Reply to McCarthy, Scalise, Biggs, and Boebert in the First Five Minutes of the House Freedom Caucus

Before the announcement of who will be majority leader on Monday, McCarthy and Steve Scalise tried to calm the party down. Sources in the room said that McCarthy apologized to Gaetz at a meeting on Monday, after Gaetz criticized him in private.

“We need to have a real discussion about whether he should be the speaker,” Biggs, who was in Washington, DC, last week for House Freedom Caucus meetings, told reporters. We need to have a very frank discussion about where we are going to be going.

Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado said it was a “red line” for her, but not everyone in the Freedom Caucus is united on whether to make that a hard line.

Political segucigators cannot be defeated. According to leadership sources, members of the House Freedom Caucus were offered concessions by McCarthy, including the loss of the speaker’s capacity to cling on to power. But they refused, making clear that this is as much about personalities as ideology. They brand McCarthy as a sell-out, the biggest alligator in the Washington “swamp” whom they will never trust.

Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.: Gaetz has been a principal instigator and steadfast opponent of McCarthy in this process. “Maybe the right person for the job of speaker of the House is someone that has sold their shares for more than a decade,” Gaetz said Tuesday.

The House GOP, Rep. Norman Norman, and the Leaders of the Causal Lobby: Predicting the Future of the House of Representatives

CNN has yet to project which party will have control of the House of Representatives, though as of Friday morning, CNN has projected that Republicans have 211 seats to Democrats’ 198.

Norman said the group hopes to formalize a lengthier list of all the rules changes they are seeking. They are also pushing to delay next week’s internal leadership elections, though there is no indication McCarthy plans to do so.

The taxpayers who voted for the representatives deserve the credit, according to Norman.

Still the math looks tough for McCarthy since the Gaetz bloc is holding firm and McCarthy can only afford to lose four GOP votes and still win the speakership.

“With a slim majority, we shouldn’t be starting the C team,” Gaetz said. “We need to put our star players in a position to shine brightest so that we can attract more people to our policies and ideas.”

In the House, some Republicans are questioning their Leadership’s embrace of the MAGA wing, lack of a cohesive message on abortion, and decisions to spend resources in deep blue territory late in the game.

Both McConnell and McCarthy are moving full steam ahead with their planned leadership elections this week, and the Senate GOP will also meet Tuesday for its weekly closed-door lunch, where the internal blame game is sure to heat up.

GOP sources familiar with the matter told CNN that an Arizona Republican, a former chairman of the pro-Trump House Freedom Caucus, is considering a challenge to McCarthy. McCarthy has prepared his team for this possibility.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee chair, Rick Scott, is calling for a delay in the Senate leadership election because it doesn’t make sense this week.

The congressman from Arkansas said that it was important for Republicans to not start January 3 by fighting and not knowing what they were going to accomplish. “We need to be able to hit the ground running and demonstrate to the American people that the trust and confidence they’ve given to us by giving us a majority, albeit slim, was a good decision.”

The race for House GOP whip – a position that will only open up if Republicans win the majority – was already competitive, though Rep. Tom Emmer, who chairs the House GOP’s campaign arm, was seen as having the edge since he was likely to be rewarded if they had a strong night.

“They’ve been measuring the draperies, they’ve been putting forth an agenda. Pelosi told CNN that they haven’t won it yet. Depending on who was the majority in their party, they will make decisions about how to move forward.

Behind the scenes, the finger pointing has already begun, and those conversations are likely to accelerate as the full House and Senate return to Washington this week for the first time since the midterm elections.

In the Senate races that determined control of the Senate, others place the blame squarely on Trump. McConnell and his allies did well in Senate races, but it was Trump and his group that spent the smallest amount of money.

Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey said that there is a correlation between big losses and the rise of the anti-Semites, known as “MAGA” candidates. “I think my party needs to face the fact that if fealty to Donald Trump is the primary criteria for selecting candidates, we’re probably not going to do really well.”

McConnell and Scott have been at odds all election cycle when it comes to strategy, with McConnell sounding the alarm about candidate quality while Scott took a hands-off approach in the primaries.

When pressed on whether he would challenge McConnell for the top spot, Scott didn’t rule it out — even though he would have little chance of succeeding.

On one side is McCarthy, who is refusing to cede his personal aspirations for power despite growing evidence he may never win the votes he needs in his own party. He will be weakened as a speaker even if he does squeeze through after repeatedly agreeing to his critics.

“Basic political physics says you can’t appease the moderates and HFC all at the same time,” one senior Republican told CNN. If you are straddled by that fence, you should hope it is not barbed wire.

The Next Speaker of the House: Reheating before Elections and Putting a Hand on the Powers of Congress, according to Pelosi

Since 1923 the speaker of the House has not been re-elected on the first ballot. The new normal is already shaping up to be a politically fiery year, with razor thin margins in both houses of Congress.

CNN’s Dana Bash asked Pelosi if she would run for leadership before the party’s leadership elections.

According to a copy of the schedule shared with CNN, the Republican Party will hold a candidate forum and leadership elections on Tuesday, November 15.

If McCarthy fails to win a majority in Tuesday’s vote, it will be the first time in 100 years that a speaker needs more than one vote to win.

The first election on November 30 will be for the next House Democratic Caucus Chair and whoever is elected to that role will administer the rest of the leadership elections.

To be elected to any position in Democratic leadership, a candidate needs to win a majority among those present and voting. If more than two candidates run and no one wins a majority, the candidate with the fewest votes after the first round of voting will be eliminated and voting will proceed to a second round. The process goes on until one candidate has a majority.

Emmer told reporters Tuesday he still plans to run and that he doesn’t know if a smaller majority impacts his bid. His pitch is similar to McCarthy’s, “we delivered.”

Emmer is running against Reps. Jim Banks of Indiana, the Republican Study Committee chair, and Drew Ferguson of Georgia, the chief deputy Whip, for the post.

The Democratic Caucus Committee Chair: Kevin McCarthy’s Challenge to SuperPACs and the Way to Bring Back the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

“Of course. The California democrat told Bash that he was not asking anyone and that it was a great thing. I am not asking anyone for anything. My members are asking me to consider doing that. Let’s just get through the election.

Currently, Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer serves as the No. 2 House Democrat, in the role of House majority leader, and South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn serves in the role of House majority whip. Massachusetts Rep. Katherine Clark serves in the role of assistant Speaker and New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries serves as House Democratic caucus chair.

The co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee, Joe Neguse of Colorado, has announced that he will be running for caucus chair to replace Jeffries who is term limited.

The race to lead the party’s campaign arm is starting to take shape after the current chair lost his reelection.

Tony Cardenas and others are in the running for that spot but others are also being considered.

