Kevin McCarthy, the House Freedom Caucus, and the Republican Legacy of the Biden Deal: What Scalise will do if the Congress is stale on Tuesday?
It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult for the congressman who has been in leadership for over a decade. The right-wing House Freedom Caucus denied McCarthy the speakership in 2015, and McCarthy spent years courting the conservative wing. Even though a red wave never materialized, a group of conservatives saw an opportunity to extract demands from the other side of the aisle.
The Biden administration continues to rely on a Trump-era pandemic emergency rule, known as Title 42, that allows border authorities to turn migrants away at the US-Mexico border. In fiscal year 2022, amid mass migration in the Western hemisphere, US border encounters topped 2 million, according to US Customs and Border Protection data. More than a million people were turned away under Title 42.
McCarthy said that impeachment will not be used for political purposes. “That doesn’t mean if something rises to the occasion, it would not be used at any other time.”
McCarthy said that he is supportive of Ukraine. “I think there has to be accountability going forward. You always need to make sure resources are going where they’re needed. And make sure Congress, and the Senate, have the ability to debate it openly.”
A small band of Republican misfits have vowed to vote against Kevin McCarthy, the party’s nominee for speaker. There was only one Republican who could deny Mr. McCarthy the gavel. This would be a big event. Since the Civil War, the House has failed to elect a speaker on the first ballot only once.
But what is less clear: What Scalise will do if the race continues to drag out on Tuesday and goes to multiple ballots – and whether the Louisiana Republican will seek to maneuver his way into the speaker’s office if the stalemate persists. If McCarthy drops out of the race, Scalise is widely expected to run for the job, though sources close to the GOP leader say he plans to stay in the race as long as it takes to get the votes.
Are Mexicans willing to stay in Mexico and leave the country while they wait in the U.S.? Reply to McCarthy on the debt ceiling
“I think ‘Stay in Mexico’ you have to have right off the bat,” he said, referring to the controversial policy where migrants were forced to remain in Mexico while they wait for their immigration proceedings in the United States.
To help stem the flow of fentanyl coming across the border, McCarthy said “you first do a very frontal attack on China to stop the poison from coming,” and then “provide the resources that the border agents need” and “make sure that fentanyl anytime anybody who wants to move it, you can prosecute him for the death penalty.”
Most bills will not be able to pass in the Senate, but they will have to pass a bill to raise the debt limit at some point next year. McCarthy, however, signaled Republicans will demand spending cuts in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling, teeing up a risky fiscal showdown that could lead to a disastrous debt default.
If you give a person a higher limit, you should say to them that they need to change their behavior if they want to. He said it was true. “You shouldn’t just say, ‘Oh, I’m gonna let you keep spending money.’ No household should do that.”
McCarthy acknowledged Republicans were willing to raise the debt ceiling under Trump, but said the calculus is different now because Democrats spent trillions of dollars under Biden.
When pressed on whether he’s willing to risk a default by using the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip, McCarthy insisted that wouldn’t happen: “People talk about risking it. You don’t risk a default.”
Reply to McCarthy’s “Comment on ‘The Way the Republicans’ Moved to Subvert the Speaker’s Race'”
McCarthy has been trying hard to win her back, from promising her better committee assignments after Democrats kicked her off committees to having weekly meetings with her in his office.
McCarthy said no when asked if he has any restrictions on which committees Greene can serve. She wants a seat on the Oversight Committee, which will play a crucial role in GOP-led investigations.
She will have committees just like every other member. He said that as we are going through the steering committee, we will look at the requests of members. “She can put through the committees she wants, just like any other member in our conference that gets elected.”
Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene complained that 19 Republicans decided to blow up the Speaker’s race and that the party was trying to subvert its own goals. McCarthy is supported by Greene.
The Red Line: Where Do We Want to Go? An Orientation Meeting of the Freedom Caucus and Working with McCarthy on the Future Direction of the House
He asked the president to not speak about the other side because there was a difference of opinion. I believe leadership is important, and I think it starts with the president. It will begin with the speaker as well.
The speaker of the House needs to be decided by a discussion, according to House Freedom Caucus member Susie Biggs. We need to have a very frank discussion about where we want to go.
Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado said it was a “red line” for her, but not everyone in the Freedom Caucus is united on whether to make that a hard line.
The Freedom Caucus, a group of hardline members, are in Washington this week for their new member orientation, and they have begun to plan their strategy for the speaker’s race. With a slimmed-down majority, they plan to use their leverage to get more power in the GOP-led House.
The Republican Governance Group, a band of centrist-leaning lawmakers, huddled with McCarthy on Wednesday in order to get a sense of where his head is at, according to lawmakers who attended. During the meeting, they told McCarthy they would have his back and were committed to voting for him on multiple ballots if it comes to that. And they also passed out “O.K.” buttons – which stands for “Only Kevin” – in a joking nod to McCarthy’s opposition.
CNN has yet to project which party will have control of the House of Representatives, though as of Friday morning, CNN has projected that Republicans have 211 seats to Democrats’ 198.
The House Freedom Caucus: How Doug McCarthy and the Scalise-McCoinnell Team Won’t Discuss Small Issues
Norman said the group hopes to formalize a lengthier list of all the rules changes they are seeking. McCarthy has not said if he will delay the internal leadership elections next week.
The taxpayers that voted for the representatives deserve the credit, according to Norman.
Matthew Rosendale R-Mont.: He said in November he wouldn’t be supporting McCarthy. McCarthy is disliked for wanting to keep the status quo, by not giving members more power over legislation, such as allowing debate on the floor. Rosendale would only vote for McCarthy if there was a very bad situation.
Gaetz said that with a slim majority, the C team should not be started. To attract more people to our policies and ideas, we need our stars in a position to shine.
House and Senate Republicans are gearing up for a tense series of closed-door meetings this week as the GOP grapples with what went wrong in the midterms and decides the political fate of its current leaders, who are under fire following last week’s disappointing election results.
McConnell has been calling his colleagues over the last several days to shore up his support as his team plans to plow forward with leadership elections on Wednesday. They are planning to have a GOP air-clearing session on Tuesday.
Before Biggs’ announcement, McCarthy and House Republican Whip Steve Scalise, who is running to be majority leader, attempted to quell the tensions vibrating within the party on Monday. McCarthy and the House Freedom Caucus met with each other on Monday and the Speaker apologized to Gaetz for the private criticisms he had made of him.
Florida Senator Rick Scott, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, believes that the Senate leadership election shouldn’t be held this week.
A number of people called Scott to ask if he would run. “Here’s my focus, is we still got to win Georgia. I am not going to remove anything from the table.
The Campaign for a Better Future: Sen. Pat McConnell and the Repackaging of the Republican Congressional Committee in the Post-Wavelow Breakup
The National Republican Congressional Committee head, Tom Emmer, has been criticized by members of the Trump administration, despite the GOP’s disappointing fall in the polls. CNN has not yet projected which party will control the lower chamber, though Republicans appear on track to gain a narrow House majority. Emmer is in a race with Jim Banks for the job of House GOP whip.
They’ve been putting together an agenda and measuring the drapes. Nancy Pelosi said on CNN that they haven’t won it yet. “After the election is concluded, depending on who was in the majority, there’ll be judgments made within their own party, in our own parties, as to how we go forward.”
Behind the scenes, the finger pointing has already begun, and those conversations are likely to accelerate as the full House and Senate return to Washington this week for the first time since the midterm elections.
