Which path will Rep. Kevin McCarthy end up taking?
Even though Kevin McCarthy is likely to become one of the most powerful people in Washington, D.C., few could envy the position he finds himself in.
Assuming McCarthy can overcome his far-right dissenters and secure the votes needed to become the next speaker of the House, he will helm a fractured Republican Party that is facing an existential crisis following a disappointing midterm election performance.
McCarthy will preside over an extremely narrow Republican majority — meaning, in order to advance any legislation, he needs to either secure nearunanimous support from the fractured Republican caucus, or to try to appeal to his skeptical colleagues across the aisle, which would trigger intense backlash from within his party.
There is also the onerous challenge for McCarthy of contending with the politically perilous force that is Donald Trump, who has already announced his intention to re-seek the presidency. Trump will use his stranglehold over the farright Republicans in Congress to further his own personal agenda – i.e., by amplifying calls to impeach President Biden, pushing for investigations into the 2020 election and targeting moderate Republicans ahead of the 2024 primaries. Given these challenges, there are two possible paths that Kevin McCarthy could take as speaker, and two distinct directions that he could lead the Republican Party in.
On one hand, McCarthy can continue kowtowing to the far right and embracing Donald Trump in the dangerous way that he more or less has since the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Despite Trump’s recent call to “terminate the Constitution” and his decision to dine with notorious antisemites and Holocaust deniers Kanye West and Nick Fuentes, McCarthy may feel that his only reasonable course of action is to stay out of Trump’s firing line.
Make no mistake, the November midterms were a repudiation of the Republican Party’s embrace of Donald Trump, not an endorsement of the Democratic agenda. Voters this year sent a clear message to the GOP: if the party continues to embrace Trump and the far right, they will keep losing elections. This sentiment is reflected in recent polling, which shows that the majority of American voters, including 36% of Republicans and 64% of Independents, do not want Trump to run for president again.
In this sense, a renewed McCarthy-Trump partnership would be a political gift to Democrats, who would welcome the chance to frame their 2024 campaigns as a referendum on Trumpism and the far right, just as they have successfully done in the past three national elections.
On the other hand, McCarthy could take a different path, which involves working with moderates in both parties, and Republican leaders in the Senate, to address real and substantive issues: immigration reform, a budget in order to avert a government shutdown and taming inflation through responsible fiscal policy.
If McCarthy takes this more moderate approach, the Republican Party’s political fortunes — and the country — will be better off for it. That being said, it is admittedly far less practically achievable for him than the former path, and would be met with intense resistance from the increasingly powerful Trump-wing of the GOP.
McCarthy can barely afford to lose any Republican support, given how narrow the Republican congressional majority will be. Thus, he will most likely feel that he has no choice but to cave to the far right’s demands and begin very aggressive investigations into the Biden administration.
The Freedom Caucus, a bloc of far-right Republican representatives, is already threatening to oppose McCarthy unless he gives in to demands to shape House rules in ways that would make it easier to impeach members of the administration. This is setting the stage for an intraparty civil war, as centrist Republicans have pushed back on the Freedom Caucus’ demands, insisting that they would instead work with moderate Democrats to find a House speaker who is not a right-wing extremist.
These fringe members of the Republican caucus — including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan — have done the party a great disservice. If McCarthy chooses to effectively sell his soul and continues to allow these far-right figures to steer the Republican agenda, the party will suffer politically in 2024 and beyond.
But as Marjorie Taylor Greene recently said of McCarthy, “To please the base, he’s going to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway.”
On this, and this alone, she may unfortunately be right.