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Kevin McCarthy rose to the speakership despite being loathed by a lot of very online conservatives and a rump portion of his own party in the House. He had to win that role across multiple votes, which the media pronounced as humiliating, indicative of a GOP incapable of governing and all the normal tropes that partisans such as Jake Tapper deploy in place of real informed analysis of the situation.
This is why they’ve proven to be so utterly wrong about McCarthy’s strength as a leader since taking the gavel. Not only has he shepherded the slim Republican majority through multiple challenging situations in the early months, he’s also notched significant wins: the effective brushback of a White House veto threat on DC crime laws; the passage of HR-1, his energy bill, with bipartisan support; and now, he has garnered the votes necessary to succeed on his debt-ceiling gambit, with the bill passing 217-214.
How did he get here? He learned a lesson prior speakers didn’t — he turned the energy of the populist fiscal conservative right to his benefit instead of making them his adversary.
Back in 2015, in a different context, I wrote in my newsletter the Transom about the error made by speakers such as, at the time, John Boehner:
Republican leadership concedes that conservatives have energy, and many of the recently elected types have great ideas too — but the main gripe of leadership is that conservatives spend more time fighting Republicans than fighting Democrats, more time running down their own team than attacking the other. What’s the best way to handle Terrell Owens? Is it to send him home to do sit-ups in his driveway to teach him a lesson? Or is it to get him the damn ball? Giving an irascible self-absorbed star player a timeout doesn’t teach him a lesson, it just makes things worse. A good coach figures out how to use that talent and get the most out of it; he calls Randy Moss’s number a dozen times and wins.
Unity can’t be achieved by defenestration or by imposition. It’s achieved by recognizing what talents a faction has, and deploying those. Boehner’s win wasn’t a sign of his strength — had Paul Ryan or Jeb Hensarling wanted that job, it’s unlikely he would have it. They view themselves as team players, though, and didn’t jump in. The real failure of this leadership team is the belief that the Tea Party wingers are threats and rivals to be crushed rather than levers to be used. You may think they’re crazy, but properly harnessed and directed, they can actually help you win. The closing scene of Michael Clayton comes to mind, where George Clooney expresses his shock and regret that Tilda Swinton thinks he’s the guy to blow up in a car bomb. “I’m not the guy you kill. I’m the guy you buy!… I’m your easiest problem and you’re gonna kill me?” And that turns him into Shiva the God of Death.
The point at the time was that these conservative aspirants didn’t actually want the jobs of the leadership they were contending with — “they’d rather be fighting about head start block granting than blowing up the team. They want to define the terms of conservative policy flowing into the presidential elections. And their ideas are good. So why not run with them? The need here is for leadership to find productive partisan assignments for the wingers to get their aggro on.”
What McCarthy achieved by bringing Chip Roy, Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene to his side in his fight for leadership was that these would-be bomb-throwers are now invested in his success. This deal has to work out, for everyone’s interest to be served. And a debt-ceiling win with a message vote that challenges the Biden administration’s spending without risking default is a major step in that direction. Sometimes, you just let the Wookie win.