But others in the party have placed the blame squarely on Trump, whose hand-picked candidates failed in key Senate races that determined control of the Senate. McConnell’s group spent more than any other group in Senate races, even though Trump’s group only spent a tiny fraction of that.
Pat said that there was a correlation between big losses and candidates with the slogan, “Make America Great Again.” “I think my party needs to face the fact that if fealty to Donald Trump is the primary criteria for selecting candidates, we’re probably not going to do really well.”
McConnell and Scott have also been publicly at odds all election cycle when it comes to strategy, with McConnell sounding the alarm about candidate quality while Scott opted to take a hands-off approach in the primaries.
Even though he would have little chance of succeeding, Scott didn’t rule out a challenge to McConnell.
McCarthy told Hugh Hewitt that they were still continuing to talk even though they hadn’t moved. The difficulty here is that we are the only Republicans who are stopping the administration. We are the only ones who can move forward. But it would delay everything, getting committees up and running, being able to do the things that you know we need to get done from the very beginning.”
“Basic political physics says you can’t appease the moderates and HFC all at the same time,” one senior Republican told CNN. If you cross that fence, you need to hope it’s not barbed wire.
Candidate Forum and Elections in the House of Representatives: Dem Demography, Social Issues, and the Investigation of a Democratic Minority Leader
Trump has been making calls on McCarthy’s behalf over the last 24 hours in an attempt to break the conservative blockade against him, this person said, but his efforts have so far been fruitless.
More context: Trump has been eager to lock up public support from Republicans for his third presidential bid, with a separate GOP source saying he has been asking to see which GOP lawmakers have endorsed him in the media.
The agenda was released by the person in line to be the majority leader. He pledged the House would vote on measures to cancel the boost in funding to hire more IRS agents, and bills dealing with border security and abortion. The House committees cannot be formed, members cannot be sworn in to begin their term, and the rest of the business is stopped until the speaker is elected.
Pelosi was asked by CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” on Sunday whether she would make a decision on running for leadership before the party’s leadership elections.
Republicans are scheduled to hold a candidate forum on Monday evening, followed by leadership elections on Tuesday, November 15, according to a copy of the schedule shared with CNN.
House Democratic leadership elections have been announced for Wednesday, November 30. Voting will happen behind closed doors using an app.
A majority of those present and voting are required for a candidate to be elected to a position in Democratic leadership. If more than two candidates run and no one wins a majority, the candidate with the fewest votes after the first round of voting will be eliminated and voting will proceed to a second round. That process continues until one candidate wins a majority.
PT-Chiral Speaker Emmer, R-Colorado, will run in the Freedom Caucus on the House Way Toward Speakership
But if enough members of the Freedom Caucus withhold their support, it could imperil his speaker bid or force him to make deals to weaken the speakership, something he has long resisted.
Emmer told reporters Tuesday he still plans to run and that he doesn’t know if a smaller majority impacts his bid. But his pitch to members is similar to McCarthy’s, saying: “we delivered.”
Emmer is running against Reps. Jim Banks of Indiana, the Republican Study Committee chair, and Drew Ferguson of Georgia, the chief deputy Whip, for the post.
“Of course. Well, you know that I’m not asking anybody – people are campaigning, and that’s a beautiful thing,” the California Democrat told Bash. “And I’m not asking anyone for anything. My members are asking me to consider doing that. Let’s just get through the election.
The Collaborative Freedom Caucus of New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, John Neguse and Kevin McCarthy ”McCarthy”
Currently, Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer serves as the No. 2 House Democrat, in the role of House majority leader, and South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn serves in the role of House majority whip. House Democratic caucus chair is New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, who serves as assistant Speaker.
Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado, who currently serves as the co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, has announced his run for caucus chair to replace Jeffries who is term limited.
The race to lead the party’s campaign arm, DCCC chair, is starting to take shape up after the current chair Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York lost his reelection.
The race for the spot was announced on Friday by a California Democrat and others are also in the running.
Several of the members of the Freedom Caucus met with McCarthy in his office on Monday as they sought to secure concessions from him in exchange for their speaker votes.
Rep. Bob Good, who said McCarthy faces “an uphill climb” to the speakership, said they’ve asked McCarthy to bring to them his proposal for running the House.
Perry said that while their primary focus has been seeking rules changes that would empower individual members – and weaken the speaker – that is “not the limit” of their issues.
“We want to see this place change dramatically, to reflect the will of the people and to acknowledge how broken it is,” he said. “It’s incumbent upon anybody that wants to lead to kind of lay out their vision and how they would change their portion of it.”
Kevin McCarthy is hoping to pass a crucial test on Tuesday in his campaign to become House speaker despite an underwhelmed elections performance that launched a search for a challenger.
Idaho GOP Representative Mike Simpson said that he would support McCarthy for leader. Simpson said that he had done a good job.
Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene stated, “If we don’t unify behind Kevin McCarthy, we’re opening up the door for the Democrats to be able to recruit some of our Republicans.”
A source in the room said that Bob Good, a McCarthy critic, complained to the leadership candidate forum thatMcCarthy did not call to congratulate him on his primary win because the McCarthyaligned Super PAC opposed some pro-Trump candidates. McCarthy directed $2 million to Good for his race. Good had to be gaveled down in order to cut him off from speaking so they could move to the next question, the source said.
Two people with knowledge of the conversations said that McCarthy and his allies are trying to convince Henry Cuellar to switch parties in hopes of padding their slim margins. Cuellar flatly rejected the idea. (McCarthy’s spokesman said the GOP leader was not involved if these conversations took place and said this is not in any way part of their strategy for the majority or for his speakership bid.)
Republicans could shift their votes to a new leader if Mr. McCarthy continues to struggle.
At the private forum, Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer, the National Republican Congressional Committee chair, was pressed on his vote in support of a bill to codify same-sex marriage earlier this year, according to a source in the room. He said divisive social issues should not be on the House floor.
GOP sources said that McCarthys supporters were planning to vote for him on multiple ballots, and there were talks about whether the House should recess or allow the votes to keep rolling.
The Republican Governance Group leader said that the speaker’s fight has been holding them up. “I have people who say they don’t care if it is 500 times, they are voting for Kevin. There is no one else.”
If Kevin took his name out you would have good people running. Scalise would probably be the guy,” one GOP lawmaker said.
In a brief interview last month, Scalise said he wasn’t going to discuss speculation on what he might do if McCarthy doesn’t get the votes to become speaker.
He told CNN that they are focused on resolving the problem by January 3. There is a lot of discussion with the members who have expressed concerns.
Jordan is a high-ranking conservative and a founding member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, serving as its first chair from 2015 to 2017, and as its vice chair since 2017. He served as the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee over the last two years. He was set to become the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, but he is going to become chairman in the GOP-held House.
After leaving a meeting with McCarthy in his office Wednesday, Norman said he would vote for Andy for speaker if it were up to him. He later added: “All this is positive. We’re having good change, regardless of what happens. You will see more of it.
In addition to those five, a new group of seven Republican hardliners on Thursday laid out a list of conditions to earn their vote, although they did not specifically threaten to vote against McCarthy if their demands aren’t met.
It’s unclear, however, whether moderates will actually be willing to follow through with the same hardball tactics often deployed by the far right – especially if it could wind up backfiring for McCarthy. Opposing the rules package, for example, could upend any careful negotiations between McCarthy and his detractors, so GOP sources don’t believe McCarthy’s supporters would ultimately take it down.
