The deadlock in the election of the leader of the US House of Representatives has exposed divisions within the Republican Party and points to the problems the speaker will face in the next two years. Because the 20 congressmen representing the far right wing of the party who tried to prevent the election of Kevin McCarthy could take the fragile majority hostage and start blocking the works again at any time.
“We have a choice to make: Are we going to be the Radical 2% party? Because that’s what it comes down to,” Florida Republican Congresswoman Kat Cammack said after a rally of Republicans, quoted by NBC. “Kevin McCarthy is going to be Speaker of the House and I don’t care if it’s the first ballot or the 97th”, he added. A hundred years ago it took as little as one vote to choose the speaker and 160 years ago as little as ten – a record that has since been broken, with more than a dozen votes cast in four days.
In the past there have always been “rebel” votes, but the fact that Republicans only had four more congressmen than the 218 majority needed to elect the leader of the House of Representatives made every vote count this time. The “red wave” desired by McCarthy, minority leader since 2019, was not confirmed in the November midterm elections, with the Republicans winning just 222 seats and the Democrats 212 (one of the 435 seats in the House is vacant, if due to the death of Democrat Donald McEachin of Virginia).
A group of 20 lawmakers – called rebels or even “Talibans” – has been holding the House of Representatives hostage since Tuesday. This Friday, on the second ballot of the night, the number dropped to six, signaling a possible light at the end of the tunnel for McCarthy, who finally managed to win over his opponents. Without the election of the speaker, who is the third member of the state (after the president and vice president) and responsible for setting the legislative agenda, new congressmen cannot be sworn in, pass laws, form committees, or become public officials hire. to their offices.
Although the 20 congressmen voted more or less together in the first 11 ballots, their demands were different. Some wanted to change the rules to gain even more power – one of the demands to which McCarthy is said to have conceded was that one vote be enough to jeopardize the position of speaker – others the guarantee that they would have access to certain prominent positions in a specific committee.
Attack on the Capitol
Most of the group belongs to the so-called freedom rally, the far right wing of the party, which took on populist and nationalist traits during the time of former President Donald Trump. More than half of those who voted against McCarthy are “election deniers,” who claim the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump. This new chaos comes two years after the attack on the Capitol in an attempt to prevent the validation of Joe Biden’s election, and whose responsibility a House investigative committee attributed to the former president.
This Friday, in a date-marking ceremony, Democrats made it a point to link the current situation to what happened on January 6, 2021. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the attack should have served as a “call to attention” for Republicans to reject extremism. “Unfortunately, the total pandemonium wrought by House Republicans this week is just another example of how the extreme wing of the party, led by election deniers, is driving them further into chaos and making it impossible for them to govern.” referred.
Also among those trying to block McCarthy’s election was a group known as the “Never Kevins— those for whom the issue is personal because they feel he is not conservative or trustworthy enough. The California congressman, age 57, had tried to be a speaker back in 2015 and finally gave up before going to the vote because of another right-wing uprising, when Paul Ryan was elected.
This time, McCarthy didn’t want to give up, even at the risk of being virtually powerless if he got the job. Added to that is the certainty that he will have plenty of challenges on his agenda over the next two years if he can keep it up all this time. Trouble is expected when it comes time to vote on the budget or lift the debt ceiling.
This scenario is not positive for the Republican Party, which wants to regain control of the entire Congress (besides the White House) in the 2024 election. The November midterms showed that Trump still has power within the party, but perhaps not as much as he wanted – many of the candidates he supported performed worse than expected. However, the former president still appears as the favorite among Republicans in the 2024 election after announcing his candidacy last year.
Source: DN
