From time to time, Shakespeare reflected on how the hardliners had fallen in his plays, sharing that “uncomfortable is the head wearing a crown. “
Something applies to the name of the Republican leader in the U. S. House of Representatives.
The current bearer of this crown, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, recently beset by recorded comments he made in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, which scared members of both houses of Congress.
The recordings reveal that McCarthy fired the guy the rioters were looking for to stay in power, former President Donald Trump. McCarthy had said Trump was partly to blame for the chaos in a speech in the room after the members returned.
But in subsequent conversations with other members, he recorded saying that “this guy is over” whose movements “no one can defend. “.
Today, McCarthy rejects everything he said at the time as a hypothetical strategy. He tells his troops at the House Republican Conference that he never asked Trump to resign. And so far, Trump himself has accepted this McCarthy tale as an excuse and “a compliment. “for me, frankly. “
Hill’s colleagues of the Republican leader also seem to agree with this, at least most of them, at least for now. The House Republican Party held a convention on Capitol Hill this week in which they were in the mood to buy McCarthy’s characterization of his 180-degree course correction.
McCarthy embodies the dilemma facing Hill Republicans in Trump’s shadow. Their struggle reflects a non-unusual delight in dealing with contradiction. “All the members had a similar process,” one Texas Republican member told the Washington Post.
This “process” can be described as pivot or pirouette, evidence of resilience or hypocrisy. But for now, the members who fled in search of his protection on Jan. 6 act as if that has never happened. And most of them seem to agree that they want to do just that.
Doing otherwise could displease both Trump and his supporters. Polls tell us that supporters, and their confidence in their denial of the 2020 results, will matter a lot in this year’s Republican primaries and in 2024.
So, at least in theory, adopting this attitude helps keep McCarthy in office and his party on track to take over the House this fall. Electoral precedents for the midterm elections, existing economic history, and peak polls suggest that their chances are excellent.
At this week’s conference, McCarthy wanted to move from his mea culpa to a speech of encouragement about the Democrats’ defeat in November. And until this month, McCarthy also hoped to be the next Speaker of the House. it’s not a lock, and it’s not until this last access to the franchise was registered.
To be Speaker, he not only wants the help of the majority of the members of the majority party, but also the majority vote of the House. This is an absolutely different calculation, as it means that small factions or even recalcitrant individuals within the party can simply deprive McCarthy of his chance to hold the highest office.
It has already happened. Republican leaders who think they would be the next president discovered weak problems in their view and subsidized them before a confrontational vote on the ground. When the last de facto dominant Republican speaker, Newt Gingrich of Georgia, lost favor with his own pack in 1998, it took weeks to locate someone willing and able to play with 218 within the Republican conclave.
It even happened to McCarthy before, when he was running for president in 2015. He had only Ohio President John Boehner’s No. 2 at the start of the 114th Congress, taking over from some other Republican “young canon” who had lost his number one to a Tea Party activist. Even Boehner himself had tense moments with the party insurgents on the day of the swearing-in, and finally kept his task with a minimal majority.
The 218-vote threshold can be a recurring impediment even after a president has won office. Boehner found that he was wearing down an almost constant rearguard action opposed to the House Freedom Caucus, with his party’s hardcore conservatives reluctant to him when he made deals with a Democrat. president.
Thus, nine months after his third term as president, Boehner resigned. He resigned his seat in Congress and returned home.
McCarthy seemed in a position to intervene at the time, but it has become transparent that he didn’t have 218 commitments in his pocket. Some attributed this weakness to the fact that McCarthy had been No. 2 for less than a year. Others pointed to a moment of recklessness on Fox News when it reported that a series of House hearings had been held to undermine Hillary Clinton’s presidential credentials.
When McCarthy was able to go beyond the most sensible and others who tried failed, the core members persuaded Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, then president of tactics and means, reluctant, to fill the void. Ryan encountered many of the same obstacles that Boehner had, and after 3 years, he also retired from Congress.
218’s desire, whether to be president or to succeed in office, has been a great explanation for why, despite all the drama in the GOP executive suite over the past few decades, adding moments when the president’s big hammer is as hard to sustain as a hot potato, or maybe a lost soccer ball.
The last Republican leader to devote himself to painting was Dennis Hastert. A former wrestling coach in Illinois high school, Hastert had the big hammer from 1999 to early 2007, longer than any other Republican president in history. His regime’s relative calm, albeit by a scandal that contributed to the loss of the House in 2006 and by his own conviction unrelated to the violation of federal banking laws. .
Given Hastert’s non-public history, it’s hard not to forget that he was promoted to the presidency after Gingrich because he wasn’t controversial, or at least much less problematic than other members of the executive team. For a while, he was known as the “accidental speaker,” but, ironically, his 8 years would be the longest a Republican president has ever had.
Hastert’s rise began in the winter when Gingrich was ousted, leaving no one on the executive ladder to seek the task and who could get 218 votes. The popular chairman of the Sourcing Committee, Robert Livingston of Louisiana, filled out the bill, but only briefly. The stories of an extramarital affair set him back from his big moment and within a few days he had resigned.
It’s hard to know what increase Gingrich had had just 4 years earlier, when he led the Republican Party to its first House majority in 40 years. after only two years, he encountered some resistance from members of his party who did not vote for him as president in January 1997.
In June of that year, much of Gingrich’s leadership team engaged in a kind of palace coup to overthrow him. The plot collapsed when the conspirators simply did not agree on which of them would upgrade their fallen Caesar after the coup. But at the end of 1998, after the party failed to gain ground in the midterm elections, Gingrich came out and began the race to update it.
In a sense, this struggle to locate a figure as transformative as the Georgian continues to this day.
These struggles on the Republican side have been specifically at odds with the relative stability at the top of the House’s Democratic leadership. sensible
Pelosi assumed the House presidency when Democrats were deeply exiled as a minority in late 2002. Two years later, they fell to their lowest percentage of seats in the House in part of a century. But since then, it has held the summits. Almost two decades have passed and no serious challenge has arisen. His No. 2, Maryland’s Steny Hoyer, has been in the job for so long and his no. 3, Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, has been there since 2006 (all of them are now over 80 years old).
There have been party members who have supported or voted for Pelosi over the years. But their number is somewhere between single and de minimis digits. Pelosi has been the boss for a dozen years in the minority and seven in the majority.
During the same period, House Republicans had four leaders. And if the experience is a guide, they could have a fifth before the end of the year. McCarthy would be the most popular Republican in the House, but unless that popularity turns the needle to 218, he will fail again. And the stampede will continue.
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