The Daily - Speaker McCarthy. But at What Cost?

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

Representative Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become speaker of the House turned into a rolling disaster last week, played out over five long days and 15 rounds of voting. Today, the inside story of how it went so wrong — and what he was forced to give up in order to finally win.Guest: Catie Edmondson, a congressional correspondent for The New York Times.Background reading: Mr. McCarthy’s slog to the speakership ended with a remarkably public show of intraparty strife during a history-making overnight session.The speaker’s concessions have given the rebels on the right flank of his party more tools to sow disarray.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

The next order of business is the election of the Speaker of the House of Representatives for the 118th Congress. Nominations are now in order. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. Madam Clerk, on behalf of the House Republican Conference, I rise today to nominate the gentleman from California, Mr. Kevin McCarthy, as Speaker of the House Republican Conference, I rise today to nominate the gentleman from California.

Mr. Kevin McCarthy. As Speaker of the People's House. So I humbly ask for your support. The inside story of how Kevin McCarthy's bid for House Speaker. Having received a majority of the whole number of votes cast, a Speaker has not been elected. Turned into a rolling disaster. The House set to try to elect a speaker again today after two days of... Well, it's Groundhog Day. Again.

The stalemate over the next House speaker looks like it could stretch into the weekend. Over five long days and 15 painful rounds of voting. McCarthy has been stalled at 202. He needs to get closer to 218. It's now the longest contest for the gavel since before the Civil War. And what McCarthy was forced to give up to finally win.

My colleague Katie Edmondson was there. It's Monday, January 9th. So, Katie, I was thinking in preparation for this interview what word could describe the last week in the House of Representatives. And the only thing I could come up with was bonkers. Maybe you have a better word for it. I think there are a lot of words for it. Historic, exhausting, insane spectacle.

It's kind of funny because a week ago, you had come on The Daily and you had previewed this coming fight. And you had told us very pointedly that this was likely to be a mess. And not only were you right that it was a mess, it was a mess of kind of epic proportions. Yeah, that's right. Well, I think it exceeded even my own extremely low expectations. my own extremely low expectations. If you would have asked me to guess how many ballots it would take before either McCarthy completely imploded or if he got the Speaker's gavel, I would have given you a single digit number. I would never have guessed that we would have gotten to 14 or 15

votes that I would have had to cover. The House could not do any legislative business until a speaker was sworn in. Right. And on top of that, neither Democrats nor this entrenched group of Republicans wanted to let McCarthy adjourn proceedings. They actually wanted him to keep taking these votes over and over and over again to show that he didn't have the support. And so that's how we ended up in this position where even though the numbers weren't really changing on the House floor, we just kept having to see vote after vote after vote.

Right, this kind of slow motion, car crash, Groundhog Day scenario where even though it looks very clear that McCarthy's going to lose and lose and lose, the system requires that everyone show up and make him lose over and over again. And what you're saying is that Democrats were very happy to watch this happen because he's a Republican and many Republicans were very happy to have this happen because they didn't want McCarthy as their speaker. Oh, some of the Democrats brought

popcorn to the House floor. But I think, you know, in terms of expectation setting, one of the things that was surprising from the outset and that was revealed on the very first vote was initially when we had been talking about the group of people who might try to block McCarthy from winning the Speaker's gavel. That discussion always centered around kind of five really entrenched, never-Kevin-type lawmakers.

But to see right off the bat around 20 lawmakers oppose him was stunning. And we don't need to relive every twist and turn of this wild, messy ride. But I'd like to understand, Kitty, based on your observations and your reporting and now with a little bit of hindsight, what exactly caused there to be so many rounds of voting and so many, as you just indicated, opponents of McCarthy within his own party and how exactly

this ultimately got resolved? Well, in part, there's not necessarily a super concise answer because you are looking at 20 different lawmakers here who had a variety of different concerns. But the saga really started with, again, that group of five lawmakers who called themselves Never Kevins. These are people who have had deep concerns for a while about generally the way the house functions. But really at their core, they are people who are disruptors and in some cases had personal animus toward Kevin McCarthy, viewed him as fundamentally untrustworthy, fundamentally a creature of the swamp that they promised to drain. And a lot of them, frankly, are not shy about getting in front of cameras and grabbing some attention.

