Two years after a mob stormed the halls of Congress in a violent push to subvert the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, Kevin McCarthy walked into the Capitol on Friday morning pledging “progress” with his repeatedly failing attempts to secure enough votes to become speaker of the House.
“We’re going to make progress,” he told reporters. “We’re going to shock you.”
Roughly 12 hours later, another Republican member had to be pulled away from physically confronting far-right members who blocked Mr McCarthy’s chances of speakership after he failed to convince them face to face to swap their votes. It was a chaotic scene that preceded the final vote of the night, when the anti-McCarthy resistance finally crumbled.
Kevin McCarthy finally found the votes he needed just after midnight Saturday morning, on the fifteenth vote.
More than a dozen Republican members who previously did not support the House Republican leader’s attempts to be named House Speaker voted to support him on 6 January, but the 12th, 13th and 14th rounds of votes fell just short of the number Mr McCarthy needs to secure the gavel, as lawmakers negotiated behind the scenes to draw concessions from the Republican leader to build up his support. The fifteenth began with it unclear what had changed to flip the final holdouts.
After adjourning in the afternoon, lawmakers reconvened on Friday night for a final round of votes to determine the speakership, concluding Mr McCarthy’s historic streak of failures and the longest election for the title in 164 years, exploding in near-blows between members, and underscoring the fragile moment in American democracy on the two-year anniversary of the January 6 insurrection.
A fifteenth vote commenced before midnight, after members Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz switched their votes to “present”. The House initially attempted to adjourn after the 14th vote ended in failure, but Republicans returned after heated discussions between Mr McCarthy, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Mike Rogers, among others.
His repeated defeats resulted in increasingly desperate offers to hardline members for even more concessions and after Donald Trump‘s public appeal to lawmakers to rally behind him, a fraught process that has increasingly frustrated members. The threshold for booting him from office will be lower than ever under the rules negotiated as part of the deal, and the House Freedom Caucus will be taking a central role in the House’s various committees.
Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, among Republican holdouts who had refused to support Mr McCarthy in all rounds of voting, accused Mr McCarthy of pursuing an “exercise in vanity” and said there is “insufficient trust” among GOP lawmakers in the House Republican leader.
“Mr McCarthy does not have the votes today, he will not have the votes tomorrow, next week or next year,” he said.
But it was clear that Mr Gaetz was bluffing; his own flip to “present” later the same day would be a necessary part of Mr McCarthy’s eventual victory.
Mr Gaetz and far-right Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert voted present late on Friday, after previously voting against Mr McCarthy andother candidates.
At the conclusion of voting after 11m on Friday, Mr McCarthy walked up to both of the members and appeared to plead for their support, which they rejected, triggering what appeared to be the beginnings of a brawl among a group of Republican lawmakers.
The four-day process has previewed incoming House Republicans’ new chaotic majority, which thanks to Mr McCarthy’s concessions to far-right members could give them relatively unrestricted domain to disrupt the workings of the House and hold him hostage to their demands.
Among potential compromises with far-right members is addressing the US debt ceiling, which some lawmakers may use as leverage to extract policy concessions and spending cuts while endangering the full faith and credit of the US and global economy.
Proposed rules changes would impose a “cut-as-you-go” measure, which would prohibit the consideration of legislation that increases mandatory spending within a five-year or 10-year budget window.
It also repeals the so-called “Gephardt Rule,” wherein the House automatically sends a joint resolution to raise the debt ceiling when the House adopts a budget package. That would set up a separate vote on the debt limit, which addresses money the government has already spent and not future spending. Defaulting on the debt would risk an economic crisis in the US and around the globe.
Republican US Rep Chip Roy called the plan “a pretty strong outcome for the American people”.
He told The Independent that the package is “opening up the House for the first time in a very long time, empowering rank-and-file members for the first time in a very long time, putting spending restraint that’s needed badly, ensuring that there’s accountability for the speaker.”
Newly elected Congressman Keith Self said in a statement explaining his vote for Mr McCarthy earlier on Friday that a “couple of individuals are simply obstructionists, more interested in self-promotion than restoring the Republic.”
Two absent Republican members – Wesley Hunt, who was tending to his wife and baby, and Ken Buck, who missed early voting rounds for a medical procedure – had returned to the Capitol on Friday night to cast their vote for Mr McCarthy, securing a nearly bare minimum number of votes for the speakership.
But Democratic Rep David Trone made a surprise return to the House on Friday after undergoing shoulder surgery to cast his vote for Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, raising the threshold for Mr McCarthy’s election.
If Mr McCarthy’s concessions to become the new speaker of the House of Representatives take form, he could emerge as a weakened figure under threat of being undermined from his in-party critics.
“I hear overwhelmingly on the phones and email, ‘What the hell are these members doing?’” Republican US Rep Don Bacon told The Independent on Friday.
“Most people are calling saying ‘get your act together, get to work.’ The Republicans need to show that they can govern,” he said.
Incremental progress on Friday signalled some “hope” that seemingly intractable members who did not support Mr McCarthy could swap their votes in future rounds, Rep Nancy Mace told The Independent.
Democrats, meanwhile, remained unified behind Hakeem Jeffries.
The New York congressman saw a historic streak of votes beating out other nominees on every tally up until Friday afternoon, but not enough to clinch a majority; he would need support from Republican members, uniformly opposed to nominating a Democratic member.
“I don’t see it as rewarding [Mr McCarthy] but I do see it as poignant, sad, strange, that today he will likely be sworn as … maybe the most tissue-thin speaker of the house we’ve seen,” Democratic US Rep Madeleine Dean told The Independent.
“He’ll be sworn in on January the 6th, this extraordinarily sad day, when so many of those people including this would-be speaker compromised, turned their back on the truth,” she said. “He knew the truth. And within days he turned his back on it … A very sad and strange place.”
Additional reporting by John Bowden and Eric Garcia
