Members-Only Article
I’ve written repeatedly that Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) remains highly likely to become Speaker of the House on January 3rd, despite all the sturm und drang to the contrary. But I admit I’m a bit less sure than I was. We should also remember that if McCarthy cannot muster the votes to become Speaker, that is almost certainly the end of his career in electoral politics. (It’s not like he can run statewide in California.) And if tradition holds his defeat would be followed in short order by his resignation and departure from Congress. You don’t get passed over twice for Speaker and remain in the leadership or in Congress.
Yet, to understand this drama, we must remember that it has nothing to do with Kevin McCarthy. To the extent McCarthy’s opponents have made an argument against him it largely turns on the mean things his predecessors John Boehner and Paul Ryan allegedly did to them when they were Speaker.
The point of this whole drama is for the House Freedom Caucus to discipline and put on its heels the rest of the GOP caucus and whoever ends up leading it. McCarthy’s whole angle on becoming Speaker the second time around was to avoid Boehner and Ryan’s mistake of trying to manage and contain the House Freedom Caucus. His angle was to give them basically everything they wanted on the theory that he’d solve the “problem” by redefining it as not a problem. He’s there to lead on their behalf. That’s basically what John Boehner did. But McCarthy is happy to do it openly. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) is now one of his top supporters, and vice versa. McCarthy has made Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) — all but untouchable just two years ago — into something like his top deputy. If the House Freedom Caucus manages to defeat McCarthy’s bid the victory will be followed by a short burst of high fives and then a panicked scramble to figure out what to do next. And — probably — if truth were told, some real annoyance that McCarthy allowed them to win.
The whole point of the exercise will have been solely to show the House, the country, the GOP and especially whoever finally gets the job that that person owes the position solely and exclusively to the House Freedom Caucus and even more specifically to Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and the other hold outs.
The McCarthy drama also sheds some light on the future of Donald Trump within the GOP.
If you were to secretly poll members of the House GOP caucus, quite a few — almost certainly a majority, but who knows — would say that it’s time to move on from Donald Trump. Some would say this because they’ve always hated the guy, privately. Others loved him and maybe still do but can see that the electoral machinery isn’t working as well as it did and that Trump himself has taken on too much baggage. For this latter group the ideal outcome might be for Trump to magnanimously pass the torch, a sacred laying on of hands, to a younger disciple like Ron DeSantis who could continue the policies with a fresher face. Of course, good luck with that.
One too-little-noted dimension of this story is that McCarthy has put all his bets on his alliance with Donald Trump and thus absolute loyalty to Trump. But at this key moment Trump is letting him dangle in the wind. That is probably mostly because Trump is Trump and for him loyalty is always only a one way street. But to some extent it is likely because even among his core supporters he lacks the juice to dictate the decision. If there’s any risk, any question, McCarthy is on his own.
The point is that just because a big chunk or even a majority of a party has decided that a new direction is required doesn’t mean they can actually move in a new direction. In a closely divided country, a tiny chunk of your party can keep the whole thing locked in place or even stuck in overdrive. Official Washington thinks the lesson of the election is that burn-it-all-down Trumpism is a loser and that the GOP will now move in a different direction. But the actual House GOP is about to sign itself over to Matt Gaetz and Andy Biggs, or allow them to wrest assurances from McCarthy, which amounts to almost the same thing. In the near term, the razor thin majority that Trump held the House GOP to becomes, perversely, an anchor of his — or at least his most ardent supporters’ — continued power over the party.
This is what I mean when I say that Trump’s repudiation at the polls on November 8th is likely the beginning of the end for him as a political force but only the beginning of the end — with a long, long way to go to get to the end of the end. Trump is unlikely to agree that he was repudiated (to put it mildly). And as long as he holds even a plurality of support in the party (and likely he holds much more) he can make it very, very hard to move in a new direction.
McCarthy’s fate is that logic played out on a different chess board.
