaker stretched into another day with no resolution in sight, the sharp divisions and general dysfunction on display among House Republicans have made one thing clear: This standoff is about much more than just Kevin McCarthy. 

The California Republican, of course, is a big part of it. His decision to press forward with his speaker bid, despite lacking the needed votes to secure the gavel, has made the first 48 hours of the 118th Congress among the most chaotic in modern history. Twenty Republicans have rejected his candidacy, despite various promised concessions – essentially paralyzing the House, which has been unable even to swear in new members, let alone move on to things like committee assignments and legislative business. 

But the messy game of political chicken is also a tidy window into the internal dynamics currently roiling the Republican Party. Following a disappointing midterm election, Republicans are deeply, publicly divided over their own identity, the possible return of former President Donald Trump, and what they actually hope to accomplish in governing. Whoever wins the gavel at this point, whether it be Mr. McCarthy or someone more palatable to his far-right Freedom Caucus detractors, will face the unenviable task of trying to hold together a party that has only cleaved further apart over the past decade. 

In many ways, the seeds of this week’s drama were planted years ago. Mr. McCarthy’s Republican predecessors, former Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, faced similar pushback from conservative lawmakers who wanted to fight anything that felt like “traditional Washington” – including their own leaders. “What they’re really interested in is chaos,” Mr. Boehner wrote in his memoir after leaving Congress. “They want to throw sand in the gears of the hated federal government until it fails and they’ve finally proved that it’s beyond saving.”

Those divisions took a new shape during the Trump years, as the polarizing president drove some Republicans out of the party while others subsumed their differences for the sake of unity. But the current speaker standoff represents more than the return of an old itch: All but three of the 20 McCarthy opponents were elected during or after the Trump presidency. Indeed, the chaos of Republicans’ first two days in the House majority is really a battle over which faction will rule their future. 

“I’m not surprised we had a deadlock today. But the question tomorrow is do you start to see cracks in the McCarthy coalition with people saying, ‘We need to find someone else; this isn’t going to happen’?” asks Matt Glassman, a Congress expert at Georgetown University. Mr. Glassman suspects that Republicans who have an interest in doing real committee work – who are more likely to be McCarthy supporters – will become more restless the longer the speakership vote continues to freeze any other congressional activity.

“If the House wasn’t organized for a month, I’m not sure a lot of these rebels would care. And that’s why they have so much leverage right now. They can hold out longer.”

Two days of voting ... so far

Going into the first vote on Tuesday, Mr. McCarthy seemed to be relying on a projection of sheer resolve, vowing to fight on for as many rounds as it took and hoping his opponents would eventually fall into line. He even took the step of moving into the speaker’s office over the weekend. 

On the first ballot, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries earned all 212 Democratic votes, while Mr. McCarthy won 203 from his own caucus – far short of the 218 he needed to win, with 19 GOP defections. Most of those Republican votes went for Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs, one of the leaders of the anti-McCarthy movement, while Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, a founding member of the Freedom Caucus and a McCarthy supporter, came in second with six votes. 

With no person receiving a majority, the clerk announced that the House would follow the precedent from the last time that happened: in 1923, when a small group of Republicans forced Massachusetts Rep. Frederick Huntington Gillett to face nine rounds of voting before he eventually won the speakership. There have been 13 other multiple-ballot speaker elections, all before the Civil War – the longest, in 1855, lasted two months, with 133 rounds of votes. 

On the second ballot, the 19 anti-McCarthy voters coalesced around Mr. Jordan, despite the congressman giving a speech in favor of Mr. McCarthy before the voting resumed. On the third ballot, Mr. Jordan picked up an additional vote, from Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, who had previously backed Mr. McCarthy.

When the House reconvened Wednesday for a fourth ballot, all 20 anti-McCarthy votes went to Representative Donalds, and Rep. Victoria Spartz voted present. A fifth ballot played out the same way. On the sixth, Rep. Kat Cammack of Florida proclaimed it “Groundhog Day,” as she nominated Mr. McCarthy, again. That vote concluded with the same result.

“This is what happens when a number of people get elected who would rather pontificate on TV than govern, which is what they were elected to do,” says GOP pollster Whit Ayres. “Their mindset will not change once there is a speaker,” he adds, “because they don’t view government as part of their job.” 

Mr. McCarthy’s opponents were unswayed by the urging of former President Trump, who on Wednesday put out a statement calling on all Republican members to “VOTE FOR KEVIN,” adding, “DO NOT TURN A GREAT TRIUMPH INTO A GIANT & EMBARRASSING DEFEAT.” 