Kevin McCarthy hopes to pass a test that will be crucial in his campaign to become Speaker despite his poor performance during the election.

The Idaho Republican said he’ll support McCarthy for leader. “He’s done a good job,” said Simpson.

“If we don’t unify behind Kevin McCarthy we’re opening the door to the Democrats to be able to recruit some Republicans.” said Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene

During a closed-door leadership candidate forum on Monday, Virginia Rep. Bob Good, a McCarthy critic, complained that a Super PAC aligned with McCarthy opposed some pro-Trump candidates, and criticized McCarthy for not calling to congratulate him when he won his primary, according to a source in the room. McCarthy replied that he directed $2 million to Good for his race. Good had to be gaveled down in order to cut him off from speaking so they could move to the next question, the source said.

McCarthy has promised to rule differently in the House, such as threatening to initiate an inquiry into Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and not take up bills from any GOP senators who supported the year-end spending package.

But McCarthy’s allies have recently attempted to convince moderate Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar to switch parties in hopes of padding their slim margins, according to two sources familiar with the conversation. Cuellar flatly rejected the idea. McCarthy’s spokesman said the GOP leader was not involved in these conversations, and that this is not a part of the strategy for the majority or for his speakership bid.

A source tells me that at a private forum in Minnesota, the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Tom Emmer, was pressed on his vote to codify same-sex marriage earlier this year. His response: “These divisive social issues shouldn’t be brought to the House floor.”

Kevin McCarthy: When Congress lost, and when Trump lost the House, what did he do after Trump impeachment? A conversation with McCarthy

Kevin McCarthy started his political career when he gambled in the California lottery when he was a kid. I scratched off my first three tickets. The most money you could win was $5,000. I scratch three of them and all three of them say $5,000. And I had never played the game before I’m going back to the checker to find out if I won. McCarthy recalled in a 2005 conversation that he was one of the first winners in California. That lucky break led him to invest that money, use it to open up a deli named Kevin O’s, and then sell that business to help pay his way through college. After 15 years working for Bill Thomas, he moved on to a job with another Republican. In 2002, he ran and won a seat in the California State Assembly where he was immediately elected party leader. I prefer to be called the Republican leader rather than the minority leader. I’m proud of my party,” he said at the time. McCarthy succeeded Thomas as congressman when Thomas decided to retire. In his campaigns since, McCarthy only ever faced token opposition for the seat representing his hometown, and he’s never won a general election with less than 62% of the vote.

In 2010, Republicans rode the Tea Party wave to win control of the House, but the cost was steep. Fights over raising the debt ceiling – something that had been routine and protected U.S. credit – and five years of an inability to get much of anything done, even with each other, frustrated John Boehner as speaker.

Ironically, McCarthy may have only himself to blame. He tied his party’s campaign for the November elections to Trump’s reputation, by quickly embracing him after initially railing against him. But many voters were alienated by the ex-president’s election denialism and landed McCarthy with a much smaller and more unworkable House majority than he expected.

Trump often called him “My Kevin” in private, and publicly backed McCarthy to lead House Republicans after they lost the majority in 2018. “We have a great man, and he’s going to be hopefully a great speaker of the House,” Trump said. During the first impeachment of Trump for abuse of power, McCarthy and Trump’s alliance was still strong. The day Trump was acquitted by the Senate, McCarthy tweeted out a video of himself tearing up the articles of impeachment cheering: “Acquitted for life!”

Kevin McCarthy was speaking to reporters in the Capitol. I’m staying until we win, he said.

“I think that Kevin knows that this is his last shot, and so he’s going to play this as long as” he can, said Representative Ken Buck of Colorado, who voted for Mr. McCarthy three times on Tuesday. He withdrew so that he would have a chance. He is not going to get another chance.

“If at some point, if Kevin did take his name out, then you would have good people (running). GOP lawmaker said that one of the guys would probably be him.

Scalise has repeatedly vowed to support McCarthy and refused to speculate on whether he would jump into the race if the GOP leader can’t get the votes.

No, I’m not going to discuss that at this time. We want to get it resolved by January 3. Kevin said there were a lot of conversations with the members who had expressed concerns.

Rep. Jim Jordan, the conservative set to become the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, went even further, ruling out jumping into the race even though Gaetz and other hardliners have urged him to seek the speakership.

Norman, a South Carolina Republican, left McCarthy’s office on Wednesday and said that he would vote for Andy for speaker. All this is positive according to him. We’re having good change, regardless of what happens. And you’ll see more of it.”

In addition to those five, a new group of seven Republican hardliners on Thursday laid out a list of conditions to earn their vote, although they did not specifically threaten to vote against McCarthy if their demands aren’t met.

Members are considering a number of other ways to curb the threat from right-wing colleagues, including ousting McCarthy holdouts from committee assignments. If it includes reinstating an arcane tool that would empower any member to bring up a floor vote to oust the speaker at any time, or if it includes teaming up across the aisle with Democrats to choose the next speaker, those are things that are under consideration.

Currently, the majority of the House GOP must push a motion to take the speaker’s chair. But some conservative hardliners are pushing for a single member to be able to call for such a vote, which they see as an important mechanism to hold the speaker accountable.

McCarthy has been adamantly opposed to restoring the “motion to vacate the chair,” and a majority of the House GOP voted against the idea during a during a closed-door meeting last month. McCarthy refused to answer the question if he would visit the issue.

The idea of people being sick and tired of the noise and fighting was one reason why a red wave didn’t show up. “And I know I get that wherever I go in my district is, ‘why can’t you guys just get things done?’”

That there is even a question over whether the words of the supposedly most powerful Republican-to-be in Washington or a renegade member carry more currency reflects McCarthy’s diminished authority – and highlights the risk that if he does have a speakership, it could be a weak one.

A Democratic Leader in the House of Representatives is Running. Rep. Kevin Cuellar and the Democrat Conference Planning Conference in Washington, Va.

Some Democrats have said they would entertain the idea, including Rep. Henry Cuellar, a moderate Democrat from Texas who told CNN some of his GOP colleagues have approached him “informally” about it.

Joyce said that some people reached out to him about possibly running, but he didn’t do it. Kevin is going to be the new speaker.

Hakeem Jeffries, the next House Democratic leader, said, “there are no behind-the-scenes conversations that he has had with Republicans to put up an alternative candidate.” But he refused to rule out a scenario where his caucus would help elect the next speaker if McCarthy couldn’t get the votes.

“Democrats are in the process of organizing the Democratic Conference,” Jeffries told CNN on Thursday. Republicans are organizing the conference. What will happen on January 3?

Some of the possible consensus picks included retiring lawmakers who voted to impeach Donald Trump, as well as a bipartisan co-chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus.

