1859. That was the last time it took this long to elect a Speaker for the House of Representatives. Fifteen rounds of voting. Five days of chaos in which the 118th House of Representatives could not be invested. The fractures in the Republican Party are on full show to the world. Is this evidence of democracy at work or proof that Kevin McCarthy does not have the support of his party?
Where Has This Chaos Come From?
In the United States, the legislative body is split into two chambers: the Senate and the House of Representatives. The speaker is the most visible and influential figure in the House and sets the legislative agenda, controls lucrative committee assignments, and organizes when votes are held. The speaker is second in line to the Presidency. When the speaker is from a different political party than the president, they have the power to disrupt the president’s entire legislative agenda.
In the 2022 midterm election in November, the Republican Party gained an additional 9 seats in the House of Representatives, thereby flipping the overall control, but the majority stands razor-thin at just four seats (222-213).
Kevin McCarthy is a Republican serving as the U.S. representative for California’s 20th congressional district. Before being elected speaker on the 7th of January 2023, he served as House Minority Leader during the Democratic-led House from 2019-2023.
Throughout his time in Congress, McCarthy has navigated carefully along the internal ideological divide in his party. For instance, in 2020 McCarthy was one of 126 Republican members of the House to sign an amicus brief in support of the Texas V. Pennsylvania lawsuit in a botched effort to contest to results of the 2020 presidential election. Yet, McCarthy subsequently denied in March 2021 that he had supported former President Trump’s false claims of election fraud. After the attempted insurrection on January 6th 2021, McCarthy stated that Trump had incited the insurrection, but by January 28th, McCarthy had journeyed to Mar-a-Lago to repair relations with Trump and ‘kiss the ring’. This inconsistent pandering to the ultraconservative wing of the Republican Party has led some to see McCarthy as untrustworthy and without conviction.
This internal party tension came to a head when McCarthy entered the contest for US House Speaker with his razor-thin majority of 4 seats. In all, in the first round of voting, 20 Republicans voted to prevent his election.
All but one of the 20 ultraconservative Republicans who refused to vote for McCarthy in the first round of voting are believed to be affiliated with the Freedom Caucus according to analysis by the New York Times. This Caucus is considered to be the most conservative and farthest-right bloc within the House Republican Conference. The Caucus seeks to cut spending and shrink the government (‘drain the swamp’).Nonetheless, although the group boasts 53 House members, the majority voted for Kevin McCarthy. Indeed, some of the most high-profile ultraconservative members of the House, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, were vocal supporters of McCarthy. However, this is not due to any sense of loyalty. Indeed, the House voted to remove Greene from all her committee roles due to her controversial and conspiratorial statements in February 2021. It is clear that Greene’s support comes with an expectation of a political reward.
Some of the most vocal critics of McCarthy, such as Matt Gaetz of Florida and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, vowed publicly to never vote for McCarthy and instead demanded that he pull out of the race. Other disruptors, such as Dan Bishop of North Carolina and Byron Donalds of Florida, did so to extract critical concessions from the prospective speaker.
The chaos on the House Floor made headlines around the world, with shocking scenes of intraparty conflict. Alabama Republican Mike Rogers had to be restrained by a colleague after he appeared to attack Matt Gaetz while Matt Rosendale refused a call from ‘DT’ (Donald Trump) on Greene’s phone in a stunning visual rebuke of the former president. The authority of the declared candidate for the 2024 presidential election, Trump, was seriously called into question after one of his most vocal supporters in Congress, representative Boebert said on the House Floor that “Even having my favourite president call us and tell us we need to knock this off, I think it actually needs to be reversed” and that “The president needs to tell Kevin McCarthy that sir, you do not have the votes, and it’s time to withdraw”.
Two major concessions that McCarthy first ruled out and then eventually backed down and agreed to involve significantly weakening the role of the speaker and changing how bills are presented and voted upon on the House Floor. McCarthy has agreed to a provision that will allow for a single lawmaker to trigger a vote to oust the speaker. This mechanism existed under the tenure of Republican speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio and this vulnerability forced him to leave his office in 2015. It was the outgoing Democratic speaker Nancy Pelosi, who stepped down this year as the leader of the House Democratic Caucus, who removed this measure in 2019 when she became speaker again.
Moreover, any representative is now able to offer amendments to spending bills, which will likely complicate the passage of significant spending packages. In all, ultraconservative representatives have gained significant power in the House of Representatives by holding McCarthy politically hostage. It was only after offering all these concessions that McCarthy became speaker on Saturday 7th with 216 votes to the Democratic candidate Hakeem Jeffries’s 212 – six ‘never Kevin’ members reluctantly voted ‘present’ to reduce the majority threshold. Either way, the damage was done.
Why Has McCarthy’s Nightmare Only Just Begun?
Despite barely surviving this humiliating saga, Kevin McCarthy is still fighting for his political survival. While McCarthy is de jure the most powerful man in Congress, his position is extremely vulnerable. The most pressing issue he faces is the raising of the debt limit of the United States. Indeed, the Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, notified Congress that the U.S. is likely to reach its debt ceiling on Thursday 19th of January. This ‘debt limit’ is the cap on the total amount of money that the federal government is permitted to borrow via U.S. Treasury securities to satisfy its financial obligations. Yellen warned that she would have to begin employing “extraordinary measures” as she urged House Republicans to agree to lift the borrowing cap. Yellen was clear that failure to meet the government’s obligations would cause “irreparable harm to the U.S. economy”.
It is the ultraconservative Republicans that McCarthy has just empowered who will ultimately now have the final say on the spending cut concessions that they expect in return for preventing the collapse of the United States’ economy. Lawmakers will be keen to avoid a repeat of the self-inflicted 2011 debt-ceiling crisis in which negotiations between House Republicans and the Obama White House almost failed, leading to the most volatile week for financial markets since the 2008 crisis.
Perhaps the most concerning thing for McCarthy, however, is that there is no end in sight. McCarthy now finds himself in an incredibly tenuous position as speaker. He may find that the very title he has worked so desperately to gain may only last as long as those who never wanted him there in the first place decide he should stay.