The House will be in order. And give us some of the names of these never-Keviners. For what purpose does a gentleman from Florida rise? To nominate a candidate for Speaker of the House. Well, Matt Gaetz really emerges from the outset as Kevin McCarthy's chief antagonist, and he played that role very well all week. You only earn the position of Speaker of the House

if you can get the votes. Mr. McCarthy doesn't have the votes today. He will not have the votes tomorrow, and he will not have the votes next week, next month, next year. Each time he would rise on the House floor to nominate a different lawmaker, he would take these really personal digs at Kevin McCarthy. But there certainly is intent, and it's an intent driven almost exclusively by personal ambition,

and that ambition is paralyzing the House now. There's one particular moment that really stands out because it is the perfect encapsulation of the contempt that Matt Gaetz has for Kevin McCarthy. On the very first day, he stood on the House floor and said, maybe the right person for the job of Speaker of the House isn't someone who wants it so bad. Maybe the right person for the job of Speaker of the House isn't someone who has sold shares of themselves for more than a decade to get it. Can you just translate that? I mean, I think I understand what he means by that, that McCarthy in his mind is part of the establishment. He's had to make the kind of compromises that mean, you know, he's not one of us. He's somewhere in the middle. But like,

what does it mean to Matt Gaetz for McCarthy to have sold shares of himself? I think everything that you said is true, but it also speaks to this idea that, Michael, you and I talked about a week ago, which is the idea that because McCarthy, over his career in Congress, has contorted himself so much, so often, every which way to please these right-wing lawmakers, that at the end of the day, some of them, and certainly Matt Gaetz, feels that he is a sellout who lacks any sort of principle or core, really, and that at the end of the day, McCarthy cannot be trusted for that reason. And so one must wonder, Madam Clerk, is this an exercise in vanity for someone who has done the math, taken the counts, and is putting this institution through something that absolutely is avoidable. Right, that he's essentially an empty vessel at this point. That's right. Okay,

who else should we talk about? For what purpose does a gentlewoman from Colorado rise? Well, there's Lauren Boebert as well from Colorado. Getting the job done is what we were elected to do. And that starts with having a leader who supports Republican principles. She actually said a similar thing to Gates. Again, their critiques have not only been broadly about the way the House functions, but have been quite personal about McCarthy. Our job is not to coronate the biggest fundraiser or rubber stamp the status quo

or keep on going along to get along. It gets to the point actually where she says that she and some of her colleagues in this Never Kevin group have been getting calls from former President Donald Trump

beseeching them to just vote for McCarthy. Even having my favorite president call us and tell us we need to knock this off, I think it actually needs to be reversed. The president needs to tell Kevin McCarthy that, sir, you do not have the votes and it's time to withdraw. With that, I yield. Thank you. And that seems notable because we think of Donald Trump, at least in the past, as having tremendous sway with these far-right conservative House members.

And in this moment, they're opposing Kevin McCarthy and bucking Trump and saying, sorry, Mr. President, on this you're completely wrong and we're not with you. Exactly. Okay. Katie, tell us about the next camp of House Republicans who make life very miserable for Kevin McCarthy in this process. The way that I described the second group of House Republicans is really the ideologues in the bunch. These are House Republicans who have had more substantive complaints and substantive demands about exactly what they're hoping to see Kevin McCarthy change about the way the House functions. And it really has to do with trying to strip some of the power

that has been centralized in leadership and bringing that down to the rank and file lawmakers. This is not personal. It's not. This is about the future of the country. And I would say sort of the most important figure of this group ends up being Chip Roy from Texas. And people ask me, what do you want? I want the tools or I want the leadership to stop the swamp from running over the average American every single day. And how exactly does Chip Roy and those like him want the system to change? Well, it really centers on how lawmakers vote on bills and how those bills are written in the first place. The rules committee sits up there and passes a bill, sends it to the floor, and we have no debate on the floor of this body.

And what has been a long-running complaint of a lot of conservative lawmakers is that particularly with respect to spending bills, these huge 3,000 to 4,000-page documents come to the House floor where lawmakers don't get a chance to debate them. They don't get a chance to amend them. And they basically have to vote yes to either the entire bill or they reject the entire bill. But the fact is, this place has to change. It has to change.

And the change comes by either adopting rules and procedures that will make us actually do our job, or it comes from leadership. And so their grievance, and it's somewhat fair, frankly, is that if you're a rank-and-file lawmaker, you really don't have any say in how those bills are put together. I don't want any more empty promises. I don't want any more, oh, don't worry, trust us, we'll do it. I want to know that we're going to be able to exercise our rights as a member of this body

to stand up for the American people and actually fix this country. Katie, you said this critique is somewhat fair, and I think I understand why. I mean, this doesn't seem like a healthy process if I'm a lawmaker, just being told, don't even bother reading the bill, you don't have time, pass it, it's billions or trillions of dollars. What has been the rationale behind that top-down system of passing these big spending bills until now? Why is it done this way? Well, it's really just efficiency. It's much easier to have a small group of congressional leaders sit in a room and hammer out legislation than to invite over 400 different lawmakers into the process.

