Would-be speaker Kevin McCarthy walked onto the House floor this week with a diminished hand.
Before starting the new year, he’d already agreed to restore the motion to vacate the chair in the House rules package. This was a significant win for the House Freedom Caucus, and a major concession for McCarthy. Yet it still wasn’t enough to avoid this week’s floor fight.
Cable news pundits have tried to sum up the drama as a tug-of-war between MAGA Republicans and ultra-MAGA Republicans, but this lazy explanation gives Donald Trump too much credit. (In fact, Trump’s recent statements backing McCarthy didn’t move the needle at all.) Deep beneath the personalities and egos, the sprawling list of demands made by the anti-McCarthy rebels concern real questions about the institutions inside the House of Representatives, as well as power-sharing, governance, and the future of the GOP.
It’s easy to forget that the motion to vacate, allowing members to remove a speaker, has been part and parcel of House politics for some 200 years. For most of the history of the Republic, House speakers carried out the people’s business knowing that a single member of their party could force a vote of no confidence. In fact, it was Nancy Pelosi who stripped the motion to vacate from the House rules when she took the gavel. After watching the House Freedom Caucus depose John Boehner and scuttle McCarthy’s first bid for speaker, she wasn’t about to let her caucus do the same.
McCarthy’s promise to partially restore this parliamentary procedure in the rules package is important and even proper. Leaders ought to be accountable to rank-and-file members and the motion to vacate is the mechanism to ensure it. It’s also clear that the company of McCarthy skeptics and detractors is large enough to provide that accountability. But the Never Kevins’ other demands are more arcane.
Article I, Section 5, Clause 2 of the Constitution grants both the House and the Senate the freedom to determine how they will do day-to-day business. Colloquially, its referred to as the “Rules of their own House” clause. In practice, it means that each chamber can govern itself however it wants. The committee system, the parliamentary procedures for bringing bills to the floor, and the amendment process, which many view as fixtures of the House, are, in fact, optional.
That’s why the rules package is so critical to this floor fight.
The anti-McCarthy wing of the party has extracted numerous concessions that change the rules of the House by empowering rank-and-file members at the expense of House leadership. Both esoteric and stilted, these changes would limit bills for consideration to single subjects, incentivize spending cuts in the drafting and amendment process, require germaneness tests for amendments, automatically grant consideration to certain amendments, and require that bill text be available for members to actually read before being put to the floor for a vote.
While good changes to current practice in the House, they seriously disempower leadership. (With rules like these, giant omnibus spending packages will be much harder to force through the House, for example.)
Under the status quo, House speakers consolidate power in committee chairmanships, which always go to the speaker’s allies. Freedom Caucus holdouts want guarantees that certain committee positions will go to their own allies, breaking up a tight-knit group on top committees like Appropriations and Rules. Last night, McCarthy agreed to give choice spots on both committees to HFC members, relinquishing significant control of the floor agenda in the process.
The last and most provocative of all the demands coming from Republican hardliners is a question of electoral politics.
For years, the Freedom Caucus’s political action committee and the House leadership-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund have dueled in deep red congressional districts. The least talked-about demand from the dissenters is for the Leadership Fund to stay out of these races. It means that in safe Republican seats, the more moderate PAC would not back more centrist candidates. McCarthy has resisted this demand entirely, drawing outside conservative groups like FreedomWorks and the deep-pocketed Club for Growth to oppose him.
But last night, McCarthy conceded this too. The Congressional Leadership Fund will sit out future primary races for safe seats. It almost guarantees that future members from these districts will not be centrists or moderates but hard-right conservatives who are likely to increase the Freedom Caucus’s numbers and power.
And that means, if McCarthy wins the speakership, it will have cost him everything. An uncharacteristically strategic House Freedom Caucus has routed him. Congressman Jim Jordan may have to settle for “shadow speaker” in the 118th Congress, but Speaker Jordan is much more likely in the years to come.