The motion to vacate the chair was famously used to take down the autocratic Republican Speaker Joe Cannon of Illinois (the “last of the czars”) in 1910. Cannon had control over committees and assignments, floor procedure, and rules for debate. No one else has had this level of authority before.
David Joyce, an Ohio Republican, said the impact of a January was that people were sick and tired of the fighting. “And I know I get that wherever I go in my district is, ‘why can’t you guys just get things done?’”
McCarthy delayed the GOP elections for committee chairmanships as he tried to control speaker’s votes. It was rumored that one member of the race for gavel may retire early if he doesn’t win, this would make McCarthy’s math problem even harder. Buchanan categorically disagreed with the notion.
Some Democrats have said they would entertain the idea, including Rep. Henry Cuellar, a moderate Democrat from Texas who told CNN some of his GOP colleagues have approached him “informally” about it.
Joyce said that some members have tried to contact him about running, but he dismissed it. “At the end of the day, Kevin’s going to be the new speaker.”
Jeffries said that there are no behind-the-scenes discussions that he has had with Republicans about putting up an alternative candidate. He would not rule out a scenario where his caucus would help the speaker get the votes.
“Democrats are in the process of organizing the Democratic Conference,” Jeffries told CNN on Thursday. They are organizing the Republican Conference. On January 3 we should see what happens.
The retiring Representatives who voted to impeach Donald Trump were included in a possible consensus pick.
But that would require agreement from every single Democrat and the help of five Republicans – no easy feat. Upton said he has no plans to be in Washington that day, telling CNN: “I’ll be skiing.”
But Republican Rep. Bruce Westerman said this has happened before – nearly a decade ago in his state where minority Democrats in the Arkansas legislature joined forces with a handful of Republicans to elect a GOP speaker of their choice. Westerman made the case this week at a closed-door meeting.
Towards the Dream of a Better Congress: Westerman’s Call to Rep. Jack McCarthy after the 2018 December 12 Attack at the Capitol
Westerman was concerned about being able to form a congress and organize committees before January 3 and not being able to push the policy objectives he wants to push.
Westerman added that the discussion over changing House rules is good for the party. But he added: “I’m not really excited about any type of destructive movement.”
Mr. McCarthy has not shared a plan to his leadership team, which has been viewed as paranoia, if he does have one. Instead, he has been spotted in recent days around the Capitol and the Republican National Committee headquarters nearby with Jeff Miller, a Republican lobbyist who is among his closest confidants.
Mr. Norman wouldn’t talk about his call with Mr. Trump, described it as a private conversation. He said he was still undecided about whom he would support for speaker. Requests for comment were not answered by Mr. Crane.
When Nancy Pelosi in 2018 found herself about a dozen votes short of what she would need to secure the speaker’s gavel, she quietly picked off defectors, methodically cutting deals to capture exactly enough support to prevail. Ms. Pelosi won seven of the nine votes she got by agreeing to limits her tenure, eight of them by promising to put in place rules designed to foster more bipartisan legislating, and the final one by creating a subcommittee chairmanship for her.
The California Republican has already made a series of pledges in an effort to appease the right flank of his party. He traveled to the southern border and called on Alejandro N. Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, to resign or face potential impeachment proceedings. He told Ms. Greene, who had been stripped of her committee assignments because of violent and conspiratorial social media posts, that she would be a plum spot on the Oversight Committee.
He has threatened to investigate the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, promising to hold public hearings scrutinizing the security breakdowns that occurred. He has been quietly meeting with ultraconservative lawmakers in an effort to win them over. And on Monday night, he publicly encouraged his members to vote against the lame-duck spending bill to fund the government.
The Party of Greene: Trump vs. Fuentes in the House at the End of the 2016 Midterm Election Year-Ended Torsion
The tiny GOP House majority that takes over in January, after a disappointing midterm performance, would mean a fragile governing mandate for any party at any point in American history. A more comfortable majority would be threatened by the ideological struggle being waged by pro-Donald Trump extremists inside the party.
But it also reflected Greene’s growing personal power, after she broke with some radical GOP members and lined up to support McCarthy’s speakership. After coming to Congress as a fringe figure, and quickly losing her committee assignments over her past retweets of violent rhetoric against Democrats, Greene now promises to be one of the most prominent faces of the new GOP majority. She has the right to make comments like insurrectionist and offensive to many people without fear of censure from her party’s leader. It is shown that the influence of Trump on his followers in the House is strong even though his power is waning elsewhere.
McCarthy raised his voice and was animated as he teed off against his opponents and detailed concessions he has made, according to two sources. He said, “I’ve earned this job.”
This is one reason why the current year-end tussle over whether to fund the government for a full year – a bipartisan framework agreement for which was announced Tuesday night – or for just a few months is so critical since it could dump a fiscal crisis on the lap of a weak and easily manipulated new speaker next month.
McCarthy replied that she thought she was being facetious, when questioned by CNN about the latest inflammatory comments by Greene. His attitude was not a surprise; it was consistent with his attempts to rewrite the history of the worst attack on US democracy in modern times, for which he briefly said Trump bore responsibility.
When McCarthy didn’t criticize the ex-president for meeting with a white supremacist at the dinner that also featured Ye, he was playing the same game. In a histrionic performance at the White House after meeting Biden and other congressional leaders last month, the House Republican leader falsely claimed that Trump had condemned Fuentes four times, when he hadn’t done so once.
Roy and 12 other Republicans sent a letter to their GOP colleagues stating they would oppose and whip up opposition against any legislative priorities of those who voted for the government funding bill. McCarthy said in a reply that they agreed with it. Except no need to whip – when I’m Speaker, their bills will be dead on arrival in the House if this nearly $2T monstrosity is allowed to move forward over our objections and the will of the American people.”
The split not only augurs likely future tensions between Republicans in the House and McConnell, it raises the possibility that it will become politically more difficult for some Republican senators to vote for a spending deal now – especially as conservative media has taken up McCarthy’s line.
The idea to kick out a group of lawmakers who are against Kevin McCarthy is being considered by some members in the House GOP.
— The GOP civil war, which erupted with the Tea Party backlash to the Obama administration, is far from burned out. It was responsible for the departures of Republican House Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner and was put into overdrive by Trump. And as soon as the party had a sniff of power again, that strife burst into the open as radicals seek to destroy a party establishment that has already shifted far right to appease them.
Nancy Mace said people need to know we don’t need to double down on failed policies. “There’s a reason the midterms were the way that they were: people who are left of center, right of center were the most successful.”
One of the few Republicans who came up in opposition to McCarthy was also aware of the reality of a narrowly divided House.
He said that they are in a community of fate. The ship is not going to leave if five people are not in that direction. On impeachment, it is true on the speakership vote, on the budget, and on policy choices.
“Some of the questions that remain unanswered is what other deals are going to be cut, you know, what guarantees, what concessions are going to be made?” Womack asked. We need to be careful that we do not give a lot of leverage away.
Why does the House have a Dirty Idea? A Democratic Leader in Washington, D.C., Tells CNN “When the Congress Comes Together”
McCarthy held a conference-wide meeting on Wednesday to let his members discuss potential rules changes, even though there is still no resolution about the motion to leave the chair.
The private part of the process is still being emphasized by many members and they say that when the Congress begins, the conference will come together. In an effort to unify their colleagues behind McCarthy, the Republican Governance Group recently sent a letter.