It would require agreement from all the democrats and five republicans in order for that to happen. He told CNN he wouldn’t be in Washington that day and would be skiing.

But Republican Rep. Bruce Westerman said this has happened before – nearly a decade ago in his state where minority Democrats in the Arkansas legislature joined forces with a handful of Republicans to elect a GOP speaker of their choice. Westerman privately made this case to his colleagues at a closed-door meeting this week.

The Ugly and the Evil: Replacing the Speaker of the House During the January 3, 2018 Insights into the 2021 Capitol Attack

Westerman was concerned about not being able to form a Congress and organize committees when he arrived on January 3.

Changing House rules is good for the party. He said he was not excited about any destructive movement.

There is concern among those who support McCarthy over what deals he could be willing to make in order to get the votes for speaker.

It was not clear whether Mr. McCarthy enlisted Mr. Trump to help his campaign, or if Mr. Trump was simply working on his own. The former president has spoken with Eli Crane, an incoming Republican congressman from Arizona, and Representative Ralph Norman, Republican of South Carolina, among others. A group of Republicans, including Mr. Crane and Mr. Norman, signed a letter demanding that their leaders in the next Congress give them the ability to vote to remove the speaker.

Nancy Pelosi quietly picked off defectors who would help her get the votes she needed to become speaker, in order to get the votes she needed. Ms. Pelosi won seven votes by agreeing to limit her tenure, 8 by promising to implement rules designed to promote more bipartisan legislating, and the sole challenger by creating a subcommittee chairmanship.

The California Republican has already made a series of pledges in an effort to appease the right flank of his party. He called on the homeland security secretary to resign or be impeached after he traveled to the southern border. He promised the woman who was stripped of her committee assignments for making violent and conspiratorial social media posts that she would be given a spot on the Oversight Committee.

He has threatened to investigate the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol, promising to hold public hearings scrutinizing the security breakdowns that occurred. He has been quietly meeting with ultraconservative lawmakers in an effort to win them over. He encouraged his members to vote against the spending bill on Monday night.

Republicans won control of the House through democratic means in a free and fair election. But their far smaller-than-expected majority is offering extra leverage to the kind of pro-Trump extremists many voters appeared to reject in last year’s midterms.

Replacing McCarthy to Make America Great Again: The Case for a Year-Ended Problem in the Reionization Era

One thing that complicates finding a replacement for McCarthy is that someone might realize how difficult McCarthy’s concessions are.

The California congressman has wanted to be speaker – badly – for years. He seemed willing to do a lot of things to get the job, including burrowing into former President Trump’s good graces.

McCarthy has become more combative with the press and has adopted some of the tactics used by the “Make America Great Again” movement, in order to seek out soundbites as badges of honor.

This is one reason why the current year-end tussle over whether to fund the government for a full year – a bipartisan framework agreement for which was announced Tuesday night – or for just a few months is so critical since it could dump a fiscal crisis on the lap of a weak and easily manipulated new speaker next month.

McCarthy was asked to speak by CNN on Tuesday about the newest inflammatory comments, but he didn’t believe she was being facetious. His attitude was not a surprise; it was consistent with his attempts to rewrite the history of the worst attack on US democracy in modern times, for which he briefly said Trump bore responsibility.

The same dynamic was at play when McCarthy declined to directly criticize the ex-president for meeting with white supremacist Nick Fuentes at a dinner also featuring Kanye West, the rapper now known as Ye, who has recently made a string of antisemitic remarks. The leader of the House lied at the White House when he said that Trump had condemned him four times without ever doing so.

Roy and 12 other Republicans sent a letter to GOP senators on Monday saying that if the government funding bill passes, they would oppose and whip against “any legislative priority of those senators who vote for this bill.” McCarthy said “Agreed” in response to their letter. Except no need to whip – when I’m Speaker, their bills will be dead on arrival in the House if this nearly $2T monstrosity is allowed to move forward over our objections and the will of the American people.”

The split raises questions about future tensions between Republicans in the House and McConnell, which could make it more difficult for some Republican senators to vote for a spending deal.

As frustration inside the House GOP has grown over a small band of anti-Kevin McCarthy lawmakers, an idea to strike back at the rebellious group has been floated among some Republicans: kicking these members off their committees, according to multiple members involved in the conversations.

It’s not certain whether moderates will follow through with the hardball tactics used by McCarthy if they end up backfiring. GOP sources don’t believe McCarthy’s supporters would take down the rules package if they were opposing it.

The dynamic offers a preview of the tensions between the moderate and MAGA wings that are likely to spill over next year with a razor-thin House majority. Part of what’s fueling the divide: House Republicans who identify as either centrist or part of the GOP’s so-called governing wing feel validated following a midterm cycle in which many extremists candidates failed.

Nancy Mace is a South Carolina Republican who said that people should not double down on failed policies. “There’s a reason the midterms were the way that they were: people who are left of center, right of center were the most successful.”

GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz, one of the handful of Republican lawmakers to come out in firm opposition to McCarthy as speaker, also acknowledged the reality of a narrowly divided House.

“We are in a community of common fate,” he told CNN. “We have to acknowledge that the ship isn’t going anywhere if five people won’t row in that direction. That is true on impeachment, on the speakership vote, on the budget and on policy choices.

There are some questions that remain unanswered such as what concessions will be made, and what other deals will be cut. Womack asked. “We got to be careful that we don’t give a lot of that leverage away.”

What have we learned from the House Freedom Caucus? An equivocal warning on McCarthy’s failure to vote as a bloc

In the last meeting before Congress, McCarthy allowed his members to discuss rules changes and concessions even though there is no resolution on the motion to leave the chair.

At this point many members are still preaching unity, calling the private deal-making part of the process, and emphasizing that the conference will come together when the new Congress begins January 3. To that end, the Republican Governance Group recently sent a letter urging their colleagues to unite behind McCarthy.

“It shouldn’t be a surprise that Republicans are out there having conversations and talking about different points of view,” GOP Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida told CNN.

The members from opposing groups have had time to have fun with one another. Burchett hosted a Christmas party in his office this week, where all corners of Capitol Hill came together, including some anti-McCarthy lawmakers. Burchett rode the skateboard of Gaetz’s wife while he stood by the Mountain Dew fountain and the “charcuterie plate” with Cheez Whiz and Ritz crackers.

There are different groups with differing opinions of most things, but at the end of the day, they all agreed on most things, and there was no reason for anyone to think it would be a problem next year.

Moore told CNN that there is not an enormous amount of drama. “I’ve met with House Freedom Caucus members to chat on what we agree on. And it’s an enormous amount.”

