The NPR Politics Podcast - Kevin McCarthy Faces A Likely Bruising Path To Speaker Of The House

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

It could be the most rancorous contest for Speaker of the House in the modern Congress — even though there is no clear alternative candidate. What will the process look like and what concessions might McCarthy have to make to secure the top job?This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, political correspondent Susan Davis, and congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh.This episode was produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. It was edited by Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Research and fact-checking by Katherine Swartz.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

Hello, this is Karen. I'm originally from Maryland, but right now I am in the cloud forest called Monte Verde in Costa Rica. It's 5.20 in the morning here, and I'm on my way to my first ever guided bird walk. This podcast was recorded at 1.45 p.m. on December 14, 2022. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but hopefully I'll have seen a resplendent Quetzal. Okay, here's the show. I love the noises. I know. Costa Rica's on my list. I've always wanted to go there.

We had tickets March 2020 that we had to cancel that. I still haven't been. I want to go so bad. You are overdue, Miles. Yeah, I know. I need to get there. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics that. I still haven't been. I want to go so bad. You are overdue, Miles. Yeah, I know. I need to get there. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And today, you can probably guess based on the cast we've assembled here, we're talking about the new Congress, specifically leadership, where Kevin McCarthy is running into roadblocks on his

way to becoming the next Speaker of the House. It's looking to be one of the more contentious leadership votes of a modern Congress. With a four-vote GOP majority, McCarthy needs basically unanimous Republican support. And guys, I'm pretty sure he doesn't have it at this point. He does not. So where are we at? So as you mentioned, Miles, the vote for speaker is in January. It's on opening day, which is January 3rd. In order to be elected speaker of the House in the next Congress, McCarthy needs a majority of all members voting on the House floor. If all members are

there, it's 218 votes. House Republicans are only going to have a four-seat majority in the next Congress, so McCarthy can't afford to lose more than four votes. But he's got a math problem right now because there are five hardliners who are publicly saying they will not vote for Kevin McCarthy. He also has sort of a structural problem in that right after the election, Republicans had a closed-door election by secret ballot for speaker, basically giving him the nomination. It doesn't become official until January 3rd. But in that closed ballot, 31 Republicans voted against him.

So it also is likely there is some continued discontent with McCarthy. There's only five public no's. I'm pretty sure McCarthy probably knows who the other possible no's are. And he's spending this time between that leadership election and January 3rd working the vote, making sure that he has the votes he's going to need and hopefully avoid having to take it to a second ballot on the House floor, which would be pretty embarrassing and something that hasn't happened in about 100 years in the Congress. So he is facing a pretty unique challenge. And frankly, I don't know how this one's going to end. Right. I mean, he's presenting an air of confidence, and he's saying that he has the votes. But we know that there's this math problem beyond the 31 people who voted inside the Republican conference for Arizona Republican Andy Biggs, who says he's going to again run for speaker on January 3rd, there were like four or five, I think, House Republicans who voted for no one. So there is still this universe of people that voted for someone other than McCarthy. And on

January 3rd, unlike that secret ballot election inside the House Republican Conference, every single member of Congress, if they're all there, stand up and are asked to say out loud the name of the person they are voting for Speaker of the House. House Republicans tend to vote for the person nominated by the conference. A lot of times there are a smattering of votes for people like, you know, other people, even people who aren't members of Congress. You don't have to be a member of Congress technically to be elected Speaker of the House. You know, people have voted in the past for people like Newt Gingrich or somebody

other than the person nominated by the conference. But right now, the only names that are out there are Kevin McCarthy and Arizona Republican Andy Biggs. And Andy Biggs doesn't have any room to grow from losing badly inside the House Republican conference. Well, that's what I was going to ask is, is there any version of this? I know there was a lot of dreaming over the last couple of weeks by Democrats that this all of this kind of inner party arguing could end up with where there would be there have been a lot of names thrown out. I feel like I wish I had a list of every name that somebody's thrown out as a potential option here. Is there any realistic option where this ends up with a more moderate Republican who can get some more Democrat votes to kind of switch over? Almost certainly not. I mean, this is a situation where maybe in

real life, if you see someone drowning, you throw them a life raft. But in partisan politics, Democrats are not there to assist Kevin McCarthy and his path to the speakership for a lot of reasons. One, there's a lot of ill will towards Kevin McCarthy among a lot of rank and file Democrats. They don't like him and they don't like how he led the party, particularly after the assault on the Capitol on January 6th. Second off, they have their own new leader. Hakeem Jeffries is a Democrat from New York. And when Democrats stand up on the floor that day, they will unify behind their leader. Now, it's symbolic. They don't have the votes for Hakeem Jeffries to be speaker. But I can't imagine any rank-and-file Democrat, particularly

as the Democratic Party has sort of also veered more to the left that would save Republicans from themselves. And Miles, part of the reason why we're so focused on this and this process is the thing that I think people have to understand about the House and the order of things. Nothing can happen until the House elects a speaker. It is the first order of business in a new Congress. Speaker, unlike every other leadership position in Congress, is a constitutional officer. Everything else has been sort of leadership offices created by the parties themselves. They don't even really technically exist. They don't exist in the Constitution. They are sort of modern political inventions. There has to be a speaker. And you can't organize the House.