Mario Diaz- Baldwin told CNN that it shouldn’t be a surprise that Republicans are having conversations.
Members from competing groups have had time to have fun. Burchett hosted a Christmas party in his office this week, where all corners of Capitol Hill came together, including some anti-McCarthy lawmakers. Amid the Mountain Dew fountain and “charcuterie plate” consisting of Cheez Whiz and Ritz crackers, Burchett at one point rode the skateboard of Gaetz’s wife.
The various groups agree on most things at the end of the day, said Rep. Moore, a Utah Republican who identifies himself as part of the governing wing.
“I’ve said this over and over again: there is not this, like, enormous amount of drama,” Moore told CNN. The members of the House Freedom Caucus agreed on some issues with me. And it’s an enormous amount.”
For now, a mutiny waged by ultraconservative lawmakers who for weeks have held fast to their vow to oppose Mr. McCarthy has paralyzed the chamber at the dawn of Republican rule, delaying the swearing in of hundreds of members of Congress, putting off any legislative work and exposing deep divisions that threatened to make the party’s House majority ungovernable.
McCarthy’s dire warning comes as the five GOP members – Gaetz, Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Bob Good of Virginia and Matt Rosendale of Montana – have warned they may vote as a bloc on January 3, meaning they’ll all vote the same way.
“Remember, this is a presidential year, so you only have so many months to really get out there and govern,” McCarthy said. “And you want to hit the ground running. If you don’t lose a quarter, you don’t start strong. You don’t get strong candidates. You don’t get more resources to be able to supply those candidates to get the message out.”
It wouldn’t be easy to take care of unfinished business this year and next year, especially when you have a narrow majority.
The silly season of a campaign is continuing. For most of us, that’s over after you get elected. But he’s running for speaker of the House, so the silliness is still evident,” he said.
Some of McCarthy’s fiercest critics, including Matt Gaetz of Florida and Ralph Norman of South Carolina, have told CNN they don’t think the five-person threshold is high enough.
A five-person threshold, however, may be too low for the moderate wing of the party, some of whom have privately suggested they would be willing to agree on a 50-person threshold.
Why the ‘devil is in the details, Senator George Santos, won’t be a Speaker of the House, nor will he
All of this will be discussed during a key conference call on Friday afternoon that McCarthy scheduled with the different ideological caucuses in the House GOP just four days away from the speaker’s vote.
The South Dakota Democrat said he would swallow the low threshold as long as it helps McCarthy win the speakership. The rules package that McCarthy was negotiating will be off the table if his critics try to sabotage his speakership bid.
“The ‘devil is in the details’ as far as threshold & other rule concessions,” Norman said. “Until the details are spelled out, in writing and sealed with social media posts, people will not move on votes.”
Dean Obeidhal is an attorney and a host on the “The Dean Obeidhal Show” on the radio. Follow him @DeanObeidallah@masto.ai. The opinions he gives in this commentary are his own. CNN has more opinion on it.
GOP Rep.-elect George Santos has been making headlines since December 19 — when The New York Times published its jaw-dropping article documenting his litany of false claims about his work experience, education and just about everything in between. (Santos later described these falsehoods as “resume embellishment” but admitted to misrepresenting his employment and educational background.)
Santos also claimed that his grandparents fled the horrors of the Holocaust as Ukrainian Jewish refugees from Belgium — only to have this version of his family background contradicted by a review of genealogy records. TheSantos campaign did not reply to the request for comment.
Adding to the firestorm are recent developments that federal and state authorities have launched criminal investigations into Santos over his finances and fabrications. When he first ran for Congress unsuccessfully in 2020, Santos reported he had no assets, yet somehow he was able to lend his 2022 campaign $700,000.
It’s likely McCarthy has declined to condemn Santos because the California lawmaker is so desperate to secure the 218 votes he needs to be elected speaker when the new Congress is sworn in on Tuesday. After the scandal broke,Santos deleted his pledge to support McCarthy in his speakership bid. McCarthy would need the support of other Republicans to have a chance of becoming speaker of the House.
McCarthy has also criticized the Biden administration’s border policy and played up accusations on Fox Business that the FBI worked to suppress news stories hurtful to Democrats.
McCarthy world was worried about looking weak and like he was bleeding support, so it was important to reverse the narrative, according to one of the sources.
Kevin McCarthy has said he’s interested in breaking the record of 1856-54, but there is a chance that the House failed to choose a speaker on the first ballot for the last time.
Proposal for a Reply to the Californian Congressional Ethics Committee Chairman, Mitch McConnell, after the Supermajority Voting Call
His net favorable rating was found to be 30 points higher among Republicans. That’s certainly not bad. (Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell has notoriously low ratings among Republicans.) The net favorability rating of +30 points is not good.
Either way, all of this GOP angst is a pretty decent consolation prize for Democrats after losing the House majority. They’re watching the Republican Party that can’t seem to get itself together after a historically bad election.
In a letter to his fellow Californian, he made his case for the speakership and offered other perks, including making sure ideological groups are better represented on committees.
Not long after Sunday’s call, a group of nine hardliners – who had outlined their demands to McCarthy last month – put out a new letter saying some of the concessions he announced are insufficient and making clear they’re still not sold on him, though they did say progress is being made.
There are missing specific commitments with respect to virtually all component of our entreaties and thus no way to measure if promises are kept or broken, the members wrote in the letter obtained by CNN.
Sources say that some moderates who think the motion to vacate will be used as cudgel over McCarthy’s head pushed back during the call.
Rep. Carlos Gimenez of Florida then repeated Diaz-Balart’s question, asking McCarthy to answer it. McCarthy’s response, according to sources, was that they have a couple days to close the deal, and they need to close.
When Speaker Nancy Pelosi changed the rules, Gaetz asked if he would back McCarthy if he agreed to bring the threshold down to a single lawmaker. Gaetz said that if McCarthy were to make that offer now, he would consider it.
The package released late Sunday includes giving five Republicans the power to call for a vote on deposing the sitting speaker, restoring the ability to zero out a government official’s salary, and creating a new select commit to investigative.
The rules package does not change the process for discharge petitions, which allows lawmakers to circumvent leadership and force a bill to the floor if it has the support of 218 lawmakers.
There are some notable items in the rules package, which include prohibiting remote hearings, allowing the House Ethics Committee to take ethic complaints from the public and removing staffer unionization efforts.
He attempted to sell his supporters on the speakership plan, even after he had offered a number of concessions, but his critics were still undecided about their support.
With just one day to go, a group of nine Republicans have made clear that they are not sold, despite McCarthy’s warning and even after he gave in to some of their demands, which he outlined during a Sunday evening conference call.
We are ready for a fight. We want to start out in our new majority in a way that doesn’t damage our chances but we can’t negotiate against the idea of giving us everything we ask for and not guarantee anything in return. The Republican Governance Group is made of centrists, according to a member of that group.
I give him a lot of credit. He’s brought everyone in and worked really hard to figure out a way forward. A way to make this place run better. I think that a lot of people don’t negotiate in good faith.
McCarthy worked the phone with both critics and supporters to find a consensus on rules changes that would win over holdouts.
The Campaign to Overthrow the Speaker: The Case for a Democratic Leader Who Can’t Trust the Legislative Body Without a House Rules Package
He can only afford to lose four votes on the House floor, and so far, at least five Republicans have vowed to oppose him, with nearly a dozen other GOP lawmakers publicly saying they’re still not there yet.
