Kevin McCarthy : In the midst of a revolt by a small group of GOP dissidents that foreshadows the instability that will envelop the chamber over the next two years, Representative Kevin McCarthy lost a third round of voting for House speaker on Tuesday, greatly endangering his chances of gaining the position.
The California Republican, who had spent most of the previous year recruiting hard-line conservatives in the House GOP caucus, received a shocking political rebuke from the three votes. A House speaker wasn’t chosen on the first ballot for the first time since 1923.
The House will vote until a speaker is chosen and won’t be able to do any business until that time. McCarthy has promised to continue.
“We stay in until we win,” he said after the second ballot.
McCarthy, 57, received support from the majority of Republicans in each of the three voting rounds, but it wasn’t enough to give him a majority in the entire House. In the first two rounds, 19 GOP members opposed him; in the third, that number rose to 20.
Andy Biggs, a representative from Arizona, was the first-round choice of McCarthy’s opponents. Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican who backs McCarthy, was nominated in the second round by Representative Matt Gaetz, one of McCarthy’s loudest critics.
“Maybe the right person for speaker of the House isn’t someone who wants it so bad,” Gaetz said on the floor.
To create momentum for an alternative, McCarthy’s opponents banded together around Jordan, but the steadfast conservative would struggle to win over moderates in swing districts.
“I believe it’s possible this could go for some period of time,” Texas Republican Pete Sessions, a McCarthy supporter, said.
Hakeem Jeffries, a representative from New York, received 212 votes from Democrats who submitted ballots for him in the first round.
McCarthy’s supporters claimed that they anticipated him to win in the end, but the unrest is sure to give the dissident Republicans more confidence and make it much more difficult for the speaker to preside over the house and unify the party around legislative concerns. Additionally, it foreshadows gridlock in Congress as crucial deadlines to increase the country’s debt ceiling and continue funding the government later this year draw near.
McCarthy’s fate depends on a gradual revelation, name by name.
The fight for the speakership is a part of a larger conflict inside the GOP between moderates from swing districts and conservatives who support the populist policies of the late president Donald Trump.
The hostility within the GOP appeared to be both political and personal. Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama threatened to remove McCarthy’s rivals from their committee positions, but Gaetz dismissed the threat.
“I’m not here to participate in some puppet show,” Gaetz said.
Nancy Mace of South Carolina, a McCarthy supporter, voiced her annoyance with the House Freedom Caucus members who are driving the resistance.
“When asked point-blank what more they wanted, the House Freedom Caucus could not say what more they wanted,” Mace said after a closed door meeting of Republicans Tuesday morning. “They are holding our agenda hostage.”
Former Republican representative Justin Amash, a libertarian who quit the party in 2019 and did not run for reelection in 2020, detailed a number of McCarthy’s detractors in a scathing sequence of tweets.
“All evidence suggests that McCarthy, if elected speaker, will be singularly focused on doing whatever it takes to remain speaker,” Amash, a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, tweeted. “He’s motivated by power, not principles. A person with this mindset — that the end justifies the means — will, by definition, put the process last.”
McCarthy’s fate depends on a gradual revelation, name by name.
McCarthy’s problems are made even worse by the political circus surrounding the recently elected Republican representative from New York, George Santos, who has admitted to fabricating much of his resume, including the information that he attended college and worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
After Santos was elected in November, the lies he had spoken became widely known. Since then, inquiries into the differences have been launched by both federal and municipal authorities. Santos supported McCarthy, who has not yet stated whether he intends to censure him despite other Republicans asking for it.