J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) leaves the House floor after being ousted as Speaker of the House, at the Capitol in Washington, October 3, 2023.
It’s too soon to sort out all the consequences of the coup against Kevin McCarthy, but here is a preliminary list.
The ouster of the former Speaker by a tiny fraction of Republican nihilists does serious damage to Republican chances of holding the House in 2024. Republican candidates, and not just the GOP incumbents in the 18 districts that voted for Biden in 2020, can reasonably be charged by Democrats as a party that cannot be trusted to govern. This will also spill over into the contests for the presidency and control of the Senate.
One thing that McCarthy did well was to raise tons of money. His leadership super PAC raised more than $250 million in the 2022 election cycle for House Republican candidates. Some kind of House leadership PAC will continue but without McCarthy’s personal Midas touch.
But the deposing of McCarthy makes it even harder to get through this budget season. Whoever becomes the next Speaker, there is simply no recipe that satisfies both the right and the far right, not to mention the Democrats in the Senate, the House, and the White House. If the next Speaker makes a compromise budget deal of the sort that cost McCarthy his job, he faces ouster all over again.
It’s a mistake to see the Republican split as normal conservatives versus a far-right splinter. The vast majority of the GOP caucus is almost as extremist on the issues as the Gaetz faction, wanting drastic cuts in domestic spending including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Some of the more florid lunatics in the Republican Caucus, including Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, did not even vote to oust McCarthy.
It has become conventional to view Matt Gaetz as someone purely on an ego trip to settle a personal score, with no convictions other than a wish to tear the House down. But if you listened to his performance last night, you could discern an ideology.
Gaetz’s attack on McCarthy for making a budget deal with Democrats is just a more extreme version of what most Republicans want. Only eight Republicans voted to depose McCarthy, but 90 voted against the budget deal that kept the government running for 45 days. The problem is that both the Gaetz version and the slightly less extreme version are wildly unrealistic, as substance and as politics.
Perhaps the most important takeaway is that this was a big personal win for Hakeem Jeffries. Going into this fight, some Democrats were uncertain whether their new leader had the stature or savvy to fill the giant shoes of Nancy Pelosi. He does. Over the weekend, there were rumblings that some “Problem Solver” Democrats were inclined either to support McCarthy against Gaetz or to vote “present” to tilt the arithmetic in McCarthy’s favor.
But Jeffries astutely orchestrated the Tuesday Democratic Caucus meeting so that it stimulated a litany of complaints on how McCarthy could not be trusted to keep his word, and the often fractious caucus voted as a bloc, surprising both Gaetz and McCarthy.
And Jeffries said one important thing that prefigures the only sensible endgame to this mess. Speaking to reporters after the closed-door caucus meeting, Jeffries Tuesday urged moderate Republicans to break away from the “extremists” in their party and join with Democrats “to move the Congress and the country forward.”
In practice, that could mean an ad hoc coalition with the 10 or 20 anti-MAGA Republicans to keep the government operating, or it could mean a moderate Republican Speaker elected mostly by Democrats. One can only imagine the reaction of Matt Gaetz to that.