A group is still pushing for a single member to be allowed to call for a vote to overthrow the speaker, and they want a commitment that leadership won’t play in primaries.
In another strategic move, McCarthy postponed races for any contested committee chairs until after the speaker vote. He said it was to allow freshman members to have input in the process, but other members believe it was a way to insulate himself from potential criticism from members who end up losing their races.
In phone calls and text messages during the holidays, McCarthy’s defenders vowed to him and each other they wouldn’t let a handful of members control their conference.
McCarthy’s opposition, however, has also been working in tandem – and they are far more practiced in playing hardball, though the Freedom Caucus has been openly divided over McCarthy.
The committee in charge of administrative matters sent a letter last week outlining the practical implications and pitfalls of a drawn-out speaker’s fight. The memo shows that committees won’t be able to pay staff without an approved House Rules package.
The same memo, which was obtained by CNN, warned that student loan payments for committee staffers wouldn’t be disbursed if the rules package wasn’t adopted by January.
It’s just one of the many ways a battle over the next speaker could paralyze the House and the Republican majority from operating efficiently in their opening days with some of the harshest penalties falling on rank-and-file staffers.
Even with the race far from settled, boxes from McCarthy’s office were spotted by CNN being moved into the speaker’s suite last week – a standard protocol, but a sign he’s committed to seeking the job.
The member said of the ongoing standoff between pro- and anti-McCarthy groups that both sides have ripped the steering wheel off the dashboard and are going pedal to the metal.
The House will continue to be paralyzed until this standoff is resolved. And Republican allies of McCarthy are beginning to fear that the House GOP leader may not be able to pull off his gamble for speaker if the fight goes much longer.
“Steve is trying to be very supportive” said Rep. Don Bacon, a McCarthy supporter. He has been very open about his support for McCarthy. I think someday he wants to be speaker He has to be tactful.
Censorship, transparency and the problem of the House Majority Causal Committee: a congressional perspective on the case of McCarthy and the KMC
But some of the hardliners are not satisfied, pushing to lower the threshold to just a single member who can call for such a vote – something that other House Republicans fear would be a recipe for chaos and have vowed they wouldn’t support.
“I think people will become more set against rule and operational changes if it becomes clear that no matter what, KMC won’t get their votes,” said another GOP member, referring to McCarthy.
Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz said that he would have to agree to the same concessions as McCarthy. For anyone, the McCarthy concessions are a baseline.
Good promised a new candidate would emerge on Tuesday and should not be hurried to make a bad decision. He declined to specify the member and also declined to comment about Scalise.
A congressman from South Dakota said that the Republicans in favor of a more transparent conference are now getting behind a candidate they plan to ambush at the start of the new Congress.
“I think members are growing increasingly frustrated with the intransigence of some of the holdouts,” Johnson told CNN, calling some of them “chaos agents who are trying to cause trouble.”
One Republican lawmaker stated that the people shouldn’t believe that this is a noble cause. “No one should believe that this is anything other than self aggrandizement. They are trying to push procedures that don’t interest anyone outside of Washington, just to get more power.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/02/politics/mccarthy-floor-fight-steve-scalise/index.html
The Oklahoma Senators Who Never Change: Tim Jordan’s 1923 Floor Fighting Campaign to Unite Republicans and the Democratic-Republican Correspondence
Mullin, an Oklahoma Republican who was elected to the US Senate, met with McCarthy in his office. Mullin, who has been helping to lobby House members to back McCarthy, said he and others have been encouraging McCarthy with a simple message: “Stay put.”
“nothing changes when nothing changes” was the words of a leading McCarthy critic who signed onto a letter with nine other Republicans. He mentioned the letter that states, “the times call for a radical departure from the status quo not a continuation of the past and ongoing Republican failures.”
After all, the speaker of the House, in addition to conducting the House’s business and being a key cog in the process of passing legislation important to people, is also a leader in party messaging.
McCarthy or someone else will be the one who will figure this out and unite the Republicans. Nine votes were taken for a floor fight in 1923. Before the Civil War, the votes could drag on for months.
Jordan, in an effort to show party unity, nominated GOP leader Kevin McCarthy in the second round of voting. The differences between Republicans and Democrats are not as large as those between Republican and Democratic legislators, according to Jordan.
A close ally of Donald Trump was Jordan. After Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election and Trump refused to concede while making claims of election fraud, Jordan supported lawsuits to invalidate the election results and voted not to certify the Electoral College results.
A Nightmare in McCarthy’s Life: A Story of Resurrection, Chaos, and the Taliban 20, a Tracer of the Relativistic Democracy
Even though one senior GOP source told CNN that McCarthy would never back down, McCarthy was weakened by each roll call. Some GOP members are talking about the rebels as the chaos caucus or The Taliban 20.
To be elected speaker, a candidate needs to win a majority of members who vote for a specific person on the House floor. If there are no member who skips the vote, there is 218 votes.
A group of conservatives who had distrustful of McCarthy were given a lot of room to make demands after the razor-thin majority for the Republicans in the November midterms did not cause a red wave.
What has unfolded over the last two months is an all-out scramble for the speakership, which has taken the form of strategy sessions with close allies on and off Capitol Hill, intense negotiations over rules changes and non-stop phone calls with members.
A daylong debacle, in which McCarthy appeared to have no strategy other than a beat-the-head-against-a-brick-wall approach, ended with the House in an absurd limbo. The family members who traveled to Washington to watch their new lawmakers were bored and disappointed. Even though there’s no sign that the stalemate will break, the House will be back in session on Wednesday at noon.
It’s a story of how 20 Republican lawmakers, despite obtaining most of their demands from Rep. Kevin McCarthy, simply will not support the man. The first two votes had 19 holdouts, but grew to 20 in the third vote.
But on Wednesday, after the House reconvened, Mr. McCarthy lost a fourth ballot on the same margins as the third, with 20 defectors this time throwing their support behind Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, the first Black man ever to be nominated by Republicans for the job. Representative Victoria Spartz, who had previously supported Mr. McCarthy, voted present, denying him a badly needed vote but limiting him less than if she had voted for another lawmaker.
The original 19 people were supported by Donalds, who in turn supported Jordan.
“The irony of what we’re witnessing here today is the fact that Jim Jordan was always the ringleader of these types of rebellions and he’s trained these guys well,” said the CNN analyst, moderate Republican and former Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania.
“Now he ostensibly is trying to get these guys to back off and they won’t. Dent said that this is the most odd thing he has ever seen on the House floor because he was a rebel and couldn’t control them.
Gaetz stood in front of McCarthy and accused him of selling himself in the race for speaker, in the second round of voting.
The Kentucky Bridge Project: Connecting Kentucky and Ohio with the Rest-Closed Spending Funds of the BSPence Bridge and the Inflationary Problem
If you think that, this is a sideshow that will make raising the debt ceiling hard for the ultimate speaker to do because of the economic crisis.
“The Republicans have to at some point figure out what are we going to do here,” said the CNN anchor John King. “We are supposed to be the governing party of the House of Representatives and we cannot come to a consensus on who should lead us. Don’t even think about immigration, what we are going to do about inflation and America’s place in the world.
That is on hold until a leader is found. House Republicans are wrestling with how to convince their members who don’t like the system that it should work and there will be a highly scripted photo opportunity on Wednesday.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who just became the longest-serving Senate party leader in history, will appear with his state’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, and the country’s Democratic president, Joe Biden, to announce new funding to upgrade the Brent Spence Bridge, which connects Kentucky to Ohio. There will be an Ohio Republican, Gov. Mike DeWine, and an Ohio Democrat, Sen. Sherrod Brown, also on hand.
