After the 2022 midterm elections, a significant group of House Republicans opposed Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become the next GOP House speaker, but they struggled to settle on a credible rival. It’s one of the reasons the far-right members were able to delay McCarthy’s effort but not stop it.
As many of those same House Republicans prepare to take aim at the GOP leader again, they seem to realize that they’ll need a better plan if their scheme is going to work. Politico reported last week, for example, that McCarthy’s intra-party foes “are privately mulling who they could back if the California Republican loses his gavel.”
That same report quoted Rep. Dan Bishop, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, saying, “I think I know who the right person is,” though the North Carolina Republican would not disclose the name he had in mind. Bishop added, however, that he’d “muttered” the name he has in mind to a couple of other people and “have found surprisingly that they have been thinking very much the same thing.”
Two days later, Rep. Matt Gaetz — by most measures, McCarthy’s most ardent GOP foe — was a little less cagey during an on-air interview. “Our whip, Tom Emmer, is someone who has a lot of credibility,” the Florida Republican told Newsmax.
It was against this backdrop that The Washington Post reported overnight:
A contingent of far-right House Republicans are plotting an attempt to remove Kevin McCarthy as House speaker as early as next week, a move that would throw the chamber into further disarray in the middle of a potential government shutdown, according to four people familiar with the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private talks.
The reporting, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, added that some far-right members are “coalescing around nominating a member of McCarthy’s leadership team, Rep. Tom Emmer (Minn.), to be the next speaker if they can successfully oust McCarthy.”
Politico published a related report suggesting that Rep. Andy Biggs has also “privately raised” the House majority whip as a potential McCarthy successor, though the Arizona Republican denied the accuracy of the reporting.
There are a variety of questions hanging over the process, none of which has easy answers. The first, of course, is whether far-right GOP members would actually force the issue.
It’s become increasingly easy to believe that such a showdown will happen, and McCarthy’s Republican opponents will try to take advantage of the chamber’s motion-to-vacate-the-chair rules. At that point, it would simply be a matter of majority rule: If the incumbent House speaker can maintain the support of a majority of representatives — from both parties — he’d keep his gavel. If McCarthy’s support fell short of a majority, he’d lose his gavel.
As for whether Emmer would want such a gig, the Minnesota Republican told the Post, “I fully support Speaker McCarthy. He knows that and I know that. I have zero interest in palace intrigue. End of discussion.”
Of course, if McCarthy were forced out by some members of his own conference, that “discussion” might change.
Under such circumstances, it seems likely that the conversation would focus on Emmer’s recent record, including the Minnesotan’s tenure as chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee in the 2022 cycle. Emmer made some rather bold boasts about his party’s prospects ahead of Election Day, which failed to materialize.
Finally, there’s the matter of what House Democrats might do if far-right members were to call the question. To assume that the Democratic minority is irrelevant is to get the broader dynamic backward: It would be Democrats, after all, who decided whether McCarthy stays or goes.
It was just over the last week or so when members of the House minority conference started having conversations about what they’d expect from the speaker in exchange for support. There’s no consensus wish list in place, though Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told Talking Points Memo this week she’d like to see McCarthy agree to some kind of “power-sharing” agreement.
Watch this space.