On Friday, McCarthy took to the airwaves to argue the detractors threaten to put the entire House Republican agenda in peril, warning that basic decisions on legislating and investigating will be “all in jeopardy” – such as getting a new select committee on China up and running. McCarthy needs four GOP votes on January 3 if all of them are in attendance and votes for a specific member.

McCarthy’s dire warning comes as the five GOP members – Gaetz, Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Bob Good of Virginia and Matt Rosendale of Montana – have warned they may vote as a bloc on January 3, meaning they’ll all vote the same way.

“Remember, this is a presidential year, so you only have so many months to really get out there and govern,” McCarthy said. You want to hit the ground running. If you lose a quarter, you don’t start strong. So you don’t get new, stronger candidates. You can’t supply those candidates with more resources to get the message out.

“This is a lot of unfinished business this year that they would have to take care of next year and I know from having been over there, that wouldn’t be easy, especially when you’ have a narrow majority.”

There is a silly season of a campaign. For most of us, that’s over after you get elected. The silliness is still evident since he is running for speaker of the House.

The five-person threshold is still too high for some, including Matt Gaetz of Florida andRalph Norman of South Carolina, who told CNN they are against McCarthy in his battle to take the speakership.

The moderate wing of the party may be willing to agree on a 50 person threshold if it were a five person threshold.

The Devil is in the Details: Confirming a Proposed Rules Package for the House Speaker’s November 3 Voting Referendum

All of this will be a major topic of discussion during a crucial conference call on Friday afternoon that McCarthy scheduled with the various ideological caucuses in the House GOP, just four days ahead of the January 3 speaker’s vote.

Norman said that the “devil is in the details” regarding thresholds and other rule concessions. “Until the details are spelled out, in writing and sealed with social media posts, people will not move on votes.”

In a letter to his colleauge, the California Republican said that he would make his case for the speakership and that he would ensure that the ideological groups are better represented on committees.

Not long after Sunday’s call, a group of nine hardliners – who had outlined their demands to McCarthy last month – put out a new letter saying some of the concessions he announced are insufficient and making clear they’re still not sold on him, though they did say progress is being made.

“Thus far, there continue to be missing specific commitments with respect to virtually every component of our entreaties, and thus, no means to measure whether promises are kept or broken,” the letter, obtained by CNN, states.

Some moderates – who fear the motion to vacate will be used as constant cudgel over McCarthy’s head – pushed back and expressed their frustration during the call, sources said.

Johnson said that he would swallow it if it helped McCarthy win the speakership. The rules package negotiated will be off the table if McCarthy loses his speakership bid.

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida pressed McCarthy on whether this concession on the motion to vacate will win him the 218 votes. McCarthy had said earlier that people were slow to move in the right direction.

Rep. Carlos Gimenez of Florida then repeated Diaz-Balart’s question, asking McCarthy to answer it. McCarthy’s response, according to sources, was that they have a couple days to close the deal, and they need to close.

Lawmakers worked over the weekend to finalize the rules package. Ultimately, McCarthy informed Republicans on the conference-wide call Sunday evening that he agreed to the five-person threshold on the motion to vacate – which he billed as a “compromise.”

The package released late Sunday includes giving five Republicans the power to call for a vote on deposing the sitting speaker; restoring the ability to zero out a government official’s salary; giving lawmakers 72 hours to a read bill before it comes to the floor; and creating a new select commit to investigative the “weaponization” of the Justice Department and the FBI.

The rules package does not change how discharge petitions are used, which allows them to be circumvented and force a bill to the floor if they have the support of 218 lawmakers.

Other notable items include the rules package that prohibits remote hearings and markups, eliminates staffer unionization efforts, and allows the House ethics committee to take ethic complaints from the public.

Four days before the House speaker vote, when his critics were still noncommittal about their support for his speakership bid, even after the California Republican had offered a number of key concessions – including making it easier to oust the sitting speaker – he attempted to give them the hard sell.

But now with just one day to go, a group of at least nine Republicans have made clear that they’re still not sold – despite McCarthy’s warning and even after he gave in to some of their most ardent demands, which he outlined during a Sunday evening conference call.

“To be honest, we are preparing for a fight. It is not the way we want to start out in our new majority, but you can’t really negotiate against the position that you won’t guarantee anything in return. Rep. Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota, a member of the centrist-leaning Republican Governance Group, told CNN.

“I give Kevin a ton of credit. He worked really hard to figure out a way forward after bringing everyone in. A way to make this place run better. The feeling is that some people are not negotiating in good faith.

McCarthy worked the phones to find consensus on changes designed to get over holdouts, and he spent the week before Christmas in deal-making mode.

The fight against McCarthy in the House is far from settled – but a team is fighting to halt the campaign of a lost speaker

He can only afford to lose four votes on the House floor, and so far, at least five Republicans have vowed to oppose him, with nearly a dozen other GOP lawmakers publicly saying they’re still not there yet.

That group is still pushing for a single member to be able to call for a vote toppling the speaker, which is what it used to be before Speaker Nancy Pelosi changed the rules, and they also want a commitment that leadership won’t play in primaries.

McCarthy had postponed the races for committee chairs until after the speaker vote. He said it was to allow freshman members to have input in the process, but other members believe it was a way to insulate himself from potential criticism from members who end up losing their races.

While some of the 21 may be waiting to see whether the wind blows in a different direction, Norman is not a fan of McCarthy. How to budget is the core problem with McCarthy.

In phone calls and text messages during the holidays, McCarthy’s defenders vowed to him and each other they wouldn’t let a handful of members control their conference.

McCarthy’s opposition, however, has also been working in tandem – and they are far more practiced in playing hardball, though the Freedom Caucus has been openly divided over McCarthy.

The committee in charge of administrative matters sent a letter last week outlining the practical implications and pitfalls of a drawn-out speaker’s fight. Without an approved House Rules package, the memo outlined that committees won’t be able to pay staff.

The same memo, which was first reported by Politico and obtained by CNN, also warned that student loan payments for committee staff wouldn’t be disbursed if a rules package isn’t adopted by mid-January.

It’s just one of the many ways a battle over the next speaker could paralyze the House and the Republican majority from operating efficiently in their opening days with some of the harshest penalties falling on rank-and-file staffers.

Even with the race far from settled, boxes from McCarthy’s office were spotted by CNN being moved into the speaker’s suite last week – a standard protocol, but a sign he’s committed to seeking the job.

One member of the group said that the standoff between pro- and anti-McCarthy groups is a weird game where both sides have ripped off the steering wheel from the dashboard.

Pennsylvania GOP Rep. Scott Perry, a leading McCarthy critic who signed onto a letter with nine other Republicans circulated on New Year’s day, tweeted: “nothing changes when nothing changes.” He cited the letter, which states “the times call for a radical departure of the status quo — not a continuation of the past, and ongoing Republican failures.”

