U.S. lawmakers convened Tuesday for a new era of divided government as Democrats relinquished control of the House after midterm election losses, with Republican Kevin McCarthy seeking to avoid becoming the first nominee for Speaker in 100 years to fail to win initial support from his own colleagues.
McCarthy is in line to replace Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker for the 118th session of Congress, but he heads into the vote with no guarantee of success. Despite an endorsement from former president Donald Trump, still popular within the party, McCarthy faces entrenched detractors within his own ranks despite weeks of lead time to get hesitant members on board after the November midterm results became official.
The showdown could very well devolve into a prolonged House floor fight and a spectacle that divides the Republican Party.
“We went out to the American public with a commitment to America to fight for them, not for a few members,” said McCarthy, as he entered a closed-door morning meeting of House Republicans.
Without a Speaker, the House cannot fully form — naming its committee chairmen, engaging in floor proceedings and launching the investigations of U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration that are expected to be core to the Republicans’ agenda.
Typically it takes a majority of the House’s 435 members, 218 votes, to become the Speaker. With just a slim 222-seat majority, McCarthy can afford only a handful of detractors. A Speaker can win with fewer than 218 votes, as Pelosi and Republican John Boehner did in recent years, if some lawmakers are absent or simply vote present.
Every nominee in the last 100 years has succeeded on the first ballot. The record number of voting rounds to elect a House Speaker is 133 over a two-month period in the 1850s.
Alternate candidates unclear
McCarthy, of California, has raised millions of campaign dollars and travelled the country to recruit many of the newer lawmakers to run for office but has failed to win over a core group of right-flank Republicans led by the conservative Freedom Caucus, despite weeks of closed-door meetings and promised changes to the House rules.
Nearly a dozen Republicans have publicly raised concerns about McCarthy.
Republicans’ slim majority in the new U.S. Congress means there will probably be little legislation passed, says Ravi Perry, professor of political science at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
“Kevin McCarthy doesn’t have the 218 votes to be Speaker,” said Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus and a leader in Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election. “Unless something dramatically changes, that’s where we’re going to be.”
A viable challenger to McCarthy had yet to emerge. Congressman Andy Biggs of Arizona, a former leader of the Freedom Caucus, was running against McCarthy as a conservative option, but was not expected to pull a majority. McCarthy defeated him in the November nominating contest, 188-31.
The second-ranking House Republican, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, would be an obvious next choice, a conservative widely liked by his colleagues and seen by some as a hero after surviving a brutal mass shooting during a congressional baseball game practice in 2017.
Scalise’s office rejected as “false” a suggestion Monday by another Republican that Scalise was making calls about the Speaker’s race.
McCarthy, other prominent Republicans defied subpoenas
One core ask from the holdouts this time is that McCarthy reinstate a rule that allows any single lawmaker to make a “motion to vacate the chair” — in short, to call a vote to remove the Speaker from office.
Pelosi eliminated the rule after conservatives used it to threaten Boehner’s ouster, but McCarthy agreed to add it back in — but at a higher threshold, requiring at least five lawmakers to sign on to the motion.
“I will work with everyone in our party to build conservative consensus,” McCarthy wrote in a weekend letter to colleagues.
Read the final report of the Jan. 6 committee:
The changeover in party control means that the work undertaken by the Democratic-led committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol will cease, an effort disdained by McCarthy and nearly all other House Republicans.
That committee in its final report recommended that McCarthy, Perry, Biggs and incoming House judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan all face House ethics committee proceedings for defying subpoenas to interview with the panel.
Pelosi, who turns 83 in March, is stepping aside from her leadership role for the Democrats. New York Democrat Hakeem Jeffries will become the party’s minority leader.
In the Senate, the Democrats retained their slim control over the chamber, led by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York.
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