The man with the hardest job in Washington this year is not called Joe Biden, but Kevin McCarthy. After five days and 15 rounds of voting, he was elected Speaker of the House of Representatives with heels over the ditch on Friday night.
In one fell swoop, McCarthy is, on paper, the most powerful Republican in the country. But he faces a monster job. “My dad always said, it’s not how you start, it’s how you finish,” a visibly relieved McCarthy said Friday night. “Now the hard work begins.”
In Washington DC, everyone knows that the 57-year-old Congressman from California will have a hard time in the coming years. Because wherever McCarthy looks, his enemies are everywhere.
Before the election, Kevin McCarthy’s political future looked brighter. Republicans expected to win dozens of new seats in the House in November. This is what McCarthy had been working towards for years. He had been minority leader for four years, now he would finally head a beneficent Republican force.
It turned out differently. The hoped-for majority of dozens of seats became one of five. McCarthy’s main tasks are to pass laws with that narrow majority, block others, weaken the Democrats and at the same time strengthen his own party. Four challenges for the brand new Republican speaker.
1. Party Rivalry
A minimum of 218 votes is required to pass a bill through the House of Representatives. The Republicans own 222. So McCarthy, every time, has to find support from almost his entire group. Whether he can always count on that remains to be seen.
A group of about 20 ultra-conservative Trump loyalists thinks Kevin McCarthy – although also Trump’s ally – is not conservative enough. They sabotaged McCarthy’s presidency last week by nominating someone else in almost every round of voting.
This Freedom Caucus, a far-right faction within the party, seems more intent on controversy than cooperation. The more fuss they cause, the more often they are allowed to speak up Fox News and the more they stand out to their right-wing supporters.
Tensions have run high this week. Alabama Congressman Mike Rodgers almost got in the hair of Matt Gaetz after the 14th ballot. He was fed up with the opposition of his radical party members. In the end, McCarthy won not with their support, but because six members abstained. This gave him 216 votes.
So McCarthy never got a resounding ‘yes’. While he gave them pretty much everything they asked for in negotiations.
Like the ultra-conservatives’ demand that every member of Congress henceforth have a motion to vacate can table, a kind of vote of no confidence against the chairman. McCarthy also promised that he would not raise the debt ceiling without forcing cuts on other fronts. This could have far-reaching consequences for Americans who rely on government. The radical part of the party held McCarthy completely hostage for years to come.
His predecessor Nancy Pelosi also faced dissident voices within her Democratic party. Still, McCarthy is getting a lot more difficult, says political scientist Suzanne Chod. She has been researching the functioning of Congress for years. “The progressive left did not always agree with Pelosi, but they voted with her because they put their party’s interests above themselves. The Christian nationalists are not concerned with the Republican Party, but with their own re-election.”
However, support works both ways. One of the speaker’s jobs is to raise campaign money for members of Congress. If the Freedom Caucus wants to take advantage of that, they’ll have to give McCarthy a sweet look sooner or later.
2. The Senate
Even if Kevin McCarthy manages to get the noses in his party in the same direction from now on, he’s not there yet. As chairman, he decides which bill will be discussed in the House of Representatives. The more laws initiated by him and other Republicans are passed, the more successful his presidency will be.
Yet many of his proposals will never see the light of day. After a bill is approved in the House, it goes to the other chamber of Congress: the Senate. The Democrats have a majority there. The political climate in Washington has hardened to such an extent in recent years that politicians are no longer likely to vote along with the opposing party. Moreover, McCarthy is a controversial figure there. He continued to support Trump after the Capitol storming and endorsed his election lie.
Part of McCarthy’s job will therefore be on stage: initiating laws that never pass anyway, and then pointing the finger of blame at the Democrats. McCarthy will want to assure his supporters that Republicans are not sitting still, no matter how little they succeed. Migration is a dossier on which he will put in a lot of effort, just like the unpopular tax cut for US companies, which Democrats consider unpopular.
What McCarthy can also do: submit proposals that Democrats have to agree to. Take parental leave, for example: this is not regulated for all American employees, and more and more Republican women want legislation for this. If McCarthy were to propose a mandatory paid parental leave of several months, Democrats would find it hard to say ‘no’ – after all, their supporters want that too. In this way, many Republicans felt compelled last year to vote for Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill with a heavy heart.
3. Role of Trump
McCarthy is an ambitious politician, but not a visionary. He is known as a pragmatist, especially out for power. He has it as chairman. In the unlikely event that something happens to Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, McCarthy would even become president.
But within his party there is someone who has more influence: Donald Trump. That’s why McCarthy often obeys the wishes of the former president. That seems to be working: in recent weeks, Trump has called several opposing congressmen to instruct them to support McCarthy. “VOTE FOR KEVIN,” Trump said in a call ahead of Wednesday’s vote, “CHOOSE VICTORY.”
Trump is also a stumbling block. His influence is eroding, many candidates he supported lost the mid-term elections in November. There are several criminal investigations against him. And even his confidants are starting to get unnerved by the anti-Semites and racists he surrounds himself with. It will therefore be one of the greatest challenges of McCarthy’s presidency: to keep Trump on his side without committing his fate to him.
“Many Republican politicians would like to kick Trump out of the party,” says Gary Jacobson, a political scientist in San Diego, “but nobody wants to be the one to throw the kick.” More than 60 percent of right-wing voters still support Trump. “You see his popularity waning,” says Jacobson, “but it’s still very slow.” For the time being, McCarthy remains behind the former president.
4. Score with political theatre
The divided Congress and divisions within his own party make it difficult for McCarthy to make a mark on new policies. But with his majority in the House, he has a powerful weapon that he will certainly use: he can initiate investigations and initiate impeachment proceedings, for example against President Joe Biden or members of his administration. But there are also risks involved.
In recent months, McCarthy has alluded to investigations into the dramatic withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in 2021, the chaos at the border with Mexico and China’s growing influence. Then there are the vicissitudes surrounding Hunter Biden, the president’s son. The Republicans have long been hammering on his alleged business malpractice, for which no concrete evidence has yet been found. “The goal of the Republicans is to make the Democrats look bad whenever they can,” said Martin Wattenberg, an election expert at the University of California.
According to Wattenberg and other experts, the Republicans will try to impeach Joe Biden with impeachment proceedings, like the Democrats are using twice against Donald Trump. “And when that attempt falls in the Democratic Senate, they try again,” says Wattenberg. “And again, and maybe again.”
These investigations and proceedings may very well end in nothing. The Republicans then have to score with what is in fact political theatre. That could bounce back in McCarthy’s face like a boomerang, when voters see little more than a waste of time and money. McCarthy will go down in history as the speaker who hunted ghosts, but in the meantime got nothing done.