The NPR Politics Podcast - House Deadlocks In Vote For New Speaker

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

The 118th Congress began its work today, and the first order of business for the House was to select a new speaker. However, after multiple rounds of voting, no candidate achieved a clear majority of voting members — meaning the House can't conduct any official business. California Republican Kevin McCarthy, widely expected to accede to the position, faced notable opposition from members of his own party. This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh, and senior political editor & correspondent Domenico Montanaro.This episode was produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. It was edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Research and fact-checking by Katherine Swartz. Thanks to Lexie Schapitl.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Jacob from Oakland, California. It's been quite a week. Started off with a flight canceled in Charleston, South Carolina, headed home. Then two days later, a flight canceled in Atlanta, headed home. So now we are in the car driving across the country, went from Birmingham to Tulsa yesterday. And today we go to Dallas where there should be a flight that will send us back to Oakland. This podcast was recorded at 5.36 p.m. on Tuesday, January 3rd. Things may have changed by the time you hear this podcast, but I don't know where we'll be. We're going to be somewhere.

Enjoy the show. Well, it's one way to see America. Might not be the way you chose, but it's definitely a way. Listen to a lot of podcasts on that trip. Absolutely. That's true. That's just not a fun thing to be doing. Not at all. Hey, there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And we're coming to you a little later in the day than usual because it's been a historic day on Capitol Hill. It's the

first day of the new Congress and for the first time in a century, the election to pick a Speaker of the House has gone to multiple ballots. No persons have received a majority of the whole number of votes cast by surname. A Speaker has not been elected. Traditionally, the majority party picks the speaker, and Republicans won a narrow four-seat majority in November's elections. The head of the Republican conference, New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, stepped forward this afternoon on the House floor. On behalf of the House Republican conference,

I rise today to nominate the gentleman from California, Kevin McCarthy, as Speaker of the House to lead America's new Republican majority. But California Republican Kevin McCarthy's push for the gavel was met with a critical block of opposition from some members of his party, which McCarthy himself acknowledged was likely ahead of the vote. So we may have a battle on the floor, but the battle is for the conference and the country, and that's fine with me. After the first ballot, McCarthy had just 203 votes. 19 House Republicans voted for other candidates. A majority of the whole House is needed to win, and with 434 lawmakers present, that magic number is 218 votes. Meanwhile, McCarthy's Democratic counterpart, minority leader Hakeem

Jeffries of New York won 212 votes, with all Democrats united behind him. The battle McCarthy alluded to was on. So the House continued to a second round of voting. Ohio Republican Jim Jordan, who got six votes from Republicans in the first ballot, rose to start the process again, nominating McCarthy once more. The differences we may have, the differences between Joyce and Jordan or Biggs and Bacon, they pale in comparison to the differences between us and the left, which now unfortunately controls the other party. So we had better, we had better come together. Jordan was trying to unite the party, but Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida had other ideas. Maybe Jim Jordan is the right person for Speaker of the House because he is not beholden to the lobbyists and special interests who have corrupted this place and corrupted this nation under the leadership of both Republicans and Democrats. So the House voted again and with almost the same results.

212 votes for Hakeem Jeffries, 203 votes for Kevin McCarthy, 19 votes for Jim Jordan. And then a third ballot when McCarthy opposition only grew to 20 votes after Florida's Byron Donalds joined the defectors. The House then adjourned for the night. The House, without a speaker, can't move forward with official business. Members cannot be sworn in. Committees cannot hold hearings. No legislation can come up for a vote. Deirdre, you have been on Capitol Hill all day.

Thank you for sticking around there for us tonight. I think it's fair to say today we knew there would be some drama. We knew that there could be multiple ballots. How much of a surprise is this outcome? I don't think it's a surprise. As you said earlier, you know, Republicans only want a four-seat majority. So Kevin McCarthy was always heading into the vote for Speaker with a math problem. He had more than four public House Republican opponents saying they didn't want to vote for him. Early this morning, before the House came in, House Republicans huddled in a conference room in the basement for what became a really contentious closed-door meeting. McCarthy's allies pressed the opponents, you know, what do you want? You've got all the demands that you want

in terms of we're changing rules to how the House operates. But they came out, McCarthy's critics, very upset and saying they were, you know, they're not going to be sworn in today. They were sworn at by their colleagues. They were very dug in and made it clear they were not going to vote for him. So McCarthy's allies said, you know, coming out of that meeting, if it takes multiple ballots, multiple days, we're just going to keep voting until they elect McCarthy. I mean, the key question I think people have, especially people who don't watch Congress as closely as we do, is what do these 19 members want from him? I mean, I think personally, they don't like him. They don't trust him.