Right. So what system do people like Congressman Roy want instead? What do they propose in this speakership process to McCarthy? Well, there are a few demands. One is that they want to have a critical block of lawmakers placed on what's called the House Rules Committee. And that is a powerful committee that essentially decides what legislation can be put on the House floor and to the extent that it can be amended. So their sort of first step is they want to open up how many people can get involved in changing legislation. So they want to be the kind of guards at the door of that initial

legislative creation process. Exactly. They also want to ensure that lawmakers get 72 hours before a vote to actually see the text of the bill. Reasonable. Seems pretty reasonable. And as an accountability measure for all of this, they also want to make sure that any one lawmaker can call a snap vote to oust the speaker. And just explain that and how that kind of keeps the system accountable. So the idea of having this procedure in place means that if McCarthy takes some sort of step that this right flank does not like, that any one of them is going to be able to threaten his speakership, essentially, by calling a snap vote to oust him. So it's really about the idea of creating this threat

that is going to hover over McCarthy's speakership. And Katie, you had told us that from the very beginning, Kevin McCarthy hated this idea because it meant that his speakership could be threatened at any given moment by a very small number of lawmakers, in fact, one of them. Exactly. And we know from history that this group of hard right Republicans have not shied away from using this mechanism and that, in fact, it was the threat of having a snap vote called that ultimately forced out John Boehner from his speakership. So this was something that McCarthy had absolutely

no appetite to even discuss. And as they were haggling, McCarthy had said, I don't even want to let five lawmakers call for a snap vote, let alone a single one. Okay, so when faced with these two camps making their various demands, the never Kevin people and what I would call the kind of weaker Kevin people who want to make the speakership less powerful, what does McCarthy end up doing in response? Well, McCarthy's team, and I think correctly, made the calculation that they were not going to have a lot of success negotiating with people who called themselves Never Kevins. Right. And so they turned to really Chip Roy and this group of ideologues to try to figure out some sort of set of concessions that they could trade essentially in exchange for

their votes. So he agrees to a litany of concessions. He agrees to open up the spending process, meaning that lawmakers are going to be allowed to debate the spending bills much more than they had previously, which was not at all, and that any lawmaker can offer an amendment to the spending bill. Got it. And he agrees to put three of these hard right lawmakers on the rules committee, which again is that group of gatekeepers essentially for legislation. And then crucially after failing to make any headway and losing multiple rounds of votes over the course of the week, McCarthy finally agrees that he will let any single lawmaker call for that snap vote to oust him. Right, crossing the red line he himself had drawn.

And just how many votes does that get McCarthy? It gets him a lot. It gets him 14 votes. And again, we had 20 lawmakers voting against him. So he wins over a sizable block. But it's still not enough for him to win the Speaker's gavel. He still has to find a couple more votes in this group of lawmakers who have just been absolutely unyielding. just been absolutely unyielding. And it all comes to a head late Friday night on really this kind of final showdown on the house floor that built up to a collision of tension and emotion and drama

that I really don't think we've ever seen on the house floor. We'll be right back. So Katie, tell us about these final emotional, dramatic rounds of voting and how it is that McCarthy, at long last, gets himself over the line. It really centers around the Never Kevins. At this point, the ideologues who really just wanted to see some changes to how the House functions are pretty happy they're willing to change their votes. And so it all comes down to McCarthy's team needing to crack some of these never-Kevins who have refused to ever vote for him. Right. And so how does that work?

Well, under this kind of weird rule system, McCarthy doesn't actually need to get a specific number of votes to win. He just needs to win a majority of those lawmakers' votes who are present. And so there are some tricks he can play. And one of them is that it actually helps him if lawmakers vote present instead of voting for a lawmaker who isn't him. And so that's the trick that his allies think they're going to be able to use to their favor. Rather than convincing Never Kevins to finally vote for him, they think that they've gotten enough of those people to simply vote present. And then he has to call back two

Republicans who have supported him, who went home to deal with some family situations. He calls them to fly back to D.C. late Friday night, and he thinks that way he is going to have the votes. Got it. And when we say vote present for those who don't cover Congress, that's not yes, it's not no, it's kind of like a neutral vote. It's a non-vote, but counts towards the math he needs. That's right.

