California Rep. Kevin McCarthy tapped to lead House Republicans

WASHINGTON — California Rep. Kevin McCarthy will lead Republicans in the minority in the next Congress, defeating a challenge from his right for the job.

Securing the minority leader position puts him in a prime position to become House speaker if and when Republicans regain control of the House.

The challenge from conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus, and the group’s founder Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, was spirited, but ultimately fell far short of blocking McCarthy from the simple majority he needed for the top position. The vote was 159-43.

First elected to a House leadership position in 2009 during his second term, McCarthy rose to become majority leader in 2014 and made a bid for the speaker’s gavel in 2015.

Hours before an expected vote, however, he abruptly dropped out of the running because of objections from the Freedom Caucus that he was not conservative enough.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., tapped McCarthy as his chosen successor when Ryan announced last spring that he would retire from Congress. President Donald Trump avoided directly endorsing McCarthy in the race, but the men have a good relationship.

McCarthy argued to colleagues that he has helped the GOP regain the House from a bigger deficit than the one they will face in 2019 when Democrats take back control of the chamber.

For some freshmen members who will be just arriving in Washington, the choice between McCarthy and Jordan was difficult.

“I think he’s a very good conservative, he’s shown a lot of leadership, he’s certainly earned the position,” Rep.-elect Dan Meuser, R-Pa., said of McCarthy. “On the same note, I think Jim Jordan is a smart, tough, focused individual.”

Jordan tried to make the race a referendum on the leadership of Ryan and McCarthy over the past few years, saying in a letter to colleagues that “this might be a hard pill to swallow, but I believe that if we’d handled the past two years differently, we would still be the majority party in the House of Representatives.”

If Republicans had held the House majority, Jordan may have been able to pull away enough votes to prevent McCarthy from getting the majority of all House votes he needed to be speaker. But as a candidate for minority leader McCarthy just needed support from a majority of his own party, which Jordan couldn’t prevent him from getting.