The Big Surpise From the Speaker Fight That No One is Talking About
Kevin McCarthy, Tom Emmer and Ronna McDaniel at an election event before the 2022 Mid-term election. Photo by Office of Congressman Kevin McCarthy, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The campaign to elect a new Speaker of the House is dragging on in Congress. As surprising as McCarthy’s failure to clinch victory over several days of voting is how the battle lines have been drawn. In particular, the battle pits Donald Trump against some of his most zealous supporters.
The group of 20 Republican dissidents, all but one of whom come from double-digit Republican-leaning districts and who are uniformly MAGA, now find themselves opposing Trump’s endorsed candidate for the speakership.
An interesting statistic is that, for the 15 members of the dissident group who have a Trump score from FiveThirtyEight (which measures the number of times a congressman voted with Trump), the average was 94 percent. That number is skewed because of Rep. Chip Roy of Texas whose score was 33.3 percent. The remaining 14 rogue Republicans had voted with Trump 100 percent of the time.
Another article from FiveThirtyEight also offers more data on the raucous caucus of 20:
- 17 come from R+15 districts
- 14 are members of the Freedom Caucus
- Five were first elected in the 2022 midterms
- Four of the five newly-elected members were endorsed by the Freedom Caucus
So why are the mavericks breaking with Trump over the election of Kevin McCarthy? One answer is that McCarthy is a weak figure who isn’t trusted by either his allies or his enemies.
Writing in the New York Daily News, S.E. Cupp points out how McCarthy himself contributed to the rebellion by failing to keep the radical fringe in line as he led the caucus over the past few years. In her devastating critique, she calls McCarthy “an unprincipled sellout who made all the wrong bargains with all the wrong people.”
Ouch.
The bottom line here is that the rebels rightly judge that McCarthy is a weak leader with few core values who wants to be Speaker more than anything else. They know that they can extract a heavy price from such a person and their ultimate goal may be to seize de facto control of the House Republican caucus by making McCarthy their puppet.
A second possibility for the schism between Trump and his MAGA enablers may be even more important to the future of the GOP. After the disappointing (to put it mildly) Republican performance in the midterms, we may be seeing the beginnings of a process in which Trump loses control of MAGA.
The rise of Ron DeSantis as a MAGA darling and an alternative to Trump gives the anti-establishment wing of the party a new champion. At the very least, events have combined to make MAGA Republicans feel safer in flouting Trump’s wishes if maybe not challenging him directly.
Now that Donald Trump is the Republican establishment, politicians who make their name by being anti-establishment have to choose between backing Trump and being outsiders. Trump, now weakened and wounded by legal problems and electoral defeats, is becoming easier to ignore.
Depending on which member of the rebellion we are talking about, the holdouts may fall into both camps. In some cases, they may share both motives at the same time to a certain degree.
Of course, even when flouting Trump’s wishes, some find ways to be obsequious to The Former Guy and his base. Lauren Boebert (R-Col.) recently floated the idea of nominating Trump as Speaker, an idea that would likely be as popular as fecal material floating in a punchbowl.
At this point, it’s impossible to say how the Speaker battle will play out, but as a former Republican who has seen this intraparty trainwreck coming for years, I’m enjoying the spectacle. Only when the radical MAGA faction is brought to heel can the GOP return to being the sane conservative party that the country needs it to be.
The irony now is that the current skirmish puts Trump on the opposite side of his own faction. Regardless of the underlying Speaker fight reason, it seems apparent that The Former Guy is no longer in complete control of the movement that he created. With MAGA off the leash and out of its creator’s control, there are interesting times ahead.
This is indeed all true. But until someone else declares for President who can capture MAGA without Trump, he’s still defacto leader, and if he’s the only on standing, MAGA voters will still turn out in droves for him.Report
Some of us have been talking about this “big surprise” for a while now. I make no guarantees that Trump is finished, but we’re on the course that would lead to that outcome.
Just a few weeks ago there were people on the left voicing fears that Trump would become Speaker. That’s how out-of-touch some analysis has been.
Also let me offer this correction: “Trump,…wounded by legal problems and electoral defeats” The former doesn’t mean anything outside the liberal bubble.Report
I’m not seeing any surprises.
Almost all of the 20 are insurrectionists who reject the legitimacy of opposition and refuse to share power. This is what people have been discussing for a while now, Trumpism after Trump.
According to them, their disagreement with McCarthy is that he is “weak” and by this they mean that he is willing to negotiate with and share power with Democrats.
They are just unwilling to share power- they are unable.
Their core principles aren’t conventional political agendas which can be negotiated or compromised. They hold that their political enemies are fundamentally illegitimate and an existential threat to the nation. They have chosen therefore, “rule or ruin”.Report
I’m old enough to remember this thing called the “Tea Party.” The Freedom Caucus is a direct product of it.
I think the real surprises here are that a) McCarthy is trying to put some distance between himself and Trump, and b) he’s still getting ~90% of the votes of his caucus. Hell, today he got up to 214, and they’re re-convening in a few hours so maybe he’ll pull it off.
I wonder what he’s had to give away to get there.Report
From the speculations I’ve read, much of what he gave was a return to “regular order” and corresponding reductions in the Speaker’s power. Twelve appropriations bills written in committees, floor amendments, adequate time for review before a vote. Discharge petitions are not easy, but are no longer effectively impossible. Any member can make a motion to remove the Speaker (largely symbolic unless it’s privileged, which is not clear). There have been policy promises, some of which are empty (vote on an amendment to impose term limits) and some of which are not in the Speaker’s purview to guarantee if the procedural changes are adopted (no debt ceiling increase w/o spending cuts).
I expect most of the leaning on the last six holdouts will be from the 15 who got what they wanted.Report
That discharge petition part makes me hopeful. It suggests a few corporate owned Republicans and all the Dems working in tandem could maybe tackle the debt ceiling regardless of McCarthy and the loons if the latter turn out to be cray-cray and intransigent.Report
Point of order – there are still 12 appropriations bills written by 12 committees. But because the senate can’t get its sh!t together their versions never see floor action before the end of the fiscal year and so we get continuing resolutions followed by omnibus packages which squish those twelve bills together. Also worth noting that Congress generally gets Congressional Ooerations and Defense passed on time each year.Report
What media do you consume that didn’t tell you that the Republicans are putting distance between themselves and Trump?Report
My comment was about McCarthy specifically, not Republicans generally.Report
So you knew the GOP was trying to distance itself from Trump, but didn’t think the guy who’s trying to become its de facto leader would do the same?Report
Afterward, McCarthy thanked Trump, saying no one should doubt his influence.
“Distancing”.Report
Again, this has been discussed many times that “respectable” Republicans are eager to embrace Trumpism, so long as Trump himself is not a part of it.
That is, they are devoted to all the aspects of Trump- the grievance-mongering, the sulking cult of victimhood, the devotion to displays of belligerence and dominance, the contempt for the rule of laws and a refusal to share power with those they deem inferior.
Ron DeSantis is Exhibit A for this phenomenon. Identical to Trump in every way, but speaks in complete sentences.Report