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After House Speaker Kevin McCarthy struggled at a historic scale to earn his gavel in January, much of the commentary surrounding the California Republican was ominous. Would he fall on his face? Would he be ousted by his own members? Was he in over his head?
Nearly five months later, the conventional wisdom on the House GOP leader has largely been turned on its head. The Washington Times, an overtly conservative outlet, for example, published a report touting McCarthy’s “virtuoso performance.”
And while the Times’ report was a little over the top in its effusive praise, mainstream outlets are also patting McCarthy on the back. The Associated Press ran this piece yesterday, celebrating the House speaker as “a political survivor.”
Underestimated from the start, the Republican ... was never taken too seriously by the Washington establishment. With overwhelming House passage of the debt ceiling and budget deal he negotiated with President Joe Biden, the emergent speaker proved the naysayers and eye-rollers otherwise. A relentless force, he pushed a reluctant White House to the negotiating table and delivered the votes from his balky House GOP majority to seal the deal.
PunchBowl News was similarly impressed. “McCarthy was criticized as being a policy lightweight who never shepherded a major piece of legislation into law,” it told readers yesterday. “But after the last five months, McCarthy has successfully completed one of the thorniest legislative tasks a Republican speaker has to undergo — lifting the debt limit with a Democratic-run Senate and a Democrat in the White House.”
I realize that the House speaker fared better than expected in this process, but this is a parade in need of some rain.
At a superficial level, if we look at the debt ceiling fight as a pass/fail test, I can certainly appreciate why this looks like a success story for the House speaker: McCarthy wanted White House negotiations, and he got them. He wanted a deal, and he got one. He wanted a bill to pass, and it’s now poised to become law.
But the details matter.
Parts of the political world are suddenly celebrating a congressional leader who oversaw a dangerous and damaging hostage crisis he didn’t need to launch. McCarthy forced President Joe Biden to the negotiating table and secured a modest ransom, not through persuasion or the power of his ideas, but by threatening the people of his own country with deliberate harm.
Yes, I’m mindful that many observers — including me — were skeptical that he’d have the wherewithal to help craft a bill that could clear the House. But perhaps we can set the bar a little higher before patting McCarthy on the back for using extortion to get some of what he wanted?
What we saw in recent weeks was many things, but a “virtuoso performance” wasn’t one of them. The House speaker clashed with his own ostensible allies. McCarthy delivered entirely different and contradictory messages to different factions of his own conference, leading to ill-will and lingering mistrust. He peddled deceptive nonsense to the press, including the idea that his goals were actually his concessions.
All the while, McCarthy earned the ire of the right-wing House Freedom Caucus, whose members might yet try to take his gavel away.
This week’s vote — by most measures, the most significant legislative lift of his congressional career — only succeeded because Democrats provided the House speaker with the votes he needed, both on the procedural hurdle and on final passage. In fact, members of the opposition party supported the bill in greater numbers than his own party, after roughly one-third of the House Republican conference ignored McCarthy’s wishes and rejected the bill.
Perhaps it’s worth pausing before heralding the speaker as some kind of triumphant legislative mastermind?