Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) speaks with reporters at the Capitol, September 30, 2023.
House Democrats now face a weird strategic choice—whether to save Kevin McCarthy’s Speakership and what to demand in return. The Democrats, justifiably, loathe McCarthy and don’t trust his word. To appease his far right, he went back on his budget agreement negotiated with President Biden last May to solve a contrived debt crisis. And he has gone along with a totally bogus impeachment witch hunt against Biden.
Florida Republican Matt Gaetz vows he will file a motion to vacate the Speakership. Gaetz, who has a personal vendetta against McCarthy, has said he will keep filing such motions until he succeeds. McCarthy says, bring it on.
At this writing, it is not clear whether Gaetz (who is at least as unpopular with his colleagues as McCarthy is) will have the votes. But the likelihood over the medium term is that McCarthy’s survival will depend on the votes of Democrats. Those votes were the only way McCarthy could pass an extension of government funding, as Republicans couldn’t come up with their own funding bill.
The situation raises several intriguing questions. What should Democrats demand in exchange for a de facto governing coalition with McCarthy and at least some of the less extremist Republicans, and what could they plausibly get? The first demand is to restore the funding for Ukraine that McCarthy stripped from the continuing resolution that kept the government open. But if McCarthy delivered that, it would enrage more of the Republican ultras, and produce more votes for Gaetz.
And what are the risks for Democrats of a deal with McCarthy? One risk is that such a deal will splinter the Democrats, who need above all unity. There are many Democrats, including most of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who say they will not vote for McCarthy under any circumstances. But centrist Democrats, who promote a bipartisanship that is entirely illusory under current circumstances, like the idea.
Even if Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries sought to whip his caucus to vote as a bloc, it’s doubtful that he could succeed. Jeffries, who excoriated McCarthy’s untrustworthiness in an impromptu mini-filibuster buying time for the caucus to debate whether to take McCarthy’s eleventh-hour deal, is keeping his own counsel while Gaetz tries to round up votes.
The other problem for Democrats is that this drama is endless. Republicans will pull variations of the shut-down-the-government stunt several times in coming months. Congress will have to do this all over again before November 17, when the continuing resolution expires.
In addition, appropriations for the new fiscal year still must work their way through various subcommittees, and the money being approved by House Republicans falls far short of what was agreed to in McCarthy’s deal to keep the government open. This way, McCarthy insidiously tries to have it both ways: give the Democrats a continuing resolution to keep spending roughly at current levels, while taking that away and appeasing the far right via cuts in appropriations.
A de facto, very unstable coalition between McCarthy and the Democrats is one possibility. A better coalition is an agreement between Democrats and non-MAGA Republicans to elect one of the few moderate Republicans as Speaker, with Democratic support.