CNN reported on Tuesday that Beshear told Kate that the bridge project will help the region’s economy and that a key piece of infrastructure with $1.6 billion passed through Capitol Hill in 2021, in the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
It’s a good statement that there is nothing partisan about the bridge, Beshear said. He later added the bipartisan quintet would “announce that we’ve done the right thing for our people. It is pretty refreshing.”
He will have to find a way to work with whoever Republicans decide to be their speaker but also with the legislators who want to keep the government running.
Two years after the master of political mayhem, ex-President Donald Trump, stormed out of Washington in disgrace, Republicans have finally won back some power.
Democrats should have been mourning the loss of their majority in the 116th Congress, but they were overjoyed at the GOP circus that opened the 118th.
First Majority Voting: The Plight of a Relatively Abrupt Congress and the Case Against a Democratic Ex-President
McCarthy didn’t think they would get any more productive by continuing on the day. He said he wouldn’t be leaving the race.
He implied that he can get some members to vote present, which would lower the threshold he would need, as it is not going to happen.
“Maybe the right person for the speaker of the House isn’t someone who has sold shares in himself for more than a decade to get it,” Gaetz said on the floor on Tuesday in a cutting jab at McCarthy, who sat a few feet away.
Former Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington state – who voted to impeach Trump, lost a primary to a rival backed by the ex-president, who then went on to lose the general election to a Democrat – told CNN’s Jake Tapper Tuesday the rebels were in it for themselves.
McCarthy might have been the only person who was to blame. He connected his party’s campaign irrevocably to Trump’s reputation after he embraced him after initially critical of him. McCarthy was left with a smaller and more unworkable House majority due to the voters backlash against the ex-president.
Democrats are already making political capital out of it, knowing that Republicans should not be in power for too long and should be removed at the first opportunity. “I just watched House Republicans plunge into utter chaos on the House floor,” Jeffries told Democratic donors in a fundraising email. This changes everything for the Democrats. We have a huge chance to use what we have to make a difference.
“This is a prelude of what’s going to come and the coming attraction when we get up to any big budget matter or the debt ceiling or anything else,” Rep. David Joyce of Ohio, a McCarthy-backer, said on CNN on Wednesday. 10% of our conference will be pushed and shoved by a crowd, and they will continue to push and shove what they think is the agenda.
None has been enough. This was the first time in 100 years that voting has gone beyond one round after three ballots, when Congress adjourned without McCarthy as speaker.
In 2010, Republicans rode the Tea Party wave to win control of the House, but the cost was steep. Fights over raising the debt ceiling – something that had been routine and protected U.S. credit – and five years of an inability to get much of anything done, even with each other, frustrated John Boehner as speaker.
Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable? McCarthy spoke on Fox News. “But we put together a Benghazi Special Committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.”
The ostensible reason for the GOP-led Benghazi investigation was to find out what happened in an attack on an American embassy in Libya, where four people died – not to hurt Clinton. Clinton, who was secretary of state in the Obama administration, was the clear front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.
Why wasn’t McCarthy so cynical when he didn’t break his pledge to reform Congress, or what did he and his allies want?
That’s why McCarthy didn’t believe he could stick to his criticism of Trump after Jan. 6, heading down to Trump’s Florida home just weeks after the insurrection and posed for a photo with him.
Trump maintained his power with the base and endorsed scores of candidates in the 2022 midterms. They did well in primaries, but many lost in competitive swing districts.
He threatened the defectors with stripping them of committee assignments at the eleventh hour, in order to play a tough guy. That appeared to have the reverse effect of what he and his allies were intending.
The question now is – not just for McCarthy but for anyone with ambition and has to make choices between what they believe and what they’re willing to compromise – was it worth it?
At the end of the day, the job of speaker isn’t supposed to be about one person’s ambition but what they can get done to fix problems in the country, and this is taking place at a time when people are already cynical about the intentions of politicians in Washington and what they are trying to accomplish.
For all of the talk in Washington of “Dems in disarray,” there is another example of chaos surrounding House Republicans. With just a four-seat majority, how can they govern if they’re going through all this just to pick a leader?
McCarthy and his allies are holding active discussions about adjourning the House until Thursday – but it is uncertain if that would be possible because they may not have the votes to pull it off, according to multiple sources.
Democratic sources say they would oppose a motion to adjourn because voting to adjourn would require 218 votes. Plus some Republicans would likely vote against it as well.
How Did President Donald Trump Bounce? The Story of the First Five Years of the McCarthy Legislative Campaign on the House Floor, Revisited
The same member said a statement made by former President Donald Trump on Wednesday morning that reaffirmed his support for McCarthy and urged Republicans to back him was basically a wash – while it was more helpful than if he had blasted McCarthy, it wasn’t expected to move the needle.
Another member warned that after Tuesday, it’s clear that the opposition to McCarthy is personal – meaning there may be little that he can do to turn the tide at this point.
I don’t agree with Trump. This is our fight. This isn’t Trump’s – and I support Trump. I don’t agree with it. Kevin is the one who’s going to censor him,” Norman said. In another sign that Trump’s spell may have broken, Boebert said that her “favorite president” had called rebels opposing McCarthy and told them to knock it off.
Gaetz is a long time ally of Trump and his refusal to bow to Trumps desire for a McCarthy speakership raises questions about the former president’s decreasing influence over Republicans.
Editor’s Note: Thomas Balcerski is the Ray Allen Billington Visiting Professor of U.S. History at Occidental College and a Long-term Fellow at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. He is the author of a book about James Buchanan and William Rufus King. He tweets about presidential history @tbalcerski. The opinions in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
The future of slavery was the most divisive issue in the nation prior to the Civil War. In 1849, the Democrats had a greater number of votes in the House than the Whigs. However, nine members of the anti-slavery Free Soil Party disrupted the balance of power and extended the speaker balloting for more than 20 days. The House decided to adopt a plurality rule to end the stalemate. After 63 rounds of balloting, the pro-Union Democrat Howell Cobb of Georgia was elected speaker.
The outcome of either the compromise of selecting a new candidate for speaker or the compromise of persuading the splinter faction to relent was usually the result. We may once again be replicating one of the scenarios if history is to be believed.
The speaker race was the most serious challenge yet. a compromise candidate was found by the lack of Democrats and former Whigs that were willing to reach a majority. William Aiken, Jr., of South Carolina, was the Democratic challenger and he was defeated by Banks after 133 ballots were held over two months. Instead, Banks ultimately defeated Aiken on February 2, 1856.
The House of Representatives was divided again four years later and a majority of Republicans wanted to place John Sherman in the chair. The Republicans tried, but failed, to use the plurality rule to end the debate. When a clear majority still had not emerged, Sherman stepped aside and urged Republicans to support Rep. William Pennington, a freshman congressman from New Jersey. After 44 ballots spanning eight weeks, Pennington was elected speaker.
There was no tolerance for the Republicans. In 1925, after several progressive Republicans refused to support then-President Calvin Coolidge’s reelection bid, Longworth, who was then speaker, punished them by stripping them of their seniority within House committees. For all intents and purposes, the Republican Party had been purged of its liberal faction.