The War of McCarthy and the Chaos Caucus: What Happens After the 12th Vote? The Real Game for the House of Representatives

How does this end? House precedent dictates that members continue to take successive votes until someone secures the majority to prevail. The House is useless unless a speaker is chosen. It cannot pass laws or even swear in its members.

If anything, McCarthy got weaker with each roll call, even if one senior GOP source told CNN he would never back down and “we’re going to war.” The rebels are now called the chaos caucus or The Taliban 20 by some GOP members.

The 12th vote for speaker began the same as the 11 before it. Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona was the first Republican to vote against McCarthy. Then Bishop, the next McCarthy opponent in the roll call, rose to cast his vote.

But when a red wave never materialized in the November midterms, the razor-thin majority that resulted for Republicans empowered a small band of conservatives – long distrustful of McCarthy – to make demands.

What has unfolded over the last two months is an all-out scramble for the speakership, which has taken the form of strategy sessions with close allies on and off Capitol Hill, intense negotiations over rules changes and non-stop phone calls with members.

The House was in limbo for a day after McCarthy appeared to have no strategy except a beat-the-head-against-a-brick-wall approach. Smartly dressed family members who traveled to Washington to see their new lawmakers proudly sworn in were bored and disappointed. The House adjourned and will resume on Wednesday at noon, even though there’s little sign the deadlock will break.

David Joyce, a McCarthy backer, said on CNN on Wednesday that this was the beginning of what would come when the debt ceiling is raised. “There will be a crowd and they’re going to continue to push and shove what they think is the agenda, and they’re 10% of our whole conference.”

Some small cracks in McCarthy’s support were starting to show in the third vote, after 4 p.m. ET, when Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida jumped camps from supporting McCarthy earlier in the day to backing Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio.

By backing Jordan, Donalds joined the original 19, including people like Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas and Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona, who are equally committed.

In 2023, Mr. McCarthy’s willingness to stand on the floor for failed vote after failed vote after failed vote after failed vote has a bizarre quality as an event on TV and Twitter. There were no meaningful changes over the course of three days. But the impasse and repetition is mesmerizing, operating in a space between institutional concern, dark comedy and some deep human element, since the dynamics of this willingness to lose are so unusual. Mr. McCarthy told reporters on Thursday that they will have votes and nothing will change. We are having really good conversations and progress.

The CNN analyst, moderate Republican and former lawmaker Charlie Dent said that Jim Jordan was the ring leader of these types of rebellions and that he had trained them well.

He is trying to get the guys to back off, they won’t. And so, I mean this is the most surreal thing I think I’ve seen on the House floor in all the years I have been around, because he was the quintessential rebel and he can’t control them,” Dent said.

Bipartisan bipartisanship in the House and Senate of Representatives to the 2019 Kentucky Bridge Debt Ceiling Measure, CNN’s Todd Bolduan, and a CNN photo opportunity

The House might have a similar set of calculations today. A large majority of Republicans want McCarthy, who has been a staunch ally of former President Donald Trump, but if the prolonged battles of the 1850s are any guide, they would do better to select someone who is acceptable to the entirety of their caucus. Otherwise, they risk prolonging the balloting for days, weeks or even months.

Gaetz stood next to McCarthy and accused him of selling himself to get the speaker’s post.

This drama will make it difficult for the ultimate speaker in the debt ceiling issue to raise the debt ceiling in the year in which the economic crisis will occur.

“The Republicans have to at some point figure out what are we going to do here,” said the CNN anchor John King. “We are supposed to be the governing party of the House of Representatives and we cannot come to a consensus on who should lead us. So never mind about immigration, what we’re going to do about inflation, what we’re going to do about the border, America’s place in the world.”

That’s all on hold until they find a leader. Meanwhile, as House Republicans grapple in a very unpredictable way with how to convince their members who have no interest in the system functioning, there will be a highly scripted photo opportunity about bipartisanship in Kentucky on Wednesday.

A group of politicians, including the Senate’s Republican leader,Mitch McConnell, as well as the state’s Democratic governor,Andy Beshear, will make a announcement about funding to upgrade a bridge in Kentucky. There will be an Ohio Republican, Gov. Mike DeWine, and an Ohio Democrat, Sen. Sherrod Brown, also on hand.

Beshear told CNN’s Kate Bolduan on Tuesday that the bridge project will help the region’s economy and update a key piece of infrastructure with $1.6 billion passed through Capitol Hill in 2021 in the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

“I think it is also a great statement that there is nothing partisan about a bridge,” Beshear said. He later added the bipartisan quintet would “announce that we’ve done the right thing for our people. It is pretty refreshing.”

He will have to find a way to work with whoever the Republicans choose to be their speaker, and then also find a way to get around the lawmakers who have no problem shutting down the government.

The circus-style politics that Trump built on a foundation of rebels in the GOP is not gone, it is back and ties Washington in knots again. As a mark of how bad things are, the impasse over the speaker has prevented the GOP from even properly taking power given that lawmakers cannot be sworn in before a leader has been selected.

On a surreal day, the 118th Congress opened with Republicans fighting Republicans, while Democrats – who should have been mourning their lost majority – were joyous at the GOP circus they beheld.

Benghazi Special Committee: Where are we going? What do we need now? What can we do about it? Jeffries tells CNN

McCarthy told reporters late Tuesday that he didn’t think the day was going to get any more productive. He wouldn’t be dropping out of the race.

He said it was not going to happen and that he only needed 11 more votes to win, suggesting that he could get a number of members to vote present.

Gaetz said the right person for the speaker of the House may be someone who has been selling shares in themselves for more than a decade.

The former lawmaker in Washington state who voted to impeach Trump, lost a primary to a rival who supported the ex-president, who went on to lose the general election to a Democrat.

Democrats want to make political capital out of it so they can make the case that Republicans should be kicked out of power in the next election. Jeffries told his donors that he just watched Republicans plunge into chaos on the floor. “This changes everything for Democrats. We have a huge chance to step in and show what we can do.

Idaho Republican RepresentativeBlake Moore spoke to CNN on Tuesday arguing that there was an agenda and that it was up to the conference to implement it.

The motion to adjourn was in danger of failing, which would have forced the House to vote on the speaker. But two Democrats weren’t in attendance, and the House clerk gaveled an end to the vote, 216 to 214.

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right?” McCarthy said on Fox News. “But we put together a Benghazi Special Committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are going down.

The ostensible reason for the GOP-led Benghazi investigation was to find out what happened in an attack on an American embassy in Libya, where four people died – not to hurt Clinton. Clinton, the former secretary of state in the Obama administration, was the favorite to win the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination.

