The NPR Politics Podcast - McCarthy Prevails, Becomes Speaker In Late-Night House Vote

Episode Date: January 7, 2023

After 15 rounds of balloting, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was elected Speaker of the House. The series of votes were contentious at times, and McCarthy made several concessions to secure the office. What can be expected from his tenure? 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 and Barbara Sprunt.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

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Hey there, and happy Saturday. 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 it's 8.13 a.m. on Saturday, January 7th. And after 15 rounds of voting, the House of Representatives finally has a speaker. 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.

Just after midnight, McCarthy prevailed. His six remaining detractors voted present, lowering the threshold for him to clinch a majority. He won with 216 votes. Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, as he did throughout all 15 rounds of voting, had the support of every Democrat. McCarthy shortly after addressed the House and the drama of the fight. I hope one thing is clear after this week. I never give up. Members of the House were officially sworn in just before

2 a.m. Eastern and then adjourned until Monday. Deirdre McCarthy won, but it was a wild little ride on the House floor to get there. It was pretty insane. I mean, just the plot twists were things that I don't think any Hollywood writer could have really dreamed up. Republicans went to the floor thinking it was all over. They had the votes locked in. And a lot of McCarthy's allies admit that they were surprised about what happened on the floor. At one point, they were heading into the final ballot, or what they thought was the final ballot on the 14th ballot. But some of the folks that they thought would vote with them, or at least vote present to help McCarthy get across the line, didn't exactly do what they expected. The celebratory mood just changed in an instant, And the chamber was silent. Democrats were standing up craning their

necks, watching McCarthy walk around the well of the chamber up the aisle to talk to Florida Republican Matt Gaetz, who at that point was essentially the deciding vote to whether or not he was going to be elected speaker. And then things got just so intense. At one point, Alabama Republican Mike Rogers, the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, had to be pulled away from what looked like a physical altercation with Matt Gaetz. And I think that may be the enduring image, potentially, of what went down last night, or early this morning. But then there was this move to adjourn. And I saw Matt Gaetz, as Republicans were voting to adjourn, because they had no plan, and we were going to have to do this all again on Monday. I saw Matt Gaetz walk up the aisle and talk to McCarthy. And then they smiled. And McCarthy's floor aide, his longtime

floor aide, just started yelling, no, everyone vote no. And everyone started changing their votes. Republicans started changing their votes to not adjourn. Not to adjourn. And then he started pounding the table and other Republicans next to him started pounding the table screaming one more time. And then we knew they were going to vote again. And it was just insane. I mean, people were like, what? What are they doing? And they were walking down the aisle to change their votes.

And then we went through the roll call again. And McCarthy was elected speaker. So McCarthy's speaker, they've even hung up the plaque over the door to the speaker's office already, but it certainly came at a price. What exactly did McCarthy have to pay? A lot. I mean, as the days wore on, as the ballots wore on, McCarthy gave away concession after concession after concession. Those were a mix of rules changes, commitments to members that they would be able to serve on important committees. And a big part of the concessions that McCarthy gave away or focused on in terms of getting support in the end were focused on federal spending. And the pledge that House Republicans were going to balance the budget within 10 years, that they won't agree to raise the debt ceiling without spending cuts.

But these are things that make it clear that the minute McCarthy crosses any block of this group of anti-establishment Republicans, they have the of them. They have the ability to oust him. So who knows how long his speakership will last. To that end, it seems pretty fair to say that he could be, he is at least entering the office, one of the weakest speakers of modern times, certainly weaker than Nancy Pelosi. Even Paul Ryan or John Boehner didn't have to agree to as much as McCarthy did to get the gavel. They didn't. And remember, Paul Ryan or John Boehner didn't have to agree to as much as McCarthy did to get the gavel. They didn't. And remember, Paul Ryan actually extracted demands from his own members before he would take the job. At this time, it's certainly been the other way around all week. I mean, McCarthy has numerically the same margin in the majority that Pelosi had over the last two years.

But now after this week and this public, you know, embarrassment of just showing how weak his speakership will be, it just shows that, you know, the power has been given to a very small number of House Republicans, and they seem pretty eager to flex their muscles. And I think it's fair to say they will. I mean, there's a whole host of fights ahead. And McCarthy has made so many promises that, you know, I wonder like sort of where we see the first test. I think it will come on Monday night, because McCarthy still has to pass a rules package that will show how the chamber operates. And we haven't even seen all of the changes in writing. There's been this framework they've been talking about over the last 36 hours.

