Kevin McCarthy’s New House

National Review Online

Saturday, January 07, 2023

 

Although some spectators might have enjoyed seeing what would have come of the Mike Rogers versus Matt Gaetz confrontation if the two hadn’t been separated late Friday night, the speaker of the House drama came to a welcome conclusion.

 

After getting the rug pulled out from under him by Gaetz on the 14th vote, Kevin McCarthy got over the top with 216 votes on the 15th tally after a Gaetz-led claque of holdouts finally agreed to vote present.

 

This isn’t how anyone wants to become the speaker of the House, and no one has had to do it this way in more than a hundred years. Electing a speaker is usually the easy part, and the chaos that unspooled on the floor bodes ill for the small, fractious GOP majority when it confronts much more difficult issues.

 

That said, despite some of the overwrought commentary, this was not a national crisis. Legislative bodies are supposed to be forums for raucous, open debate, and having four days of contention over who’s going to be speaker is something our republic can handle.

 

That McCarthy survived the repeated failed votes and threaded the needle to victory was a notable act of political endurance and horse-trading. The concessions he granted the roughly 20 dissenters won’t make his life any easier, but he was going to have an attenuated grip on the caucus regardless and a number of the changes are desirable.

 

The House now will supposedly vote on all twelve individual appropriations bills and require 72 hours for members to review bills, provisions aimed at ending the horror-show “omnibus” spending bills routinely presented as “must pass” legislation hard against some deadline or holiday.

 

McCarthy also agreed that fiscal year 2024 domestic discretionary spending won’t be higher than it was in fiscal year 2022. Defense hawks worry that this will inevitably put the Pentagon budget on the chopping block, but if the House was going to attempt any fiscal discipline whatsoever, hawks were going to have to fight to protect their priorities.

 

The House Freedom Caucus also secured additional seats on the all-important House Rules Committee that speakers use to move their agenda. This is a significant diminishment of McCarthy’s authority. Ideally, it will lead to a less centralized approach in the House, where committees have been effectively neutered over the years and there’s been a lack of policy entrepreneurship among members. But it also creates the possibility of hostage-taking.

 

Chip Roy pushed for many of these changes and has a compelling vision for how a House should work with more power for the rank-and-file, all toward his goal of reducing federal spending. He played a commendable role in the speaker fight over the last week and, importantly, was willing to take “yes” for an answer.

 

Of course, the Gaetz-led faction was a different story. It shows no concern for the party, or any ideological or other goals besides the next cable hit and fundraising email.

 

This group had inordinate power over McCarthy’s fate over the last week, and will continue to do so with the GOP majority so slender and McCarthy agreeing to a rule allowing one member to move to vacate the speaker chair. It’s true that this rule isn’t new — Nancy Pelosi changed it to a higher threshold when she took over in 2019 — but other speakers haven’t been in the tight spot that McCarthy finds himself in.

 

The next obvious moment of peril for him, and the caucus, is the looming fight over the debt limit. Republicans want spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt limit later this year. Seeking concessions is reasonable, but the party should be realistic about what can be achieved without control of the White House and the Senate.

 

If the last week shows what a determined House faction can achieve if it uses its leverage to the max, there is also much to be said for unity in the fights ahead.