Two GOP sources familiar with the matter said McCarthy’s allies were panicking on Tuesday after the former president gave a tepid response to NBC News when asked about his support for McCarthy. Several McCarthy allies worked to get Trump to continue endorsing McCarthy but the former president declined to issue a statement.

The Case for a Lossy Congress: Trump’s Importance to the Vote of a Republican Speaker in the 2020 Reheaval

As for Trump, his very influence could end up playing a role in his defeat. Even though he can’t sway votes on Capitol Hill, he’s likely to confront politicians such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or former US Ambassador to the UN Haley, who are better able to present a more polished version of Trumpism. If the GOP is now full of Trumpian Republicans who are running with his trends, voters might want to pick someone else than Donald Trump to lead them in the next era.

He tried to be a tough guy at the eleventh hour, threatening the defectors with stripping them of committee assignments. It seemed that what he and his allies were intending was reversed by that.

Early on Wednesday, Trump delivered the kind of full-throated endorsement of McCarthy that the Californian must believe he was owed after his obsequious support of the ex-president following the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

McCarthy was opposed to this because it would make his job at stake on a daily basis. But in his last rounds of attempting to secure votes, he was reported to have given in even on this issue.

At the end of the day, the job of speaker isn’t supposed to be about one person’s ambition but what they can get done to fix problems in the country, and this is taking place at a time when people are already cynical about the intentions of politicians in Washington and what they are trying to accomplish.

For all the talk in Washington of “Dems in disarray,” this is again another example of the chaos that continues to surround House Republicans. How can they govern with a four-seat majority if they’re just going through all this to pick a leader?

McCarthy suffered a string of defeats on Thursday as the House took round after round of failed votes. McCarthy is at risk of further defections and a decline in confidence in him as the fight drags on. House Republicans are scheduled to hold a conference call Friday morning, a source familiar told CNN, and the House is set to reconvene at noon ET.

The reason: Voting to adjourn would require 218 votes, and Democratic sources say they would actively whip against a motion to adjourn. Plus some Republicans would likely vote against it as well.

The Rebels Against Correlation: Trump’s Promise to the House of Representatives versus his Democrat-Current Campaign

The member said Donald Trump’s statement that he would back McCarthy and that Republicans should back him was nothing to get excited about, but it was more helpful than condemning McCarthy if he had done so.

Another member warned that after Tuesday, it’s clear that the opposition to McCarthy is personal – meaning there may be little that he can do to turn the tide at this point.

As the votes stretched on Tuesday, the situation became even more dire for McCarthy, as the vote count in opposition to his speaker bid grew.

“I disagree with Trump. This is our fight. This isn’t Trump’s – and I support Trump. I disagree with it. Norman said that Kevin was going to censor him. Boebert said that her favorite president had called the rebels against McCarthy and told them to knock it off.

Gaetz, who has been an ardent supporter of the Trump campaign, refused to bow to Trump’s desire for a McCarthy speakership, raising new questions about the former president’s diminishing influence over Republicans during his third presidential campaign.

A person on the call said that a lawmaker told Trump that he should run for speaker himself. Trump demurred and continued to push this person to support McCarthy, claiming that he would be a solid “America First” supporter.

The Long, Strange History of Speaker Elections: Nathaniel P. Banks, Benjamin Pennington, and William A. Pennington

The author is a Ray Allen Billington Visiting Professor of U.S. History and a Long-term Fellow at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. He wrote a book called “Borem Friends: The Intricuous World of James Buchanan and William King”. He tweets about presidential history @tbalcerski. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

Is this long, strange history of speaker elections telling us about the divides of the day? In the speaker contests of the 1850s, the issue of the extension of slavery in the territories was the crucial factor that divided the two major parties. The Republicans chose a member of their own party as their first choice for speaker even though they didn’t get a candidate for the job.

The result has usually been a compromise by either choosing a new speaker or by placating the splinters in some significant way. We may be living a version of one or both of these scenarios again if history is any guide.

The race for speaker faced a serious challenge in the 19th century. A compromise candidate was found in Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts, a member of the nativist American Party, because Democrats and Whigs couldn’t reach a majority. Banks, who became speaker after 133 ballots held over two months, defeated Democratic challenger, William Aiken, Jr., of South Carolina, whose backers hoped that a plurality resolution would once again capture the votes of competing factions. Banks defeated Anne on February 2, 1856.

The House of Representatives was again divided four years later, with most Republicans looking to place John Sherman of Ohio in the chair. The Republicans tried, but failed, to use the plurality rule to end the debate. When a clear majority still had not emerged, Sherman stepped aside and urged Republicans to support Rep. William Pennington, a freshman congressman from New Jersey. Pennington was elected speaker after 44 ballots over eight weeks.

The tolerance for the progressive Republicans was short-lived, however. In 1925, after several progressive Republicans refused to support then-President Calvin Coolidge’s reelection bid, Longworth, who was then speaker, punished them by stripping them of their seniority within House committees. For all intents and purposes, the Republican Party had been purged of its liberal faction.

That’s why it was so thrilling to see McCarthy rejected on the first ballot. The second position in the line of presidential succession was left open. The swearing in of the new House was undone by it. The direction of the recently elected House Republican majority in the 118th Congress was left hanging.

It’s a very small minority of a slim majority that’s kept the House from moving forward and is on the cusp of derailing Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become speaker.

They don’t speak for the majority of Republicans. Less than 10% of House Republicans are anti-McCarthy Republicans, who have derailed his bid to become House speaker.

McCarthy’s opponents did not grow their ranks, but he still lost one vote and that was the Indiana Republican who voted present. Spartz told reporters her vote was intended to encourage the two sides to get back to the negotiating table.

Ken Buck of Colorado, a conservative republican, said on CNN that the 20 should be broken down. Buck had been viewed as a possible defector before this week, and he made clear that patience with these votes is waning.

He suggested McCarthy’s deputy, Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, as a possible consensus speaker who could speak to three varieties of the 20 anti-McCarthy Republicans.

Others want specific changes. “There are some of the others … who want changes in the rules and there are some others who care about policy,” Buck said. “So I think if Steve (Scalise) meets those three needs, he will be able to move forward and take the speakership.”

Some want to shut things down. If McCarthy wants to shut the government down rather than raising the debt ceiling then it is a non-negotiable for him, according to Rep. Ralph Norman. Future funding fights could pose a threat to the economy.

These lawmakers want painful cuts now to end deficit spending. If the US were to go broke, economists think it would cause the economy to go into a tailspin. A government shutdown is unpopular but would be less severe than they were in the past.

