The GOP Speaker Battle: What to Make of the Opposition to McCarthy

M y impression is that there is not a single explanation for the House Republican impasse over the speaker’s job. Although the 20 GOP representatives who have now voted against Kevin McCarthy six times are being described in the public commentary as if they were a single bloc, they are not. There is a small Never McCarthy subset, and a bigger group that would vote for McCarthy if they get concessions, of the sort described in John McCormack’s NR report. After two days of this frustrating process, I think the two groups need to be analyzed separately.

Let’s start with the Never McCarthy faction. This group may well defy my premise that there is not a single explanation for the impasse. After all, in the end, this is about simple math. There are 222 Republicans in the new Congress. For Kevin McCarthy to get to 218, he cannot afford to lose more than four. It is certainly possible that out of the 20 dissenters, there are at least five Never McCarthys. If that is the case, McCarthy won’t get to 218, period.

There are two ways of looking at that. Yes, there are five or more stubborn holdouts who will never vote for McCarthy. But there is also an equally mulish party conference that knows it can’t purge the five if it wants to be the majority, but that is nonetheless backing a guy who needs but can’t get the votes of the five.

In my opinion (as I argued yesterday), these dissenters are in the wrong: They had their chance to defeat McCarthy in the conference meeting, and they got drubbed (McCarthy defeated Andy Biggs, 188–31). In a functional organization, if you’ve had your opportunity and you lose, you accept defeat, rally behind the victor, and try to do better next time. Nevertheless, this is politics, not ethics. The way the system works, the GOP doesn’t get to count the Never McCarthy bloc in order to achieve the majority status that allows it to pick the speaker, but then discount the Never McCarthy bloc as if they were not elected members of Congress who get to vote for the speaker.

The bloc, even if it’s just five members, can stop McCarthy from being elected speaker. There are ways to punish them for their defiance — e.g., denying them committee assignments and supporting primary challenges against them. But if they are willing to run that risk, there is no way to stop them from preventing the election of their party’s choice. Is it unfair to McCarthy and the overwhelming majority that a comparative fringe can thwart them? Perhaps . . . but fairness is beside the point when a transaction is controlled by math. If the five or so won’t move — and why would they if the anti-McCarthy votes are increasing? — then either McCarthy has to withdraw voluntarily, or the party has to abandon him and pick someone who can get to 218.

Let’s move to the second, larger group of (so far) opponents, which I’d estimate at somewhere between three and 18 (or more) members. These Republicans are not implacably against McCarthy. Rather, as explained by their apparent leader, Chip Roy, they are willing to vote for McCarthy in exchange for concessions. They maintain that they have been negotiating in good faith, and that McCarthy and other members of leadership have known for a couple of months that their support was conditional on changes to the way Congress works — or, it would be more accurate to say, on changes that are necessary because Congress doesn’t work. This group has become more jaded because of the scandalous lame-duck budget deal that was shoved down the country’s throats by the Washington establishment — 4,000 pages of legislation that no one was given time to read, much less opportunity to debate or amend, in order to spend $1.7 trillion that a country $31 trillion in debt does not have.

With respect to this group, I’ve come around to the view that a point Jim Geraghty raised and I echoed doesn’t quite hit the bull’s-eye, to wit, the criticism that there is no point in opposing the party’s choice for speaker unless you have a viable alternative who can get to 218. Perhaps understandably, these people don’t believe they need a viable alternative candidate because they’re not that interested in whom the speaker will be; what animates them is what the rules of the House will be. And on that weighty matter, they have reason to believe that conservative voters will be with them even if party leadership is not, so it is a hill worth dying on.

I believe the changes they are pushing for would, by and large, be overwhelmingly popular with Republicans and conservatives outside the Washington establishment. John’s aforementioned report captures a good deal of this. The dissenters want, for example, to end the omnibus madness; to reestablish the practice of enacting single-subject bills and of debating and amending bills, including amendments to cut spending; to force votes on raising the debt ceiling and balancing the budget; and to restore the rule that permits a single lawmaker to move for a no-confidence vote that would vacate the speaker’s chair (a change that would induce a speaker to honor his commitments; currently, only leadership can make such a motion, and while McCarthy has offered to reduce it to five members, he hasn’t agreed to shrink it to one member). The dissenters argue that because the House is on a form of cruise control, it abandons its capacity to check the Senate and the executive, and this is perilous for the nation; they therefore owe it to the people they represent to use what leverage they have to restore order.

On this, I agree with them. If I have a criticism, it is that I believe they should be much more explicit in what they are, and have been, demanding. I’m all for the principle that the most fruitful negotiations are those that take place privately, where people can be more frank about what they require and where compromise is possible. But there comes a point when, if you believe you are being misunderstood or misrepresented, clear public statements of your position are essential.

This is where we come to Kevin McCarthy’s suitability for a job in which one needs to know when it’s time for a soft touch, rather than banging heads. If you’re dealing with a group of people who are open to voting for you even if they’ve opposed you, how you treat them can be make-or-break. If you handle things badly, you can push people into more implacable opposition. The group in question contends that McCarthy has been dishonest in framing them as if they were crassly trying to squeeze him for their own aggrandizement — for “certain positions,” “certain gavels,” and “certain budgets,” as he claimed publicly in the hours before the first vote he lost on Tuesday.

On that in particular, McCarthy’s opponents feel double-crossed. In their telling, there have been general negotiations, in private, regarding posts for conservatives on important committees, during the course of which McCarthy and his team asked them for concrete proposals. When they complied by making some suggestions, McCarthy then publicly portrayed the suggestions as unsolicited, extortionate demands. On top of that, the dissenters contend that a McCarthy ally, Armed Services Committee chairman Mike Rogers, threatened to strip committee assignments from members who opposed McCarthy’s speaker bid.

This is the much more serious danger, not only for McCarthy but for the Republican Party as an institution. It is one thing to deal with a group of people who are just irrationally opposed to McCarthy because they don’t like him personally. Such people would be easy to dismiss as unreasonable opportunists who are vying for TV time and fundraising dollars. It is quite another thing, though, to deal with a group that is pushing Republican leadership to commit to conservative policies. That is not so easily dismissed. Republican voters send conservatives to Capitol Hill precisely to address runaway spending, border security, and the progressive ways of Washington — e.g., omnibus monstrosities — that cement Democratic gains, fund the government and its wasteful spending at ever higher levels, and guarantee more of the same. If these are the matters that McCarthy is refusing to make commitments on, the question isn’t why the 20 dissenters are opposing him, but why the party is proposing him for speaker in the first place.

For myself, as long as we are having marathon debating and voting over the speaker’s post, I would like to hear the opposition explain, with specificity, exactly what concessions they have asked McCarthy for (including any requests that particular members get particular plum committee assignments). Then I’d like to hear McCarthy explain, item by item, whether he is willing to accede to the proposal, and if not why not.

What I fear is that we’d come away from that exercise wondering why House Republican leadership is resisting commitments to do what it led us to believe Republicans would do if elected into the majority.