Losses pave way for McCarthy to lead House GOP

WASHINGTON — Republicans losing control of the House means Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (RBakersfield) has an easier path to becoming his party’s leader in the lower chamber, even if it’s not the speakership he has long coveted.

“The difference between being speaker and minority leader is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug,” said John J. Pitney, a professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College, paraphrasing Mark Twain. “The speaker can do things. The minority leader can only complain.”

So why would anyone want to be minority leader?

“You have the potential of becoming speaker if the political tides were to shift in two to four years,” Pitney said.

And that’s what McCarthy highlighted in a letter announcing his interest in leading Republicans in the minority next year. McCarthy noted that he helped engineer Republicans’ return to control in 2010.

“I helped build a majority from a deeper hole than this, and I have what it takes to do it again,” McCarthy said.

Having lost more than 30 seats on election night, Republicans are expected to hold their leadership elections Wednesday. McCarthy is the presumptive favorite to become minority leader.

McCarthy spent the months since House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (RWis.) announced his retirement quietly shoring up his support for a bid for speaker among the Republican conference and acting as a top campaign surrogate by raising money for colleagues across the country.

Ryan quickly tapped him as his preferred replacement, and though President Trump hasn’t made an outright endorsement, he and the man he calls “my Kevin” are in frequent contact.

But some had questioned whether McCarthy had done enough to court the conference’s most conservative members. They blocked his 2015 bid for speaker because they viewed him as insufficiently conservative and too aligned with the GOP “establishment.” The speculation increased this year when House Freedom Caucus founder Rep. Jim Jordan (ROhio) said he would challenge McCarthy for the top spot.

Jordan confirmed this week he would still challenge McCarthy for minority leader, saying Republicans lost the House because they didn’t do enough to implement the campaign promises Trump ran on in 2016. But the calculus is different for a minority leader race compared with a speaker’s race, which should make it easier for McCarthy to lock it down.

A candidate for speaker needs at least 50% of all votes — 218 when all House seats are occupied — and Democrats and Republicans get to participate. Jordan’s entry into the speaker’s race was a problem because he could pull away enough votes from conservative Republicans to prevent McCarthy from getting the majority he needed, especially since Democrats would almost certainly vote for their candidate.