You can't approve the rules. You can't do anything until you have a speaker. And so if McCarthy can't- You can't even swear in the new members. The speaker is the one who swears in all the newly elected members. Without a speaker, the House would exist in a sort of suspended animation. And basically, a failure to elect McCarthy as the presumptive speaker could, you know, be a very chaotic start to a new Congress. I've been talking to allies of McCarthy's about this idea floated by some, including a couple of House Republicans about this unity speaker or some sort of compromise speaker. And pretty much everyone I talked to ruled it out. One thing that I think is benefiting McCarthy is that the five public hardline no's like Andy Biggs of Arizona, or Matt Gaetz of Florida, these are not particularly popular people within the Republican conference. They don't have a groundswell of support. They're not really

speaking for many people but themselves. And a lot of rank and file Republicans don't like them and they don't like the havoc that they are causing. So even if some of these, you know, those 31 no's that were in private against McCarthy, even if you're maybe not super in love with the idea of McCarthy as speaker, I do think there's a lot of Republicans who want to avoid that perception that the party can't govern itself. And also, when your opponents are guys like Matt Gaetz, he's not necessarily someone that a lot of Republicans want to align themselves with. So I think the force of McCarthy's opposition in a lot of ways might be helping him build that unity within the party.

All right, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk a little bit more about that negotiating process. this vote in early January, where he is trying to convince members to vote for him. And I remember back in 2018, as Nancy Pelosi was kind of going through a similar situation, she gave Representative Marsha Fudge, for instance, a whole subcommittee to chair in exchange for Fudge not running against her in her election for speaker. What is kind of on the table for McCarthy to be able to offer these Republicans who right now have said that they are not going to support him? I mean, that's right, Miles. And that's a good point. Like other prospective speakers have faced these kind of pressures. Pelosi also that same year agreed to a sort of

a handshake agreement with a bunch of Democrats that she wouldn't continue to stay in leadership for more than four years. And she honored that agreement this year. McCarthy has a lot of tools at his disposal. Some of these potentially soft-nose want things like committee assignments. They want leverage they could use to get positions of leadership or influence inside the conference. Other more hardline conservatives are really focused on something called the motion to vacate. For a very long time, there was a rule on the books that said you could bring something called a motion to vacate to the floor, and with a majority vote could force out the speaker. The threat to use this is what derailed former Speaker John Boehner back in 2015. Then North Carolina Republican Mark Meadows, it never came to pass, but he used it as sort of a

bludgeon towards Boehner, and Boehner ultimately decided to leave Congress over it. Now, when Democrats took over, they rewrote the motion to vacate. They didn't get rid of it, but they just really raised the threshold. So I think now the way the rule is, only a leader of a party with the support of a majority of the party could bring forward the motion to vacate. So a much higher threshold than just any rank and file member. There are several hardline conservatives, people like Paul Gosar of Arizona or Andy Biggs, for example, who want McCarthy to revert the rules back to the old motion to vacate to make it a whole lot easier for any one member to sort of hold that over his head.

And a lot of McCarthy's allies say this debate was already settled. They voted against this effort inside the House Republican Conference already, and it was defeated. So there's a renewed effort by the holdouts to try to tweak the rule to get some version of it back. But a lot of these members who are supporting McCarthy have talked about it, and they talked about it again today in their meeting with McCarthy. And they're saying, no, we can't agree to anything like this. And, you know, this has been settled and, you know, move on. We're moving on. The conference does not support this. You know, we'll see whether there's any tweak that McCarthy comes around on

to try to give something. But like Sue said, I mean, if they have, if any version of this comes back, it's a tool for anyone who doesn't support McCarthy to basically throw a vote on the floor, a vote of confidence at any time. Yeah. I mean, last thing I want to ask, just about Kevin McCarthy's kind of aspirations.

Why does he want this job to begin with? He might be asking himself that question. Yeah, but he has been running, like he unsuccessfully ran in 2015, right? So this is something he's had his eye on. But like, what are his long-term goals as a politician? Does anybody know? McCarthy isn't really known as a legislative leader or somebody who's laid out sort of legislative principles in terms of his personal agenda. He did oversee this effort to pass this agenda called the commitment to America, but it was sort of done by consensus and something that he sort of had key members of his team put together. I think going back to McCarthy's been wanting this since 2015, McCarthy thought he would have a cushion that he could lose maybe 10, 12 votes for Speaker of the

House. But when the 2022 midterms became so close and they only have this four vote margin, it basically scrambled his whole calculus in terms of how he can win this election. It became sort of a political fight for his political career right now that he's going through. And I don't think he was entirely ready for that. I think the thing to keep in mind with Kevin McCarthy is he likes to win. If there is one way he's always been described is he's a political animal. He loves campaigns. He loves elections. He's always been involved since he got to Congress in the campaign machinations and fundraising of politics. And he wanted to be speaker seven years ago, and he withdrew when it became clear he did not have the support from the far right of the conference to get the gavel.

He's wanted this for a long time, and I think he just wants to win it. What he wants to do with that power if he gets there, I don't really know. I think that's one of the things that people like us who have covered him a long time are going to be really curious to report on next year. But I've asked a lot of his allies, like, if we get to January 3rd and he's not certain he has the votes, will he still take it to the floor? Do you think he could step down? And to the one, people who are very loyal to McCarthy tell me he's going to take it to the floor, that he feels like he didn't in 2015 and he will do it this time. And maybe even if he's not certain he has the votes, he'll just try to win it on the floor on January 3rd.

We can leave it there for today. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.