Earlier this week, amid news that Kevin McCarthy would exit Congress at the end of the month, an unusual admission from the former speaker went viral.
“When you look at the Democrats, they actually look like America. When I look at my party, we look like the most restrictive country club in America,” he told the New York Times last month. He made similar comments in October while speaking at Oxford.
Plenty of people noted that Mr McCarthy was right: the House Republican conference is incredibly white with a smattering of some women and Latinos. However, Mr McCarthy has desperately tried to diversify the GOP. In many ways, he was trying to continue the mission that began as a member of the Young Guns: a group of fresh-faced, energetic young conservatives that included Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor.
This new crop would serve as an answer to Barack Obama’s election, himself a sign of a diversifying America. There was just one problem: while the GOP needed to grow its pool of voters, most of the base adamantly refused any kind of changes and wanted the GOP to move even further to the right, beginning first with the Tea Party and culminating in the election of Donald Trump.
This impulse can best be explained by a quote by Rep Thomas Massie, the libertarian Republican from Kentucky, who said back in 2018 that Republicans “weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a b***h in the race,” he said. “And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”
The GOP establishment tried to tame the impulses of the most extreme factions while trying to grow the party, but each time they got burned.
The first on the chopping block was Mr Cantor. As House majority leader, he frequently undercut House Speaker John Boehner during his negotiations Mr Obama, when the new breed of hard-right conservatives demanded aggressive spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt limit. They also shut down the government in an attempt to defund Obamacare. Meanwhile, Mr Ryan hoped to offer an alternative to Democratic policies, which led to him becoming Mitt Romney’s vice presidential nominee in the 2012 election.
After Mr Obama wallopped Republicans that year thanks to a coalition of young people, Black voters and Latino voters, the GOP establishment expressed some openness to immigration reform, as did Mr Ryan and Mr Cantor. But the base of the GOP spat out the idea.
Back in his home district, Mr Cantor lost his primary to a Tea Party hellraiser. While Mr Cantor rarely returned to his district, many blamed his loss on his support for immigration reform. That led the GOP to all but abandon the policy and Mr Boehner never took up the immigration bill that the Senate passed largely because he feared angering conservatives.
When Mr Boehner resigned, Mr Ryan explicitly promised the hard-right conservatives who had forced Mr Boehner’s resignation that he would not try a compromise on immigration with the Obama administration when he became speaker. That would be the least of Mr Ryan’s worries as Mr Trump’s hostile takeover gave the extremists in his conference a powerful advocate.
Whereas Mr Ryan hoped to adhere to the ideals of limited government, free trade and slashing entitlements, Mr Trump bashed trade agreements in equal measure that he did immigrants and talked about a massive government undertaking in the form of a wall on the US-Mexico border. Steve Bannon, Mr Trump’s consigliere, notably called Mr Ryan a “limp-d*** motherf***** who was born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation,” a conservative think tank in Washington.
All of that proved to be too much for Mr Ryan and he soon called it a day after he failed to repeal Obamacare or cut Medicare and Social Security.
Enter Mr McCarthy. Despite the dubious conclusion of his tenure, Mr McCarthy initially seemed to be the Republican leader best positioned to split the difference between the right-right wing and the establishment. He stayed on Mr Trump’s good side to the point that Mr Trump called him “My Kevin”. He recruited more women and people of colour to run in swing districts. As a result, when Democrats won the White House in 2020, Republicans put a significant dent in the House Democratic majority.
He cosied up to in Jim Jordan, the man Mr Boehner once called a “legislative terrorist,” and Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene – the conspiracy-mongering QAnon-believing election denier – in hopes he would avoid the same fate as Mr Cantor and Mr Ryan. He even got Mr Massie on his side in exchange for a subcommittee chairmanship.
In the end, Republicans won a razor-thin House majority in 2022, meaning Mr McCarthy had to deal with a much more powerful extremist faction that took him to 15 rounds to become speaker. That loud faction also adamantly opposed anything resembling governing, meaning Mr McCarthy frequently needed to rely on Democrats for the government to pay its bills and keep the lights on as well as stunts like censuring Democrats like Rep Adam Schiff and removing Ilhan Omar from the House Foreign Relations Committee. But that didn’t stop the most extreme voices from ejecting him from the speakership.
Now, the House GOP has abandoned any pretense of appealing to or governing for any group beyond its base. The new House Speaker Mike Johnson is an election denier more focused on impeaching Joe Biden rather than governing with him. And as far as immigration, Republicans are seeking to extract as many provisions not just to restrict illegal immigration but also legal migration for something as basic as supporting an international ally like Ukraine. Their opposition to anything resembling taxation has meant that they haven’t been able to pass aid to Israel after the deadly attack by Hamas.
Mr McCarthy’s downfall serves as a cautionary tale now: it is impossible to accommodate extremist factions within the Republican Party and they will ultimately consume any leader who tries to do so. Now, Mr McCarthy finds himself kicked out of the very country club he once ran.