But I think as some of the members read it and hear about it, there are going to be defections. I mean, McCarthy and his allies last night seem very confident that they're going members read it and hear about it, there are going to be defections. I mean, McCarthy and his allies last night seem very confident that they're going to pass it and move on. But I just think it's left some scars in terms of the House Republican Conference. Domenico, this all seemed to happen in a bit of a vacuum in that McCarthy was making all these promises to the right flank, we will bring up spending bills one by one, we promise we'll cut spending to lift the debt limit, did not seem to address the reality that this is divided government. Anything that is going to be signed into law needs to be signed by a Democratic president

and get through a Democratic Senate. I'm not sure how much power McCarthy's going to have to deliver on any of those promises he just made. Well, you know, there's some argument that they got this out of their system, and that once they refocus on the Biden administration and oversight and investigations, that some of this goes away. But as Deirdre noted, you know, when it comes to things like budget bills, money stuff, fiscal stuff, that is where the rubber sort of meets the road a little bit here when it's going to come to this again. And, you know, I mean, if we look back to the past and John Boehner, you know, resigning when he did in 2015, that really was around the debt ceiling, the threat to the U.S. credit, and the fact that he had to basically craft a deal with Democrats. You know, I was wondering to a point last night, whether or not there was going to become a serious question that McCarthy starts to sort of back channel with Democrats to figure out, you know, some way to

work together to get him into the speakership, if these four or five, you know, holdouts, state holdouts. Is he really going to work with Democrats the way Boehner did, even risking his own job? I mean, I think what could happen, Domenico, to that point, is it's not going to be McCarthy who's going to end up working with a group of Democrats. It's going to be a small group of House Republicans who could become worried about how it looks to have such a small group of the fringe of their conference sort of running the show. And basically not making government work, right? Because government would more than likely shut down if they have their way.

Right. And the anger from a lot of swing district Republicans who, you know, 15 times in a row, we're sticking with McCarthy, and we're seeing the drama of these handful of members, night after night, I think that they may just say, like, look, Kevin, you know, we can't have like a fight in the Rules Committee about shutting down the government, we're just going to vote with the Democrats. Yeah. I mean, now that we're on the other end of it, it was a wild week in terms of the process. You know, multiple ballots for speaker have happened in history, but it's been 100 years. And to me, there's no modern precedent for what just played out this week. I think a lot of

Republicans throughout the course of these nominating speeches and on and off the floor have been trying to make the case that all of this mess has been a good thing. North Carolina Republican Patrick McHenry, who is a close McCarthy ally and sort of helped get him the votes in the end, made this very point in a nominating speech for McCarthy. Look, the president has called this process an embarrassment. Talking heads have labeled this chaos and a mess, and some would call it shambolic even. But it's called democracy. And this is a hallmark of a free society where every voice and every vote counts. You think there's something to that, Domenico? I would say at least in conservative politics, there has been a view that all the stuff happens in smoke-filled back rooms, and that's bad.

And at least Republicans just aired all their dirty laundry in public. Yeah, I mean, I think that it's really symbolic of how the Republican Party has changed. I mean, the Republican Party has not always been seen as the grassroots party, we should say. But, you know, I think that with the sort of Tea Party takeover that we saw in 2010, it's really trended more in that direction of this kind of ranks, you know, they can raise money on their own. They can go on cable TV, they can go on Instagram, they can go on Facebook, they can send out emails. And, you know, they're sort of, you know, become the sort of Instagram generation of being able to do it on their own. They don't need the party donors or the big party, you know, leadership to help them move through the ranks and become, ranks and become chairman and all this other stuff.

They can really just stand out as sore thumbs if they want to. And we're really in a new place where we've had so much attention on Democrats infighting and all of that. But really, the Republican Party used to be this sort of top-down party that sort of got in line, and that's just not the case anymore. All right, let's take a quick break, and we'll talk more about this in a minute. And we're back. And yesterday on the podcast, we noted the timing of all of this coincides with the second anniversary of the January 6th attack on the Capitol. And it was striking to me that McCarthy made a point to praise former President Trump at an impromptu press conference after he won the gavel. But I do want to especially thank President Trump.

