Giving away more power did nothing for Kevin McCarthy, who lost his 7th House speaker ballot after further bowing to dissidents’ demands
Speaker #Speaker
Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s latest attempt at kowtowing to the 20 conservatives who’ve so far stymied his House speaker bid backfired Thursday as he lost the seventh ballot in three days following a long, fruitless night of ceding power to try and end a politically debilitating stalemate.
Having lost ground throughout the week, the California Republican and his allies closed out their terrible Wednesday (three failed ballots) by reaching out to anti-McCarthy activists like Reps. Chip Roy of Texas and repeat speaker challenger Byron Donalds of Florida to find a way out of the brutal leadership fight.
Republican Rep. Josh Gottheimer, who was once a thorn in House Democrats’ side, said the GOP could be in for chaos if talks could on their current trajectory.
“If they cave to the far-right extremists on the motion to vacate, and continue to give away the store on committees and rules, Congress could be forced into a gridlock nightmare,” Gottheimer of New Jersey told Politico.
McCarthy’s reward for all the late-night groveling?
The increasingly emboldened holdouts stuck behind Donalds for the second day in a row. McCarthy has lost two more votes as of Thursday afternoon. The biggest changes have been among the McCarthy agitators. Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida voted for former President Donald Trump twice. While Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Rep.-elect Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma threw their support behind Rep. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, the incoming chair of the influential Republican Study Committee.
Hern has thus far supported McCarthy, but previously hinted that he would consider taking a go at the top post.
“If I hear my name, it’s something I’ll have to think and pray about before deciding if it’s a job I’ll run for,” Hern told
The Frontier’s Reese Gorman.
Boebert twisted the knife on McCarthy further when she switched her support from Donalds to Hern by saying she was voting for “Kevin.”
McCarthy began the now months-long negotiations by opposing any effort to make it easier for rank-and-file lawmakers to topple a speaker.
Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas previously compared bringing back the procedural maneuver to governing “with a gun to your head.”
“There’s a reason [the motion to vacate] already got debated. You can’t govern with a gun to your head and that is what they are asking for. It makes us highly unstable, and it lays out the potential too for Democrats to take advantage of this and create absolute chaos,” Crenshaw told CNN in December.
According to multiple reports, McCarthy has now agreed to let a single House Republican wield that power. The archaic “motion to vacate,” which is essentially a no-confidence vote, has only ever been voted on once, but then-Rep. Mark Meadows introduction of it in 2015 set off a chain of events that led conservative rabble-rousers to push then-Speaker John Boehner into retirement.
Beyond the sword potentially falling on his head, McCarthy has also acquiesced to horsetrading that could alter the House’s average day. According to multiple reports, McCarthy will allow up to four of the holdouts to sit on the House Rules Committee, the panel that sets the procedural steps necessary for legislation to be considered on the House floor. Depending on lawmakers’ desires, the rules panel can set requirements that would effectively kill a bill with endless amendments or assure it safe passage.
All of these concessions are critical when it comes to what House lawmakers will actually have to do in the months ahead. Most notably, Congress will need to raise the debt ceiling later this year or risk a default that would send by US and international markets into a tailspin. Conservatives loathe raising the debt ceiling without significant spending cuts but their leverage is weakened by the reality of a Democratic Senate and White House. This almost certainly means McCarthy would need to rely on House Democrats, a scenario that has doomed past GOP speakers.