Where are the House Republicans? Sen. Chip Roy, Byron Boebert, and the Senate Minority Causal Causality Problem

That group includes Representative Chip Roy of Texas, the former chief of staff to Senator Ted Cruz, who has weaponized his procedural knowledge to force delays in House proceedings and call for an overhaul of the chamber rules. It also includes Dan Bishop of North Carolina and Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, a second-term Republican who emerged as a consensus pick for Mr. McCarthy’s foes on Wednesday. Mr. Donalds stated that he doesn’t want the position, but has now joined negotiations.

According to Bishop, democracy is in action. “If you’re not satisfied with Washington as it is, then you can’t be satisfied with doing the same thing as we start this Congress, I’m convinced.”

“The fact is that you never see a specific agenda that you know Kevin McCarthy’s going to go to the mat for, as opposed to sort of pablum or poll-tested language, indicates the problem,” Bishop said. It has been this way for 14 years, with all due respect to him.

“Let’s stop with the campaign smears and tactics to get people to turn against us – even having my favorite president call us and tell us we need to knock this off,” Boebert said on the House floor on Wednesday. I believe it needs to be reversed. The president needs to tell Kevin McCarthy that, sir, you do not have the votes and it’s time to withdraw.”

It is argued that the Republicans and Democrats are not that different if you watch enough Tucker Carlson on Fox. Carlson often uses the term “uni-party” to blast the funding bills that are signed into law. There’s some of that in the opposition to McCarthy, who has been part of the GOP leadership for years.

I feel that we need this area to operate differently, and that’s why I’m holding the line. It’s just something that I believe,” Rep. Chip Roy of Texas told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday.

Roy said he’s among the fiscal conservatives who want to “stop the train of the swamp,” which he said is made up of Republicans and Democrats, “power brokers and the defense industrial complex.” He argued that there are special interests working together to push government funding bills like the one that was passed last month.

Roy and Donalds have joined with others who want a single member to be able to force a vote on the removal of a sitting speaker.

The appropriations process does not allow for open amendments, and we can do nothing about it. “I think that needs to stop,” she said.

Why did Donalds get the bill? An outburst by the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus after his four-year campaign

McCarthy offered concessions to the hardliners like Roy including a promise to give 72 hours to read a bill before it goes to the floor for a vote.

He agreed that just five Republicans would be allowed to force a vote to remove the speaker.

When CNN’s Manu Raju and Veronica Stracqualursi asked Donalds, who has been getting votes from the hardliners Wednesday, if he wanted the job, he said, “Nah, not really.”

The problem, however, is that Congress has resorted to omnibus bills in recent years for a reason – it has been so polarized and dysfunctional that the only way to get any bill to the president’s desk is to cram all the spending in together.

Even after Donald Trump’s appeal to Republicans, the fourthballot vote signaled that the Republicans were not even close to breaking the paralysis in the chamber.

The endorsement failed to convince a single person to change their mind. With a fifth vote underway, the Republican leader and his allies still were working behind closed doors trying to secure the votes.

For now, there is an uprising waged by ultraconservative lawmakers who for weeks have held fast to their vow to oppose Mr. McCarthy.

On Tuesday, right-wing Republicans coalesced behind Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a founding member of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, as an alternative to Mr. McCarthy, but Mr. Jordan, a onetime rival who has since allied himself with Mr. McCarthy, pleaded with his colleagues to unite instead behind the California Republican.

The definition of party loyalty used to be voted on by every member of each party. For 50 years after World War II, there was not a single stray vote cast for anyone other than the two major party nominees.

The 1922 Decelerating Fiasco: The Failure of Warren Gillett to Win a House of Representatives in the First Five Decades

Still, a distant mirror can show us things, and even across 10 decades of profound change, there are parallels between this week’s meltdown at the outset of the 118th Congress and the fiasco that occurred in the 68th.

But in both cases, the results of the latest November elections had been somewhere between disappointing and devastating, leaving the party clinging to majority control. The power of individual committee chairs resulted in deep internal disputes over rules and procedures.

In neither case had the nominee himself been especially controversial. Each had risen through the ranks, a survivor of earlier leadership upheavals, generally compatible with the party’s broad rank and file.

But having reached the top of the leadership ladder, these men represented a party establishment regarded with hostility by a potent faction of the party. They became the embodiment of that faction’s grievances.

Gillett was a Brahmin with a Harvard law degree and had served in the House for 15 years. He had first grasped the big gavel years earlier, after Republicans seized the House majority in the 1918 midterms the month World War I ended.

Two years after that, Gillett’s party rode to a huge majority on the same postwar wave that swept Warren G. Harding into the White House in 1920. The party of Lincoln was gaining ground in most of the country and beginning a decade of Washington domination in the White House and Congress alike.

The party’s progress was halted during the brief time of the Harding administration. The economy was still recovering from its postwar recession and labor unrest was widespread, including major strikes by coal miners and railroad workers.

In 1921 and 1922, the House brought criticism when it refused to accept the official U.S. Census of 1920. That renewal of the decennial study documented how immigration had exploded and, for the first time, more Americans were living in urban areas than rural.

These controversies, coupled with the typical swing of the midterm political mood led to Harding’s GOP losing 75 House seats and a net of 6 Senate seats in 1922. It was a worse shellacking than Barack Obama or any other president of the past four decades would experience in his first midterm.

The first session of the Congress was not convened until the fall of 1923 under the congressional schedule at the time. In the meantime, Harding died in August and was succeeded by his vice president, Calvin Coolidge. The speaker vote began on December 5. The schedule adopted as part of the 20th Amendment in 1933 is the current one.

The First Democratic Congress: When Gillett and McCarthy vowed to Protect Procedural Reforms, the Founding House Revisited

With a majority barely larger than Republicans have now, Gillett found it more difficult to corral the factions within his party. McCarthy got more votes on the first ballot than he did in his test this week.

The New York Times named some of the 17 House members who would cast their first round speaker votes as radical progressives. A former prosecuting attorney from Racine, who died in 1931, worked for southeastern Wisconsin from 1893 to 1919 and again from 1921. Cooper lost one time, in 1918, due to his opposition to U.S. entry into World War I.

Cooper, whose parents had operated a station on the Underground Railroad by which escaped slaves reached freedom, was a longtime ally of Wisconsin’s legendary progressive governor and Sen. Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette. When Cooper was opposing Gillett in the House, LaFollette was conducting a smaller-scale revolt against the GOP leaders in the Senate.

Gillett survived. Although the voting continued for a period of time, there was no clear alternative to get a majority. His No.2 leader, Nicholas LongWORTH of Ohio, was able to help him win over the Cooper voters. Widely viewed as Gillett’s heir apparent, Longworth was able to convince enough of the progressives that there would in fact be procedural reforms.

According to Boebert, the country was watching democracy in action, even as McCarthy repeatedly racked up around 200 votes from his conference while his various radical opponents could only attract around 20. (The defections made it impossible for McCarthy to get a majority of the House’s support since Democrats backed their own leader, Hakeem Jeffries, who routinely got more votes than McCarthy, but also short of 218).