I don't think anybody should doubt his influence. He was with me from the beginning. Somebody wrote the doubt of whether he was there, and he was all in. Members were on the phone with Donald Trump last night, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia. Trump was making calls on McCarthy's behalf. I mean, Domenico, not everybody in the Republican Party is trying to break away from Donald Trump. No, they're not, and especially when you look at the most extreme hard right faction of the party. This is still a group that, for lack of a better word, talks to them on a cell phone.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is the one who was sort of in the middle of that weird adjournment vote last night that got canceled. It was kind of going up to whomever with her cell phone with DT on it that was pretty clear to read, and it was Trump on the phone. And Trump was able to kind of at least persuade a handful of members to vote present, which lowered the threshold and gave McCarthy enough room to be able to become speaker. So he does have still a solid amount of influence with this hard right faction, despite the irony of the fact that Republicans have this slim majority only because so many Republicans who Trump backed in swing districts wound up losing. I thought it was interesting that McCarthy did this last night at his first press conference. I mean, he went through this list of people that he was thanking for cutting the deal, people like Patrick McHenry, who we heard from earlier, you know, his longtime opponents who were forcing all these votes like Chip Roy and Scott Perry. And then he talked about Trump totally unprompted. No one was asking him about Trump's role in any of this process.

And up until the end, there wasn't really a lot of talk among members that Trump was, you know, really involved at all. So it just was this kind of weird dynamic, like, wait, now you're you want to make this public in front of the cameras statement in terms of your allegiance to Trump. And it was weird because it was two years after January 6 or two years and a day after January 6. So it just, it just felt kind of a little bit out of the blue at that press conference. I thought he was going to start talking about his agenda and how everyone was together. And then he brought in former President Trump. It's also to me interesting, because one of the sort of subplots of this is you now have two Republican leaders in Congress who have very different opinions and relationships with the former president. McCarthy has gone all in

with Trump and continues to be his ally. And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's relationship with the former president has been completely severed. I don't think they've even spoken since January 6th or even before that. And how McCarthy and McConnell navigate those internal Republican dynamics is going to be one of the many fascinating things to watch in this Congress. Definitely. It was two totally different paths to power. And McCarthy clearly made it his mission to get in Trump's good graces to be able to get back to power after having lost his speakership fight in 2015, and really saw Trump as his vehicle. And that's why he really couldn't criticize him,

or continue to criticize him after January 6, two years ago, and had to really kind of get back in Trump's good graces. And that's why we saw that photo. And you had Trump and McCarthy essentially use each other, McCarthy using Trump for power to try to get back to a place where he could win the speakership, and Trump being able to use McCarthy in that photo down at Mar-a-Lago at Trump's Florida home to kind of normalize what his role was in the lead up to January 6th and on that day. Deirdre, where did Democrats land at the end of this fight? Obviously, they were united behind Jeffries. It's a whole heck of a lot easier to be united in the minority in the House. Jeffries also spoke to the House last night. That's pretty customary to have the minority leader introduce the new speaker. And in that speech, he was a little provocative. He ticked through a literal list of ABCs of the differences between the party, at least as he sees it. Normalcy over negativity. Opportunity over obstruction. People over politics. Quality of life issues over QAnon. I mean, Mar-a-Lago, QAnon, I mean, clearly trying to provoke his Republican colleagues and getting some booze in response to what he said last night. Hakeem Jeffries was using his moment in the national spotlight to draw a major contrast

with Republicans. That speech was a lot of campaign stump style talk, plus a lot of digs at Republicans for their, in his argument, sort of extreme. And I think this is going to be what we're going to see on the House floor over and over again. Both McCarthy and Jeffries did try at the end of their speeches to extend a hand across the aisle and pledge that they could work with each other. But it's hard for me to see what exactly they would work together on. And there's actually no incentive for McCarthy to even really listen to the Democrats or indicate that they're having any influence over him if he wants to keep the gavel. There really are a lot of bad feelings, even in that, you know, alphabet, according to Hakeem Jeffries. It was pretty clear that there's a lot of bitterness there between

the parties. And that might be like the biggest duh thing to say over the last couple of years. I thought it was very odd to see Republicans throughout that entire day yesterday, the two-year anniversary of January 6th, nobody really mentioning the attack on the Capitol in that way to say there was an attack on the Capitol, we should unify, we should work together. There was none of that kind of discussion. Democrats were the only ones really talking about the attack on the Capitol in that way and on the institution. And that's a very strange place after everybody was able to see what happened on television playing out. Deirdre Domenico, thank you both so much for sticking with me all this week and through all

this drama. Deirdre, in particular, you've been our guide up on the Hill, and we thank you for all of your reporting this week. I'm going to take a nap. And I also want to give another shout out to Lexi Schipittel. She's one of our producers. She's been up on the Hill all week with Deirdre. Thank you so much for everything you did to make our reporting and our podcast sound so smooth. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And I'm Domenica Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.