The end is near after Kevin McCarthy’s latest defeat in round eleven of the House speaker voting, but things may not be as bleak for him as that sounds.
On the dim side, he has, at least for now, lost another Republican vote: Ken Buck. Short on patience with the logjam, Buck has publicly flirted with abandoning McCarthy. Yet, if reports are to be believed, he has absented himself over a medical appointment. Buck will evidently be absent for at least part of tomorrow. That has taken McCarthy down to 200.
That’s not all, according to Politico’s Olivia Beavers. The mother of Kevin Hern (R., Okla.) has passed away. Hern remains a McCarthy supporter, even as Lauren Boebert (R., Colo.), of the hard-core Never McCarthy faction, has twice nominated him. (Like his fellow McCarthy supporter, Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), who was nominated in the early rounds, Hern is not seeking the job. The few votes he has drawn have not changed the bottom line, since those votes had previously gone to other candidates who have no prospect of becoming speaker — Jordan, Byron Donalds (R., Fla.), Andy Biggs (R., Ariz.), and Donald Trump.)
The funeral for Hern’s mother will be Saturday, so he’ll soon be leaving to be with his family. It’s not clear how much longer he could stay for additional rounds of voting. In addition, another McCarthy supporter, Wesley Hunt (R., Texas), also has a family situation — though a happy one: His wife has just given birth. He may also be absenting himself shortly.
Not to be coldly calculating in these circumstances, but although I’ve explained why McCarthy probably needs absences (or present votes) in order to prevail, they can’t be absences of his own supporters. He would need to grow his support, while absences or present votes eat into the support of other candidates.
If the three McCarthy supporters were unable to vote, that would cut the majority needed to win to 216. That is, the minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who has kept all 212 Democrats, would be inching closer to winning, although Republicans are adamant that that will never happen. This is undoubtedly why the chamber proceeded forthwith into a tenth round of voting, which McCarthy inevitably lost, followed by an eleventh, after which the House adjourned for the night. As Rich has observed, delay is more likely to hurt than help a struggling candidate. With any group of 435 people, life goes on with all its unpredictability.
On the other hand, C-SPAN relates — based on various other press reports — that behind-the-scenes negotiations are continuing and may be nearing a conclusion that will get McCarthy close to the margin he needs. Close . . . but not there. The reporting indicates that Chip Roy remains the lead negotiator for the dissenters, and the hope is to bring something in the neighborhood of a dozen Republicans into the McCarthy column. That would still leave him roughly a half-dozen votes shy of victory. The idea, apparently, is that if there are enough GOP votes to edge McCarthy ahead of Jeffries, and the remaining resistance is reduced to somewhere between, say, five and nine Never McCarthy diehards, then enormous pressure would be brought to bear on the diehards, in an effort to induce most if not all of them to vote “present.”
To repeat, if McCarthy is to become speaker, the deal will have to be sealed with present votes.