The congressman from Bakersfield, whom Mr. Trump infamously referred to as “my Kevin,” was loyal throughout the Trump presidency. That ardent support briefly wavered after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, when Mr. McCarthy rebuked the president publicly and privately, but he later fell back in line.

McCarthy’s résumé

Over his eight-term tenure, Mr. McCarthy has held nearly every leadership position in Congress aside from speaker. He ran in 2015 after Mr. Boehner resigned, but withdrew from the race less than a month later and Mr. Ryan was elected. 

Long a skilled fundraiser, he brought in hundreds of millions of dollars for Republican candidates in 2022 – funds that the then-minority leader sometimes earmarked for primary candidates who were more likely to support him in his upcoming speakership bid. But Mr. McCarthy’s leadership PAC also donated money to 17 of his 20 detractors. Indeed, Mr. McCarthy has also been criticized for not playing “hardball” with some of these same members.

Some McCarthy opponents characterized their votes as a principled stand against a transactional politician whom they could not trust to hold the line on spending or any other conservative priorities. Rep. Chip Roy gave a floor speech to this effect on Tuesday, saying that his opposition to Mr. McCarthy was not personal, but that supporting his candidacy was equivalent to supporting “the swamp” of elites in Washington. His goal, he said, was to change the way Washington works.

Still, some veteran observers also detected a personal animus behind the standoff. 

“When it’s tight margins, all politics is personal,” says political strategist John Feehery, who served as press secretary to former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois. “There’s definitely going to be some personal animosity ... that is beyond the ideological and that complicates things.” 

To that point, Mr. McCarthy almost completely conceded to the list of his opponents’ demands, including agreeing that members would have at least 72 hours to read legislation before voting, establishing a committee to investigate the “weaponization of government” by the Biden administration, and a plan to address government spending. 

Mr. McCarthy even partially agreed to a longtime demand of far-right Republicans on the “motion to vacate.” For centuries, only one House member was needed to force a no-confidence vote against their speaker – a threat that led to the exit of former Republican Speaker Boehner but hasn’t been used in practice for more than a century. In 2019, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi changed that rule by requiring either a party’s majority or a party leader to initiate such a vote, but Mr. McCarthy’s opponents want to return to the old practice. Mr. McCarthy at first resisted but then proposed setting a “motion to vacate” bar at five members. 

Yet despite those concessions, his detractors have refused to budge – leading some Republicans to question their motives.

“It is a populist mindset that is ‘anti, anti, anti,’ but they aren’t for anything that they can articulate,” says Mr. Ayres. “It’s the same mindset that gave us Brexit: ‘We don’t have any idea about what we’re going to do about all the problems that would follow, but we are going to blow it up anyway.’” 

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has at times initiated her own kinds of chaos in the House and has been aligned with some of the McCarthy detractors on other issues, rebuked those colleagues to reporters Tuesday evening. 

“It’s not who we like and who we don’t like, because you want to know something? That is the failure of Republicans,” said Ms. Greene. “The Republicans are the party of never. It’s always ‘never’ when they don’t like somebody.” 

Who can hold out longer?

Whenever a new speaker is eventually chosen, he or she will have somewhat limited power given the divided Congress, with Democrats controlling the Senate.

But there will be issues of national consequence that Congress will be forced to address – such as the debt ceiling deadline this fall, an issue that will undoubtedly animate these Republican divides.

“If you can’t elect a speaker, how can you come up with a deal on the debt limit?” says Mr. Feehery. “I don’t think the expectations were too high that that much legislation will happen this session, but right now they are lowering expectations even further.”

Some members say this prolonged speakership battle has already hurt the next leader – and the party as a whole. 

“These shenanigans that they have pulled have certainly weakened us,” Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas tells the Monitor. “That seems obvious.” 

Others say whoever ultimately rises out of the ashes may have demonstrated they have the fortitude to succeed. Pennsylvania Rep. Matt Cartwright, a Democrat, says it all depends on how the gavel is ultimately won.

“I can think of two scenarios,” he says, standing a few feet from the House floor. “First, a charismatic natural leader emerges from the GOP conference and is able to attract [votes] by force of personality and goodwill. If that were to happen, that would be a very strong, capable, and effective speaker. The second possibility I’m thinking of is where one of the usual suspects makes all sorts of concessions to the left and the right and ends up quite hobbled.”

He notes that the last two Republican speakers, Mr. Boehner and Mr. Ryan, fell into the latter category. 

“And they hated being a speaker. Both of them.”