That’s why the rejection of McCarthy on the first ballot and beyond was such riveting news. It left open the job that stands second in the line of presidential succession (right after the vice president). It left undone the swearing in of the new House. It meant that the newly elected House Republican majority would now have to work with the Democrats in the Congress.
They’re sort of gaining support. The 21th Republican member-elect to not support McCarthy was Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana and she voted present rather than voting for anyone.
“I think you need to break the 20 down,” the conservative Republican Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado said on CNN on Wednesday. Buck made it clear that patience with the votes is waning and that he was a possible defector before this week.
He thinks McCarthy could use his deputy, Steve Scalise, to speak to some of the anti-McCarthy Republicans.
Others would like specific changes. “There are some of the others … who want changes in the rules and there are some others who care about policy,” Buck said. If Steve gets those three things, then he will be able to take the speakership.
Some would like to have things shut down. The South Carolina Republican said a non-negotiable was if McCarthy was willing to shut the government down rather than raise the debt ceiling. That suggests the kind of precarious future funding fights will pose to the economy.
These lawmakers want painful cuts now to end deficit spending. If the US was to default, it would be bad for the economy, according to economists. A government shutdown would be less severe, but they have been unpopular when lawmakers forced them in recent years.
The Train of the Swampland: Stop the train of the swamp, and don’t forget to tell Kevin McCarthy when you’re done with it
“We are showing the American people that this process works,” said the Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Scott Perry in rising to nominate Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida as an alternative to McCarthy. That it’s been 100 years since there was such a floor fight is a feature of the moment, Perry argued. “We have said we are not going to take any more of Washington being broken.”
Bishop said that he believes it is democracy in action. “If you’re not satisfied with Washington as it is, then you can’t be satisfied with doing the same thing as we start this Congress, I’m convinced.”
Bishop said that there isn’t any specific agenda that Kevin McCarthy is going to go to the mat for. This has been that way for 14 years, with all due respect to him.
Boebert said that the campaign tactics of getting people to turn against us should be stopped. “I think it actually needs to be reversed. The president needs to tell Kevin McCarthy that, sir, you do not have the votes and it’s time to withdraw.”
If you listen to or watch Tucker Carlson on Fox, you will hear people argue that Republicans and Democrats aren’t that different. The funding bills that are signed into law are often blasted by Carlson. There’s some of that in the opposition to McCarthy, who has been part of the GOP leadership for years.
I am holding the line because I think we need to operate differently, and that is not a partisan statement. It’s just something that I believe,” Rep. Chip Roy of Texas told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday.
Roy said he’s among the fiscal conservatives who want to “stop the train of the swamp,” which he said is made up of Republicans and Democrats, “power brokers and the defense industrial complex.” He argued that the special interests come together to push government funding bills like the $1.7 trillion version passed last month to fund the government through most of 2023.
Roy and Donalds are members of the same group that wants a single member to have the power to force a vote on whether to remove a speaker.
The appropriations process does not allow for open amendments and we can’t do anything about it. She said that that needs to stop.
The Sensitive House of Representatives: Kevin McCarthy after the fourth-ballot GOP endorsement failed to break the partisan stalemate
McCarthy did offer concessions to the hardliners, including a pledge to give legislators 72 hours to read a bill before it goes to the floor for a vote.
He also agreed to allow just five Republicans to force a vote to remove the speaker instead of the current requirement that a majority of Republicans join the call.
One complication with finding a McCarthy replacement is that someone like Scalise might realize how much more difficult McCarthy’s concessions will make the job.
When CNN’s Manu Raju and Veronica Stracqualursi asked Donalds, who has been getting votes from the hardliners Wednesday, if he wanted the job, he said, “Nah, not really.”
The problem, however, is that Congress has resorted to omnibus bills in recent years for a reason – it has been so polarized and dysfunctional that the only way to get any bill to the president’s desk is to cram all the spending in together.
Republican Kevin McCarthy spoke to reporters Tuesday evening in the Capitol. He said he is staying until they win.
After Donald J. Trump made a direct appeal to Republicans to vote for him in the House of Representatives, the fourth-ballot vote signaled they were not going to break the stalemate.
The endorsement failed to move a single defector in Mr. McCarthy’s direction. With a fifth vote underway, the Republican leader and his allies still were working behind closed doors trying to secure the votes.
For generations, every member of the same party was required to vote for a nominee for speaker. There were no stray votes cast for anyone other than the two major party nominees for 50 years after World War II.
Gillett’s House Leadership Team and the 1918 November Electoral Gap: The 1929–1923 Fiasco and the 1929 November Spectacular Event
Still, a distant mirror can show us things, and even across 10 decades of profound change, there are parallels between this week’s meltdown at the outset of the 118th Congress and the fiasco that occurred in the 68th.
But in both cases, the results of the latest November elections had been somewhere between disappointing and devastating, leaving the party clinging to majority control. That made internal disputes over rules and procedures more difficult, and gave committee chairs more power.
The nominee himself had been controversial in neither case. Each had risen through the ranks, a survivor of earlier leadership upheavals that were compatible with the party’s broad rank and file.
These men were represented by the establishment of a party with hostility since they reached the top of the leadership ladder. They were the embodiment of the faction’s grievances.
The oldest member of the House was 72 years old, and he had a Harvard law degree. He had first grasped the big gavel years earlier, after Republicans seized the House majority in the 1918 midterms the month World War I ended.
After two years, Gillett and the party rode to a huge majority in the same wave that brought Warren G. Harding to the White House. Washington dominated the White House and Congress in the 1990s and the party of Lincoln was gaining ground throughout the country.
The brief era of the Harding administration halted the party’s momentum. The economy was still recovering from a postwar recession and there were many strikes by coal miners and railroad workers.
The House had also brought criticism of itself in 1921 and 1922 by refusing to accept the Census of 1920. In that study, it was revealed that more people were living in urban areas than in rural areas.
The GOP lost 75 House seats and 6 Senate seats in 1922, due to the controversy and swing of the political mood. It was worse that Barack Obama had experienced than any other president of the past four decades.
Gillett’s House leadership team did not convene its first session until late that autumn in 1923, despite the Congress being in office as of March 1923. Harding had died suddenly in August of that year and was succeeded by his vice president, Calvin Coolidge. The vote for speaker was supposed to start in December.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/04/1146841362/house-speaker-vote-struggle-100-years-explainer
On the First-Right Speaker’s Fate: The Case of Joe Cannon and the Democratic Legislator’s House of Representatives Joseph Gillett
Gillett found it more difficult to maintain order within his party because of the small majority. McCarthy got more votes than him on the first ballot.
The New York Times labeled 17 House members “progressives”, who would cast their first-round speaker votes for Cooper. He was a former prosecuting attorney from Racine who worked in southeastern Wisconsin from 1893 to 1919 and again from 1921. Cooper only lost once over his career due to his opposition to U.S. entry into World War I.
Cooper, whose parents were involved in the Underground Railroad, was an ally of Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette. When Cooper was opposing Gillett in the House, LaFollette was conducting a smaller-scale revolt against the GOP leaders in the Senate.
Getting Gillett over the finish line took a total of nine ballots, and in the end Cooper’s backers simply voted “present.” The speaker was reelected with just 215 votes. (That was a majority because by then only 414 members were present and voting for a name.)
They also wanted a rule change that would facilitate the use of a rather obscure item of House floor procedure known as “a motion to vacate the chair.” The provision lets a sufficient number of members to demand a vote on the presiding officer, that’s a threat to replace the speaker.
