Even in the moments when it didn’t look like there was any way that Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) would emerge victorious from the grueling speakership race, Washington insiders said he would win.
McCarthy has the ability to overcome just about anything, as his most hard-line detractors found out over the course of four days and 15 rounds of votes. After starting with 20 adamant naysayers that he eventually whittled down to six, the race ended with the gavel in McCarthy’s hand and zero Republican votes against him. The rocky start now has one member comparing him to Rocky Balboa.
“He’s doing great,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) told the Washington Examiner a few weeks into the busy new Congress. “I come from Philadelphia, the city of Rocky Balboa. Kevin McCarthy is the Rocky Balboa of Congress. He has overcome so much adversity. And he should be very proud of all he’s accomplished.”
McCarthy negotiated his way to the speakership by cutting deals with conservatives that dispersed power over legislation from the majority party’s leadership and into the hands of rank-and-file members. It’s a stark departure from the role of his immediate predecessors, a job that’s second in the line of succession after the vice presidency.
While House speakers of an earlier era deferred considerably to committee leaders about which pieces of legislation moved or didn’t, the first House Republican House speaker in 40 years, former Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA) strengthened the role considerably. After House Republicans won the majority in the 1994 midterm elections, Gingrich, as the incoming speaker, quickly restricted the power of committee chairmen. Gingrich instead hand-picked the chairmen for the next Congress, in some cases disregarding seniority.
Subsequent Republican House speakers, such as former Reps. Dennis Hastert (R-IL), John Boehner (R-OH), and Paul Ryan (R-WI), further consolidated power in the office. But it was the only Democratic House speaker of the past 28 years, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who operated with what critics deemed imperious powers. She kept in line a sometimes-fractured House Democratic Caucus and wasn’t afraid to punish members of her own party who strayed from the fold on votes. The daughter of a World War II-era House member from Maryland who became Baltimore’s mayor, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr., Pelosi in her two turns as speaker (2007-2011 and 2019-2023) was more of an old-school, big-city war boss than the effete San Francisco liberal critics often characterized her as.
McCarthy, under the new House rules, won’t be able to operate so unilaterally. Key rules changes conservatives won in exchange for McCarthy becoming speaker include a provision under which just one House member can sponsor a motion to remove the speaker. (The old rule required a majority of either party to do so, which was put in place by House Democrats when Pelosi became speaker, again, in 2019.)
There also needs to be 72 hours’ notice before voting on a bill. Several other procedural changes became part of the House rules package — all of which were aimed at dispersing power in the chamber to rank-and-file members instead of just a few top leaders.
The Republican House majority is 222-213 over the Democrats. That’s considerably smaller than the dozens of seats McCarthy had predicted Republicans would gain in the 2022 midterm elections, halfway through President Joe Biden’s White House term.
Ironically, the smaller Republican majority probably resulted in a more conservative House than if the hoped-for “red wave” had occurred during the midterm elections in November. Conservatives aligned with the Freedom Caucus used the five-vote majority to withhold support until, for 14 of them, their demands for rule changes were met. The final six ended up voting present after the negotiations went so well that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), one of the final holdouts, said he was “running out of stuff to ask for.”
Just a few weeks after the intraparty squabble that came to a dramatic conclusion in the middle of the night, the Republican conference has become a lot more optimistic — at least publicly. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), who voted against McCarthy until the last night of votes, told reporters he now thinks McCarthy “is doing a fantastic job — so far” and reiterated that “218 is the magic number,” meaning Republicans have to listen to all corners of the party to pass anything.
Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA), the chief deputy whip and one of McCarthy’s most effective allies during the speaker election, said he knew McCarthy was going to win, even when negotiations appeared to be stalling out.
“During the speaker’s race, somebody asked me, ‘What was your low point in the speaker’s race?’ I was, like, ‘I didn’t have any low point. I knew that McCarthy was going to win. It just took some time,’” he said.
McCarthy has been gunning for the speakership for nearly a decade, and his deep experience in the political arena prepared him for the third-top job in the U.S. government. In 1987, he began working for his Bakersfield, California, hometown representative, Bill Thomas (R-CA), and forayed into politics himself with an election to the California statehouse in 2002, quickly rising to Republican floor leader the next year. He then won his election to the House in 2006 and has been on an upward trajectory ever since.
He got a spot on the powerful House Steering Committee as a freshman and was the chief deputy whip by the next term. By 2011, he was the whip, and after 2014, he was the House Republican leader. In 2015, he withdrew from the speakership race, knowing he wouldn’t have the votes, and the spot went to Ryan.
“Of course, Kevin can do every job here,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) said, calling him a “great resource” since he has experience in many of the top GOP positions.
Democrats, of course, aren’t thrilled with the power exchange since they lost their majority and Pelosi lost her job as speaker. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, will see a lot of changes to his panel since it was one of the central pawns in the negotiations between McCarthy and the conservatives.
“I’m nervous to even think about what might be coming our way,” McGovern told the Washington Examiner. He said the addition of several conservatives to the committee was because Republicans “wanted those seats for a reason, and that is to make sure that the bills that come to the floor are as extreme as possible.”
On McCarthy’s leadership during the first three weeks of the new session, McGovern said he hasn’t seen anything substantial come from the GOP, such as bills to address inflation.
“We’re not doing anything. He’s threatening to default on our debt, which would ruin our economy, so it’s safe to say I’m not impressed.”
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There seems to be at least one basic reason for McCarthy’s survival, and that’s the simple fact that he’s nice. Everyone from journalists to Hill staffers to TV bookers to fellow lawmakers says McCarthy is genuine, pleasant, and enjoyable to work with — something that’s not said of everyone in politics.
It’s a trait that served him well through decades at the top of the political game, and it may see him through at least one full term as speaker. Much attention has been paid to McCarthy’s assent to allowing only one member to bring forward a motion to vacate the chair, triggering an immediate vote on keeping him in the seat he fought so hard for. But one journalist recalled hearing from a Hill staffer years ago, “I believe in three things: God, the superiority of the U.S. Navy, and Kevin McCarthy’s ability to survive.”
Juliegrace Brufke contributed to this report.