It helps him because it's essentially lowering the number of people who are opposing him. And so by Friday night at 10 p.m., McCarthy and his team finally think they've gotten the math right. They think this is finally going to be the ballot that wins him the Speaker's gavel. But of course, that's not what happens. Right. The House will be in order. It has to be more dramatic than that. The reading clerk will call the roll. And as the voting plays out... Go, Sarah.

We are seeing that group of 14 or so defectors flip their votes and vote for McCarthy. Roy. Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy. But we also see that some of these never-Kevin lawmakers are holding out.

Crane. Andy Biggs. Biggs. And as we get to the end of the vote, it becomes very clear that the deciding vote is going to come down to Matt Gaetz, and that in order for McCarthy to win on this ballot, he is going to need Gaetz to vote for him.

And what does Gaetz do? Gaetz. Gaetz. Well, Gaetz actually missed his first vote and has been milling around the floor. The reading clerk will now call the names of the members elect who did not answer the first call of the roll. But the House clerk calls his name. Gates. And he finally responds.

Present. Present. And instead of voting for Kevin McCarthy, Matt Gates responds, Present. Present. And instead of voting for Kevin McCarthy, Matt Gaetz responds, present. Now, in just a testament to how confusing this whole process is, when Matt Gaetz votes present, a bunch of lawmakers, a bunch of Republicans actually think that he has just tied it up for McCarthy. And they jump to their feet and they start applauding. Amazing. Even though he is just tanked the speakership.

But one person who immediately knows that something is wrong is Kevin McCarthy himself. And he's been, I mean, just amazingly stoic this entire week. He's been smiling. He's been dispatching his allies to buttonhole lawmakers and instead has been sort of just staying in his chair. But after Gates votes present, he gets up and he tears across the House floor and goes up to Gates. And they're having a really, well, McCarthy is having a stern conversation. Gates is sort of pleased and sitting back in his chair. And it is very clear by the time McCarthy starts walking away from Gates that there is no resolution. And he is just absolutely stone-faced and goes back to his chair.

And it's just as McCarthy is walking away from Gates that Congressman Mike Rogers of Alabama, who is a big McCarthy backer, approaches Gates. And he's irate, too. And he seems ready to come to fisticuffs with Matt Gates. And another congressman actually intervenes. He physically restrains Rogers. He pulls him back. And so you have this gasp go up from the House floor. Lawmakers have never really seen anything like this happen. We've never really seen anything like this happen.

Wow. It's all on C-SPAN that people were watching live. It was just an incredibly intense moment. Wow. It's all on C-SPAN that people were watching live. It was just an incredibly intense moment. Right. I mean, at this point, people have lost their patience. They're furious at one another. They probably just want to go home and sleep. And tempers are really flaring. Absolutely. And I think there's something about the intensity of that moment where these never Kevin lawmakers realize that something has to give and that they have to put this to bed. At the same time, while this kind of melee was happening on the House

floor, Donald Trump was calling lawmakers. We know that he called Matt Gaetz, as well as another lawmaker from Arizona who was in the Never Kevin camp, and he told them, essentially, knock it off. It's over. Bring this to an end. And so they agree that that's what they need to do. And so in the 15th round of voting, the final round of voting, you can feel the mood change. Kevin McCarthy is finally smiling again, this time a very genuine smile. And we see a critical block of these Never Kevin lawmakers fall in line and change their votes to present, allowing McCarthy to become speaker. And so there's just an enormous eruption of applause on the House floor from these very tired lawmakers. After 15 votes and five long days. The Honorable Kevin McCarthy of the state of California, having received a majority of the votes cast, is duly elected Speaker of the House of Representatives.

McCarthy finally becomes Speaker. And the question now, of course, is at what cost has McCarthy been elected, given all the things he had to agree to to get the votes? Well, I should say first that we actually don't know the full list of concessions that McCarthy has made. That's something that they've kept pretty much under lock. We're still learning about new concessions that he made every day, largely from the right-wing lawmakers. But the big one that stands out for McCarthy personally, obviously, is this one-member snap vote to oust him. And I think the important thing to know here is that it's not so much that lawmakers think that McCarthy is going to lose, at least right away, one of these votes, but it

creates this threat that hangs over him and will hang over him for his entire speakership, right? This is something that is going to hem him in considerably in terms of what types of actions he might take as a speaker, because he knows that if he takes some sort of action that is going to anger the far right, they could move to try to force him out. anger the far right, they could move to try to force him out. So in a sense, the greatest risk of this is all the ways that it might prompt McCarthy to kind of self-censor, right, or kind of disempower himself because he might have a set of ideas, but think to himself, well, if I talk about that one or propose that one, that might lead to a snap vote for my removal.