They have complaints about the way the House operates. They want to be able to offer amendments. They want to be able to go through regular ordering committees. This is an issue that members of both parties always have with whoever the Speaker is. There's always complaints from members that there's too much power consolidated in the Speaker's office, and they wanted mechanisms to make sure that they had a say in the legislative process. But every time they were offered a new concession and McCarthy gave in, including one rule that essentially gives just five members the ability to toss out a Speaker by putting a resolution, essentially a no confidence vote on this floor, they sort of moved the goalposts. So I don't know, you know, what more they expected they were going to get today.

Yeah, I mean, McCarthy is not native to this hard right faction. They derailed a speakership bid before. McCarthy ran for speaker in 2015, when John Boehner decided to step down in the middle of a Congress and McCarthy had to abandon that bid when it became clear he didn't have the support and didn't have the support from the conservative faction. Yeah, definitely. And, you know, he's really kind of clawed his way back into the political limelight. He largely did it by glomming on to former President Trump and getting into his inner circle and his good graces, and has come up short here at this point. And I think a lot of that vacillation that we've seen from McCarthy over the years, kind of going back and forth between what kind of McCarthy is he, who does he stand for, and what is his moral core, that's something that a lot of these

hard right members just, they don't trust him at all. Domenico, I'm glad you used the word hard right, because I think it's worth sort of focusing on who these 19 members are. I think a lot of times they've been described as conservatives. But Deirdre, I feel like I struggle with the language here because, you know, Jim Jordan is a conservative and he's very strongly backing Kevin McCarthy, I think these 19 would be more fairly described as maybe more fringe or more hard right or more anti-establishment than necessarily what some might think of as a traditional conservative legislator. I think anti-establishment is the right label for this group, mostly. You know, I think they are conservative. A lot of them are conservative. And they're trying to get, draft Jim Jordan to be the speaker. He kept telling them over and over again. He didn't want to be speaker. At one point, you could see Jordan talking to Matt Gaetz on the floor who nominated him and then he nominated McCarthy on the next ballot. wants a lot of attention. And I think that a lot of the process driving this is they're getting a

lot of attention, right, to their cause, which they say is trying to sort of return the House to be more of a body that, you know, more members can participate in. They're also getting a lot of anger, though. I mean, the vast majority of House Republicans, like Kevin McCarthy, they support Kevin McCarthy, they want him to be Speaker. I mean, the vast majority of House Republicans like Kevin McCarthy, they support Kevin McCarthy, they want him to be speaker. I mean, Domenico, there's always we've always had this joke that the Democratic Party is more chaotic, and there's more infighting. But we haven't seen anything like this. Like, yes, it's happened before, but it was 100 years ago. And there's just no real analogy to this happening in modern politics.

No, and it gets so much attention that, you know, we've got Dems in disarray, because you have so many different types of Democrats, and they're largely very outspoken, and they vocalize what their gripes are more so than Republicans do oftentimes. But really, what we've seen over the last two decades in the House in particular, is far more Republican chaos than Dems in disarray. Nancy Pelosi really kind of held the Democratic caucus together. Democrats made a point of it today with Pete Aguilar, who had repeatedly put Hakeem Jeffries up as their nominee to be speaker, who's now the Democratic leader. And he made a point of saying that they were united. So a lot of times Democrats air their dirty laundry, but then come together

at the end of the day. What you've seen repeatedly in the House for Republicans is undermining leadership over and over again. Sue, you covered McCarthy for a while, and I know you talked to a lot of people about him right before the November midterms. What do you think it is about him that got us to this point where he has this open rebellion? You know, McCarthy, I don't think has ever had a ton of credibility with the far right faction of the conference. He came into politics from sort of the traditional Bush era conservative mold. He was seen as a rising star in the party. He was always sort of proudly establishment in the beginning of his career. And the faction of the party that has grown more suspicious,

more nihilistic, and more willing to blow everything up has just grown. And like you said, it's just a math problem. If there had actually been a red wave in 2022, if he had 10 to 15 more votes to play with, he'd probably already been elected speaker by now. But when you've only got four votes to spare, I think it foreshadows that everything could be a battle in the next Congress. And there's your irony of Trump, because in large measure, Trump is the reason why those candidates that he backed that were too extreme for a lot of voters in swing districts didn't win peddling Trump's election lies. And McCarthy is in this box, right? Live by Trump, die by Trump. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll talk more about the fight for the speakership when we get back. And we're back. And Deirdre, I think the question we have to sort of entertain now is, if McCarthy can't get to 218, what is the orbit of alternatives look like, at least right now? I'm not sure we know. I mean, it could end up being somebody that we haven't talked about yet.

