Kevin McCarthy has won enough votes to become speaker of the House of Representatives. The Republican has had to bow to the concessions of ultra-conservatives who will continue to thwart him for years to come.
A delivery man in a hat drives a cart full of blue plastic boxes into the Capitol on Tuesday. A heavy desk rolls over gleaming marble. The items pass chandeliers, columns and elegant state portraits in gold frames. Finally, they reach their final destination: the office of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the most powerful person in the country following the President and Vice President. The household effects belong to Republican Kevin McCarthy (57). He thinks he can immediately move into his new workplace. But it goes differently.
It was expected that McCarthy would encounter some opposition in winning the presidency. His party is divided to the bone. But that it would be a bloody battle of four days, and fifteen rounds of voting – no, he had not seen that coming.
McCarthy has been sabotaged by an alliance of 20 ultra-conservative members of Congress. By constantly voting for other, hopeless candidates, this group blocked his nomination for days. This is how they kept the whole country in its grip: without a chairman, the political year cannot begin. Only on Friday do they finally appear to support him. In the fifteenth round of voting, McCarthy managed to get 216 votes.
In the Congressional benches, Kevin McCarthy looked deeply mortified this week. And yet he has this situation all to himself. McCarthy has been bitten by the beast he himself let in. For years, the Republican faction leader danced to the tune of the far right. He sided with ultra-nationalist and even radical right-wing candidates who had little interest in democracy. All the while he watched as moderate party members were torn to pieces by them. Now he himself is covered in teeth marks.
With all winds
Kevin McCarthy is a pragmatic man who easily blows with all winds. When he took office in the House of Representatives in 2007, the strongest wind came from the Tea Party, an extremely conservative movement that has turned its back on the federal government. If he wants to go far within the party, the Congressman from California thinks, he too must move to the right.
By the time Donald Trump comes on the scene, McCarthy has risen to party leader. In exchange for his support, he lets Trump and his radical, sometimes extremist allies from the far-right Freedom Caucus get away with anything and everything for years.
“President Trump won this election,” McCarthy said on Fox News in late 2020, just following Joe Biden was elected president. When that lie later leads to the storming of the Capitol, McCarthy himself is a bit shocked. For a moment it seems that he is dropping the former president, but soon they are having a nice photo together once more.
From then on, McCarthy turned his anger on party members who voted for Trump’s impeachment. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger in particular get it, two Republicans who advocate an investigation into the storming of the Capitol. Expressing concerns regarding democracy is taboo in the group led by McCarthy.
Drunk off the red light
Under McCarthy, it’s not the most thoughtful voice that leads to the top, but the loudest. McCarthy is helping to build a party full of mediagenic figures who don’t want to listen to anyone. More and more often not to him either.
“People who walk into the Capitol and get drunk on the cameras red light,” Republican campaign strategist Alice Stewart calls them in The New York Times: the more they are in the spotlight, the more influential they become. They are allowed to speak on conservative media outlets, get noticed by right-wing backers and raise money for their next campaign. They are hardly concerned with problems of voters – substantive policy.
Exactly this group had turned once morest the party leader this week. “We need a leader who can’t get out of this broken system,” sleeper Lauren Boebert said Thursday. “I want to fix it.”
De ‘Taliban 20’
Can you negotiate with politicians who don’t believe in the system? McCarthy kept trying for weeks. He has made major concessions in recent days. He promised the troublemakers positions in political committees and even an adjustment of the rules that will make it easier for them to impeach him later.
The troublemakers prefer to present themselves with arguments, obstruction and chaos – not with convenient political deals. Angry Republicans who want to break the impasse speak reproachfully of the ‘Chaos Caucus’ or even the ‘Taliban 20’.
Even now that Kevin McCarthy has made a deal with his opponents, he is far from getting rid of them. “He handed himself over to hostage takers,” the magazine writes The Atlantic. “A McCarthy presidency is a recipe for parliamentary paralysis, for rule by a minority faction within the majority party, for crisis following crisis following crisis.”
Kevin McCarthy’s long-held dream of becoming chairman has finally come true. The question is how long his old friends will let him enjoy his new office.