So he'll never offer those ideas in the first place. Yeah, that might lead to a snap vote for my removal. So he'll never offer those ideas in the first place. Yeah, that's right. And I think that's actually a nice transition into how the house is going to be affected by all of these concessions, which is that it's really just going to screw up the day-to-day of his job. Explain that. As we've said before, there are just some basic functions that the House needs to be able to do to function. There are basic bills, such as spending bills to fund the government that the House has to take care of. Otherwise, the government shuts down.

Sometimes the House has to raise the debt ceiling to make sure the United States doesn't default on its debt. And what he has given away in this list of concessions is basically his power to use his Speaker's gavel to strong-arm the House into just making sure all of that happens. Right. The old system of the omnibus bill that the speaker tells his members to pass, when that goes away, you're saying this idea of just getting essential bills passed becomes more perilous. where lawmakers of all different sorts of dispositions will be offering amendments, some for pretty radical moves that will just muck up the House's ability to get these basic pieces of governing done.

So you're saying, think about the fight we just saw on the floor to get a speaker and imagine that a fight of that nature attends every spending bill that funds our government, and you get a kind of gridlock that could easily tip over into chaos. Exactly. Michael, this was supposed to be an easy vote. McCarthy didn't have a viable challenger opposing him. This was supposed to be a vote where Republicans

came together and kicked off the new majority. It took them a week to be able to do that, and it was an excruciating process. What is it going to look like when you have, you know, more than 200 members who all think the government should function in a different way, fighting over spending levels for a litany of government agencies. It's going to be chaos. So this is clearly the downside of agreeing, as McCarthy has, to empowering a lot of rank and file members. But so far, we're acting as if hard right Republicans are the only kind of Republicans who are being empowered by this change. And it occurs to me that the new rules are designed to empower all lawmakers of all stripes. So is it possible, Katie, that what McCarthy has agreed to is going to empower the

moderate wing of the Republican Party as well, perhaps in ways that encourage them to, for example, work with Democrats to pass budgets in ways that could outmaneuver the far right? Is that possible? It is. It's a really interesting dynamic. What McCarthy has done is to give the tools to any faction of House Republicans to become more emboldened, to try to take matters into their own hands

and leverage their power. So it's just going to be a question of whether the centrist Republicans try to do that. Typically, these are lawmakers who want to see the government function, who do not want to take the House hostage. And so there's a sense that they're a little bit more of a go-along-to-get-along crew that is going to try to help McCarthy. But you have to imagine if they feel that they are being pushed out of the process by far-right lawmakers, they're going to have some sort of response to that.

Right. Katie, I watched McCarthy after he won, and he looked happy. I mean, he's got this giant gavel in his hand, he's using it, and he seemed relieved. But do you think that he was happy to have won this way? Well, you're right. He was happy to have won. I think he would have preferred not to win this way. But I was talking to one of his close allies about this, and I asked him,

what sort of lesson do you think this hard right flank has learned from this entire process? They basically got everything they wanted and will receive no punishment for creating all of this chaos. And his response was essentially to say that McCarthy didn't have any other choice and that this is what he had to do to win the speaker's gavel. any other choice and that this is what he had to do to win the speaker's gavel. And so I think that is going to be the dynamic that really drives this Congress in the House. I think the lesson these hard right rebels have learned is that they do have the power in the House.

And even though it's supposed to be the speaker who runs the show, they learned over the last week that they run the house. Exactly. And that is going to create an extremely precarious dynamic for the next two years. Well, Katie, thank you very much. Thanks, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Sunday, thousands of supporters of Brazil's former president, Jair Bolsonaro, stormed the country's Congress, presidential offices, and Supreme Court to protest what they falsely believed was a stolen election. The violent scene recalled the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol, with rioters parading around government buildings.

And it seemed to have a similar origin, a series of relentless verbal attacks on the country's election system by a losing presidential candidate. Bolsonaro lost his re-election in October, but has yet to formally concede. to formally concede. His successor, Luis Inacio Lula de Silva, who was sworn in last week, was not in the capital city at the time of the attack. By Sunday night, Brazilian police said they had cleared the rioters from government buildings and had arrested about 200 of them. of them.

Today's episode was produced by Rachel Quester, Diana Nguyen, and Muj Zaydi, with help from Asta Chaturvedi. It was edited by Mark George and Paige Cowan, contains original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.