San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
McCarthy faces resolute foes in bid to be speaker
WASHINGTON — In his quest to rise to House speaker, Kevin McCarthy is charging straight into history — potentially becoming the first nominee in 100 years unable to win the job on a first-round floor vote.
The increasingly real prospect of a messy floor fight over the speaker’s gavel on Day One of the new Congress on Jan. 3 is worrying House Republicans, who are bracing for the spectacle. They have been meeting endlessly in private at the Capitol trying to resolve the standoff.
Taking hold of a perilously slim 222-seat Republican majority in the 435member House and facing handful of defectors, McCarthy is working furiously to reach the 218-vote threshold typically needed to become speaker.
“The fear is that if we stumble out of the gate” the voters who sent the Republicans to Washington “will revolt over that and they will feel let down,” said Rep. Jim Banks, RInd., a McCarthy ally.
Not since the disputed election of 1923 has a candidate for House speaker faced the public scrutiny of convening a new session of Congress only to see it descend into political chaos, with one vote after another, until a new speaker is chosen. At that time, it eventually took a grueling nine ballots to secure the gavel.
McCarthy, a Republican from Bakersfield who was first elected in 2006 and remains allied with Donald Trump, has signaled he is willing to go as long as it takes in a floor vote to secure the speaker’s job he has wanted for years. The former president has endorsed
McCarthy and is said to be making calls on McCarthy’s behalf. McCarthy has given no indication he would step aside, as he did in 2015 when it was clear he did not have the support.
But McCarthy also is acknowledging the holdouts won’t budge. “It’s all in jeopardy,” McCarthy said Friday in an interview with conservative Hugh Hewitt.
The predicament reflects not just McCarthy’s uncertain stature among his peers, but also the shifting political norms in Congress as party leaders who once wielded immense power — the names of Cannon, Rayburn and now Pelosi adorn House meeting rooms and office buildings — are seeing it slip away in the 21st century.
Rank-and-file lawmakers have become political stars on their own terms, able to shape their brands on social media and raise their own money for campaigns. House members are less reliant than they once were on the party leaders to dole out favors in exchange for support.
Republicans met in private last week for another lengthy session as McCarthy’s detractors, largely a handful of conservative
stalwarts from the Freedom Caucus, demand changes to House rules that would diminish the power of the speaker’s office. The caucus members and others want assurances they will be able to help draft legislation from the ground up and have opportunities to amend bills during the floor debates.
Outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and the past two Republican speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan, faced similar challenges, but they were able to rely on the currency of their position to hand out favors, negotiate deals and otherwise win over opponents to keep them in line — for a time. Boehner and Ryan ended up retiring early.
But the central demand by McCarthy’s opponents’ could go too far: They want to reinstate a House rule that allows any single lawmaker to file a motion to “vacate the chair,” essentially allowing a floor vote to boot the speaker from office.
When Pelosi seized the gavel for the second time in 2019, House Democrats voted to do away with the rule and require a majority vote of the caucus to mount a floor vote challenge to the speaker.