Let Speaker McCarthy Happen Now
I am not a Kevin McCarthy fan. I think he is both rudderless and unprincipled. He is an opportunist who has not sold anyone on a reason for him to be Speaker of the House of Representatives except that it is his time. We should not reward ladder climbers who, having gotten to the top rung, just expect to climb it. But, his lack of principles has now opened the door for the biggest conservative gains in Congress in decades and he should be Speaker of the House.
Twenty brave members of Congress have weathered the storm of bullying and attacks against them for refusing to support McCarthy. Some of them are personality driven and do not like McCarthy. Some of them are deeply principled, convictions based politicians who seem out of place in Washington. They truly believe things and want to get things done in a certain way.
The ring leader of the principled congressmen is Rep. Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas and a personal friend. Ted Cruz named Chip his first Chief of Staff. He worked for Texas Governor Rick Perry before that and Senator John Cornyn. He also served for a time as Texas’s Deputy Attorney General. Years ago in the Senate, Chip Roy led a staff rebellion against the nomination of Harriet Miers to the United States Supreme Court. His efforts directly impacted the shift of the Supreme Court by scuttling Miers in favor of Justice Sam Alito, who just wrote the decision ending Roe v. Wade. Chip plays the long game and is an unsung hero in the battle against abortion in America. He is a convictional conservative.
Roy led a group of conservatives in battle against Kevin McCarthy. That group has now won. They have gotten everything they asked for. They wanted a real, legislative plan for a balanced budget over a ten year period. They now have it. They wanted to end governance by crisis whereby House leadership waits until the debt ceiling or government shutdown has arrived then forces through a multi-thounsand-page piece of legislation designed to prevent the crisis. They got it. They wanted conservatives on the House Rules Committee to be able to decide what legislation goes to the floor. They got it. They wanted defense cuts to force the Pentagon to finally deal with its waste, fraud, and abuse. They got it.
They got everything they wanted and then some. The condition for the gains is supporting Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the House. After twelve votes, Roy and most of the twenty hold outs have acquiesced and supported McCarthy. On the thirteenth vote, after Roy finally voted for McCarthy, the House broke out into a round of applause.
Unfortunately, now there are still holdouts who are driven more by disdain of McCarthy than principle. I share their disdain. But each of these people claims to be a conservative. We are on the cusp of long term legislative gains for conservatives locked into House rules that would take a two-thirds vote of the House to change. The question for the personality driven congressmen and women is do they want to advance the convictions on which they have campaigned or do they want to end McCarthy?
As tempting as it might be to just end McCarthy’s Speakership, to do so would be to scuttle all the gains Congressman Chip Roy just negotiated. The next Speaker, whoever that might be, would not have to acquiesce. There would be no need to go through the process again. The holdouts might argue that any nominee would have to agree, but not every other nominee would be as unprincipled as McCarthy, willing to give away all his power for sake of a title.
Kevin McCarthy has just weakened the power of the Speaker to levels unseen in modern American history. He gave away the store just for the title of shopkeeper. But by leveraging his lack of principles against him, Congressman Roy and the other principle driven members of congress have just made real, substantive, long term gains for the conservative cause, responsible budgeting, and small government sanity. It is time to let McCarthy be Speaker and take this deal.
The list of the principled objectors who are now willing to support McCarthy on the strength, terms, and binding nature of the deal are:
Josh Brecheen
Dan Bishop
Michael Cloud
Andrew Clyde
Byron Donalds
Paul Gosar
Anna Paulina Luna
Mary Miller
Ralph Norman
Andy Ogles
Scott Perry
Chip Roy
Keith Self
Victoria Spartz
.
IMHO: a word on the pitched battle for the Speaker’s job in the 118th Congress.
The narrow Republican majority achieved something I didn’t expect to see in my lifetime - a renewed respect for the institution of the House of Representatives driven by a Tiananmen Square-like stand by principled conservatives less interested in who swung the gavel than in the rules that would restrain them.
The band of “holdouts” and their 15-round bout with a political Goliath bred in the John Boehner swamp now gives the larger GOP delegation a chance to transform itself from the top-down Democrat-lite go-along-to-get-along spending machine they have been into a functional political body that will respect the voice of a party that continually votes for change but never sees it when their elected representatives head to DC only to be subsumed by “The Political Machine.”
We now have a somewhat de-fanged Speakership (thank you Chip Roy), still powerful to be sure but no longer the sole authority within the House GOP. It’s not a job with the perks Kevin McCarthy wanted but it’s a job that will very quickly demonstrate whether he can become a true leader and not the ruler he wanted to be. If he tries to rule with an iron fist anyway, the good news is that his stalwart conservative opposition forced Mr. McCarthy to accept a rule that would allow him to be challenged quickly and with meaningful consequence - including removal.
Kevin McCarthy has won the job of his dreams. But he now faces the dawn of a new reality that demands he awaken from that dream to govern by principle rather than fiat and steer the House by a return to order the founders intended. Otherwise, his will be a short-lived tenure. I wish him well in the challenges he - and the Republic - will face ahead.
I understand McCarthy agreed to the formation of a "Church Committee" and that Thomas Massie will lead. Good. But I really really want to see what happens when subpoenas are ignored, or responses are mostly redacted.