At the height of his power, Cannon not only chose all the committee chairs, he chose all the members of all the committees. He also made himself chairman of the Rules Committee, determined which bills and amendments would be allowed on the floor and which members would be permitted to speak.
Someone asked a congressman for a copy of the rules in that era, but was sent an envelope with a picture of Joe Cannon.
When Cannon’s high-handed practices had become intolerable, a coalition of Democratic members and Republican progressives put together the bipartisan majority needed to “vacate the chair.” Cannon was not the Speaker but he was stripped of most of his powers. He returned to serve as a rank-and-file Republican after he was defeated in the 1912 election.
The Cannon House Office Building, originally just the House Office Building, was the first such structure on the Hill to bear a person’s name. It stands as a monument both to the preeminence of the speakership and the impermanence of power.
Chaos and Desperation in the California House of Rep. Kinzinger, a former Senator from Los Angeles, California
The California Republican caved in to pressure from the right-wing radicals who blocked his bid for power in six humiliating votes.
The moves which have not been agreed upon could make him a hostage of his party’s extreme voices and also cause the chaotic instability of the tiny new Republican majority. And a neutered speaker unable to force his members into hard votes could have grave implications with Congress facing critical decisions later this year, including a need to raise the government’s borrowing limit – a duty that if not fulfilled could pitch the US and global economies into crisis.
The proposals surfaced after the new House majority finally agreed on something Wednesday: following another day of feuding and insults, they narrowly voted to adjourn their futile search for a speaker until Thursday.
The cheer was audible when the vote closed, and it reflected the risible state of the House GOP management, which is unable to perform the only task it is currently able to do, choosing a leader.
“The country or Kevin McCarthy. Which should have more weight?” said recently retired GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who is now a CNN political analyst.
The right-wing extremists on the other side hold their party, the House and the country hostage with no clear objective other than to destroy governance itself. Chaos is the point for them.
There was a hint of hope for the Californian lawmaker as humiliation piled on and the anti-McCarthy block began to splinter.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/05/politics/mccarthy-desperation-speaker-analysis/index.html
Progress in the House of Representatives: What Will it Tell Us About the Reforms of the Republican Left-Left Agenda and How It Will Be Done Right?
Several lawmakers who want to change the way the House works reported progress in talks with McCarthy. If the talks take place, Texas Rep. Roy predicted he could get over 10 votes.
The question is whether another day of pointless voting on Thursday will prompt members to consider whether he should give up his seat for a more trusted colleague. Many Republicans are complaining that their hopes for quickly wielding power and throttling the Biden administration have been dashed.
The battle for the speaker’s gavelm may become clearer as a result of another Day in the House with no new speaker. It also provided insight into the new balance of power in Washington and how Congress will work (or won’t) in the months ahead.
If it is the latter it isn’t constructive because it should be about the process and not the personality. He told CNN that he doesn’t know the number of people in either camp.
In impassioned floor speeches and interviews, Roy has argued that the House is finally having consequential debates. Under recent Democratic and Republican speakers, normal order and the sequencing of new laws through the committee process and debates on the House floor have been curtailed as severe partisanship and gridlock causes leaders to enforce ruthless party-line discipline.
Some Republicans accuse their colleagues of grandstanding and of using the spotlight to raise campaign cash and to drum up appearances on conservative media. The anti- establishment wing of the GOP wants to eliminate government itself, and this is one way they are trying to do that.
This politics of destruction was sent into overdrive by ex-President Donald Trump, with his vows to drain the Washington “swamp.” And it was expressed most eloquently by Steve Bannon at the start of the Trump administration as “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” The problem for McCarthy – who has cozied up to Trump and often appeased the zealots – is how to negotiate with someone whose main aspiration is chaos.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/05/politics/mccarthy-desperation-speaker-analysis/index.html
What Happened to Speaker Joe Biden at the White House in Mar-a-Lago? Insubordination in the House and in Congress: Why he could not do that
It was the kind of social media blast that once would have had Republican members leaping into line. But no longer. It didn’t appear to change a single vote.
The latest sign that Trump isn’t what he used to be is her rebuke, she was one of the few Republican House members who still voted for him. While the ex-president’s rapport with the Republican base surely remains intact, this kind of insubordination is unlikely to have gone down well in Mar-a-Lago.
The spectacle in the house was more similar to the chaos in parliaments in Europe or Israel, where it can sometimes take weeks or months to get a majority, and in the US, where the vote for speaker is normally a simple one.
The chaotic situation in Kentucky where President Joe Biden and Senate Republican leaderMitch McConnell were participating in an event was embarrassing for the country.
Even after he proposed concessions to his hardline opponents late Wednesday, it’s not certain if he’ll get the 218 votes he needs to become Congress’s new leader.
McCarthy said Wednesday evening that there was no deal yet to end the stalemate, but that there has been progress. McCarthy thought it would be best for people to work through some more.
GOP sources say that Roy told Republicans that he could get 10 holdouts to vote against McCarthy, if the negotiations for a speakership are successful.
A whole bunch of members were involved in this and now some of them are considering the next steps, according to the Minnesota Republican.
Moderate Republicans aren’t happy with the concessions, though they are willing to discuss them.
I am willing to listen to discussions, even though I don’t like the rules. They are a mistake for the conference. These handful of folks want a weak speaker with a four-vote majority. The member said that the public would not like what they see of the GOP.
The core of this group are anti-establishment, ideologic skeptics of government. They want it to be smaller, do less, to spend less and are hard line on immigration. Most were endorsed by former President Donald Trump, and many are election deniers, but even Trump’s influence is only going so far in this fight.
Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C.: The House Freedom Caucus member was one of seven members to sign a “Dear Colleague” letter outlining concerns, like “increasingly centralized decision-making power” that result in “massive, multi-subject bills that are unable to be amended or fully read, all driven by supposedly must-pass defense and appropriations measures” that amass large debt.
(The other six to sign the letter were: Republican Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania; Paul Gosar of Arizona, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, Chip Roy of Texas, Andrew Clyde of Georgia and Eli Crane of Arizona.)
Rep. Lauren Boebert is from Colorado. The controversial Colorado firebrand narrowly won reelection. She and others want a single member to be able to bring a motion to vacate the speaker.
Josh Brecheen, R-Okla.: The rancher and construction company owner is a new member of Congress, who aligned himself with the House Freedom Caucus during his campaign.
Cloud noted that he’d worked for months in high hopes and good faith that we would chart a course away from the status quo, and that he wanted to get the country on a path toward fiscal responsibility.
The gun shop owner, who sent an encouraging text to the White House Chief of Staff days after Trump was inaugurated, was one of the seven people who signed the “Dear Colleague” letter.
Gosar is one of the most controversial members of Congress. He’s defended white nationalists and spoken to them and was censured after posting an anime video depicting the killing of Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and President Biden. He’s also one of the leaders of this insurrection against McCarthy and was the first to rise to nominate an alternative. Gosar went viral Tuesday when he was spotted having a conversation with Ocasio-Cortez on the House floor about whether Democrats would help McCarthy get elected. She said she told the group not to.
Mary Miller, R-Ill.: The second-term Illinois representative has been quiet on her vote. But former Rep. Rodney Davis — whom Miller defeated in the GOP primary — told CNN on Tuesday that “I don’t think anybody from Illinois would be surprised by that vote.” Miller is an adherent of the House Freedom Caucus, a member of the majority of other McCarthy defectors, and he denies the results of the 2020 presidential election.