I mean, there's just a real uncertainty about how McCarthy gets out of the impasse that we're in. His allies continue to say no matter how many votes it takes, they're going to back him for speaker. But we did see one member, as you mentioned, Byron Donalds, who voted for him on the first couple of ballots, vote for someone else on the third ballot. And that same member, Congressman Donalds, said on CNN, you know, it's becoming clear that McCarthy doesn't have the votes. And at some point, our conference has to figure out who does. There have been some quiet talk about whether McCarthy's number two Louisiana Republican, Steve Scalise, could be the person that they turn to. But other Republicans tell me that he has sort of the same problems that McCarthy has. To establishment, been there too long. Yeah. any kind of transformative figure in terms of how the House is run. There was some talk early on

about whether there could be some kind of consensus candidate, whether it's like somebody outside the House or a former member. But there's not been any serious talk about that and no serious talk at all about Democrats helping Republicans out of this jam. They are clearly staying on their strategy to just keep sticking together and forcing McCarthy to try to get out of this jam. They are clearly staying on their strategy to just keep sticking together and forcing McCarthy to try to get out of this jam himself. It's fascinating having seen, you know, the Jim Jordan speech, then Steve Scalise's speech, while they were, you know, essentially promoting Kevin McCarthy, and yet almost looking like tryouts to be speaker in some respects, because the Jim Jordan speech wound up getting more

conservatives on his side. And, you know, Steve Scalise then following up after that, somebody who's on the tips of everyone's tongues for who might be next. It's tricky. But again, there is a bit of a roadmap here, because this all did play out kind of eerily similar in 2015, is that it seems like one of the key things to being speaker now is you have to not want to be speaker. Right. Somebody has to be drafted. Yeah, like that was the Paul Ryan model. He didn't want to be speaker. McCarthy, you know, back in 2015, McCarthy dropped out, he had to be begged, he had to, you know, like that. And Matt Gaetz, the Republican from Florida alluded to

that today in nominating Jim Jordan saying the fact that he doesn't want to do it is potentially one of the arguments for why he should have the job, which is, you know, it's just kind of a fascinating statement on how Republicans view their leadership these days. Well, and remember, Paul Ryan ended up having his own demands. If I'm going to take this job, you guys have to agree to go along with me. I mean, who could go around and convince this group to any of their demands for taking the job? That's the thing I can't figure out. speaker is elected. It has to be the first order of business in a new Congress. None of these members of elect have yet been officially sworn in yet. Nothing's been organized. People are waiting for committee assignments. I mean, it can become a test of, you know, can this party govern and the longer this goes on? Well, that's why this matters, right? I mean, you know, we can talk about all the palace intrigue that we like, you know, the players, the personalities, the characters, and all of that stuff is interesting and interesting for us.

But it matters to real people because legislation goes through the House and the Speaker of the House is the person who controls the agenda. And if they don't have a Speaker, they don't have – there's no avenue to get, you know, half of Congress functioning. And you saw Jim Jordan warn his own conservative allies, the ones who were trying to draft him, look at all the things that we want to get done. We're not able to even start any investigations of the Biden administration's policies or anything else we want to do to rein in federal spending until we unite around a speaker. So, you know, he's trying to argue that they're costing the party their own agenda. Domenico, I just have to think this is a gift for Joe Biden. I mean, if he's running for reelection in 2024, if you're looking for a foil to run against, if this is the tone that the

Republican Party is setting when they're giving power, it's kind of a political gift. You know, it's been a good few months for the White House and President Biden. You know, I mean, this is somebody who had been losing support, intensity of support anyway, among even his base before the election. There had been a growing chorus of people saying that they thought he was too old to run for re-election. That's still an issue. Obviously, that's looming out there. But clearly, for Democratic power, and for the ability to message against, you know, the kind of country that you want to create, and then you can use Republicans' dysfunction, frankly, in the House, you know, it's a powerful political weapon.

I mean, Sue, you alluded to the sort of real world consequences earlier. I mean, if Republicans can't elect a speaker, and we have this narrow four seat majority, what does it mean for Congress funding the government and avoiding a possible government shutdown? What does it mean for avoiding a default? In the spring, the country needs to raise the debt limit. If Congress can't agree to that, that has major potential ramifications for the financial markets, for people's pocketbooks. So I think today's dysfunction could be just a sample of more to come. Speaking of more to come, Deirdre, I mean, just from the basic process now, the House is going to come back in, I believe, at noon tomorrow,

and they just get back to balloting, right? It looks that way. I mean, traditionally, and you know this, Sue, there always ends up being some sort of emergency meeting in the basement of the House Republicans. I could see that happening again. It didn't really seem to work this morning. So I don't know if they need to break up into smaller groups, or have more meetings in the Speaker's office. Maybe some trust circles, something. Yeah, I think it's sort of unclear how tomorrow will be different from today. But there's a lot of people in McCarthy's office trying to sort that out right now. All right, let's leave it there for today. I am certain we'll have more to say about this tomorrow.

I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.