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Yesterday afternoon, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) lost several embarrassing floor votes for the House speakership, after a fiery closed-doors meeting of the GOP caucus. It was day one of what is likely to be a contentious two years for the fractious, razor-thin Republican majority in the House of Representatives and a very bad omen for the country's near-term governability. And McCarthy and his fellow Republicans have no one to blame but themselves.
In the meeting prior to the votes, McCarthy tried to rally the caucus behind him by listing the various concessions he made to the Freedom Caucus terrorists in his ranks. "I earned this job!" he reportedly told his colleagues. He also vowed that he was not going away. McCarthy's adversaries and allies emerged from the meeting livid with one another, which augured poorly for a swift resolution to the standoff.
McCarthy's ensuing pratfall unfolded over the course of an excruciating day as 19 of his colleagues distributed their votes between for Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), and Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) on the first ballot. It was clear by the time that they got to 'H' on the list of last names that McCarthy was a goner. Biggs, a hardliner in the far-right House Freedom Caucus, was the second-leading Republican vote-getter with 10 in the first round. It meant that it would take multiple ballots to elect the speaker for the first time since 1923. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), set to be House minority leader, got more votes for speaker than McCarthy in all three rounds of voting, but fell short of a majority for obvious reasons.
The second floor vote commenced not long after the first. It quickly became clear that Biggs' supporters had been transferred to Jordan, who had amassed enough votes to block McCarthy again before even a third of the members had voted. The New York Times' Annie Karni reported during the vote that "Jordan is trying to move his supporters' votes to McCarthy, while Biggs is trying to move his supporters' votes to Jordan." If Jordan made any serious effort to whip those votes to McCarthy, it didn't work. Nineteen Republicans voted for Jordan, and McCarthy pulled the same tally of 203 as he did on the first ballot.
And then on the third and final vote of the day, McCarthy actually lost a vote, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fl.), to Jordan, who increased his total to 20 votes. The House then voted to adjourn and resume voting on Wednesday at noon. Until a speaker is chosen, members of the House cannot be sworn in and the United States will be without the services of one of the two chambers of Congress.
It was an almost unprecedented display of political incompetence and internal party division, and it's as much McCarthy's fault as it is anyone else's. For close to two decades now, Republican primary voters have been sending unserious, unskilled and unwell nominees to general elections in landslide GOP districts. The party leadership, while not exactly happy about it, has mostly looked on with helplessness or complicity.
No figure in authority has ever publicly denounced transparently unfit representatives like Lauren Boebert (R-Co.) or Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.). Instead, McCarthy dutifully gave them their committee assignments, and no one bothered backing primary challengers. But it was worse than that—McCarthy, to name just one small example, deliberately empowered Jordan, one of 139 House Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, by trying to place him on the House's Jan. 6 Committee when he knew perfectly well that the Ohio congressman's behavior would be under scrutiny.
Where Republicans go from here is anyone's guess. For those writing McCarthy's obituary, it's worth noting that he and any four loyalists can block anyone else from the speakership if they so desire. So, if you're heading over to PredictIt to gamble on this mess, McCarthy is probably still a better bet than Jordan or whoever the dark horse candidate of the moment is, whether that's Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) or someone entirely off the radar. Any consensus nominee who could draw votes from the Democrats to get to 218 would have to make concessions to the left that would be unpalatable to most Republicans.
In terms of procedure, the House must continue to vote until someone gets 218 votes. It took 133 tries for Know Nothing Party leader Nathaniel Prentice Banks to become Speaker in 1855, a session that is remembered for little other than the savage, near-fatal beating of anti-slavery Sen. Charles Sumner by Democratic Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina. For those who think shamelessness and impunity are recent inventions of the Trump GOP, Brooks was re-elected in 1856 before dying in 1857 of croup.
For Democrats, enjoying the spectacle is sort of like marveling at the holiday-season meltdown of Southwest Airlines from seat 28A on the tarmac of Southwest Airlines flight 435. While Democrats will certainly benefit politically from the never-ending dysfunction emanating from the House, it serves no one for the House to be unable to pass basic appropriations bills and other legislation to address critical problems and unforeseen catastrophes. We are all on the plane together, for better or worse.
That means Democrats should absolutely be scheming behind the scenes to elevate someone, anyone, who is both sane and can consistently command 218 votes in the House to ensure that the government can do its most basic work for the American people.
David Faris is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