For some of McCarthy’s critics, a major motivation has been the decentralization of authority in the chamber. They want less reliance on the leadership and more empowerment of the committee chairs.

They wanted a rule change that would make it easier for the use of a motion to leave the chair. That provision allows a lot of members to get a vote on the presiding officer, a threat to replace the speaker.

At the height of his power, Cannon not only chose all the committee chairs, he chose all the members of all the committees. He was chairman of the Rules Committee and he determined which bills and amendments would be allowed on the floor and which members would be permitted to speak.

One inquirer who asked for a copy of the House Rules in that era received a photo of Joe Cannon in an envelope.

When Cannon’s high-handed practices had become intolerable, a coalition of Democratic members and Republican progressives put together the bipartisan majority needed to “vacate the chair.” Cannon remained Speaker speaker but stripped of most of his powers. Defeated in the 1912 election, he returned two years later and served again as a rank-and-file Republican.

The House Office Building is where the offices of House members are located. It was then called the Old House Building. Cannon was the name it was given in 1962. It stands as a monument both to the preeminence of the speakership and the impermanence of power.

The Case for a Better House: Infuriating the Right-Handed Candidates Or Inflicting More Money? The Case of Kevin McCarthy

The new GOP-led House was in for a rude shock on Wednesday after the right-wing radicals blocked his bid for power in six humiliating votes.

He could be a hostage of his own party’s most extreme voices if the moves were agreed upon. Congress facing critical decisions later this year including a need to raise their borrowing limit, a duty that if not fulfilled could cause the US and global economy to be in a crisis, should a neutered speaker not be able to force hard votes.

The proposals surfaced after the new House majority finally agreed on something Wednesday: following another day of feuding and insults, they narrowly voted to adjourn their futile search for a speaker until Thursday.

When the vote closed, Republican benches erupted with cheers, which showed how bad the situation is for the GOP because it cannot perform the only task it currently has, choosing a leader.

“The country or Kevin McCarthy. Which should have more weight?” said recently retired GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who is now a CNN political analyst.

On the other side is a band of right-wing zealots, holding their party, the House and the country hostage – some with no clear objective other than to destroy the idea of governance itself. They want chaos to be the point.

But as humiliation piled on humiliation for the California lawmaker, there was the merest hint of a lifeline as a divide inside the anti-McCarthy block began to open.

The Problem for the House is in the Chaos, not in the Desperation (Pseudo-Desperation) Speaker, Rep. Chip Roy

Several lawmakers who desire changes to the way the House works reported genuine progress in talks with McCarthy. One of their number, Texas Rep. Chip Roy, predicted he could bring over 10 votes if the talks pan out.

The question is whether another day of pointless voting on Thursday will prompt members to begin to consider whether he should step aside for a more universally trusted colleague – perhaps Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, for instance. Many Republicans are complaining that their hopes for quickly wielding power and throttling the Biden administration have been dashed.

There were hints on how an end to the battle for the speaker’s gavel may unfold during another Groundhog Day in the House. It also provided insight into the new balance of power in Washington and how Congress will work (or won’t) in the months ahead.

The process should be about the process, but if it’s the other way around, it’s not as constructive. He told CNN he had no idea how many were in either camp.

Roy argues that the House is finally having consequential debates. Recent Democratic and Republican speakers have made it easier for leaders to enforce party line discipline, meaning that the committee process and debates on the House floor have been reduced as a result.

Some Republicans accuse their colleagues of grandstanding and of using the spotlight to raise campaign cash and to drum up appearances on conservative media. If there’s a philosophical grounding to the opposition, it’s as the latest expression of the longtime anti-establishment wing of the GOP that seeks to neutralize government itself.

Donald Trump sent the politics of destruction into motion with his vow to drain the Washington swamp. Steve Bannon called it the deconstruction of the administrative state at the start of the Trump administration. McCarthy has cozied up to Trump and appeased the extremists, but the problem for him is negotiating with someone who wants chaos.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/05/politics/mccarthy-desperation-speaker-analysis/index.html

Back to Biden, Not The Way The GOP Spent a Single Day: After Two Years in Political Exile in the House and the Teasers Who Left Behind

It was a blast from the social media past and Republicans would have jumped in line. But no longer. It didn’t appear to change a single vote.

Her rebuke was the latest sign that after two years in political exile, a disastrous intervention in the midterms and a low energy 2024 campaign launch, Trump’s juice isn’t what it once was in GOP ranks in the House. While the ex-president’s rapport with the Republican base surely remains intact, this kind of insubordination is unlikely to have gone down well in Mar-a-Lago.

The spectacle in the House on Wednesday had more in common with the chaos and recrimination that unfolds in parliaments in Europe or Israel, where it can sometimes take weeks or months to arrive at a leader or governing majority, than in the US House, where the vote for speaker is normally a formality.

“It’s embarrassing for the country,” President Joe Biden said on Wednesday, as he capitalized on the chaos in an event in Kentucky highlighting bipartisan political leadership over his massive infrastructure package, appearing with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.

He also agreed to allow for more members of the Freedom Caucus to serve on the powerful House Rules Committee, which dictates how and whether bills come to the floor, and to vote on a handful of bills that are priorities for the holdouts, including proposing term limits on members and a border security plan.

It remains unclear if he will be able to lock in the 218 votes he needs to win the gavel, despite the concessions he proposed late Wednesday.

McCarthy and his allies are trying to chip away at the opposition of conservatives by negotiation, and there are indications that some progress is being made.

McCarthy had been in talks with Roy, who told GOP leaders he thought he could get 10 holdouts to come along with him. McCarthy also met separately Wednesday evening with freshman members who voted against him.

“There were a whole bunch of members that were involved in this, and there are some folks now that are sitting down and talking about that discussion to see where they want to go with it next,” the Minnesota Republican said.

A moderate Republican told CNN that they are willing to talk about the concessions and not be happy with them.

Reply to Gosar’s “Controvert on the Status Quo”: Nominating a New Leader of the House Freedom Caucus

The fear is that lowering the threshold for a vote to oust the speaker to one member will make governing on items like the debt limit and funding almost impossible.

I am willing to hear discussions despite my dislike of the rules. I think they’re a mistake for the conference. These handful of folks want a weak speaker with a four-vote majority. The public will not like what they see of the GOP, I fear,” the member said.

The core of this group are anti-establishment, ideologic skeptics of government. They want it to be less expensive, spend less and be hard line on immigration. Donald Trump endorsed most of the candidates, and many are election deniers, but he’s only a part of it.

A representative from the House Freedom Caucus wrote a letter to his colleagues about concerns about the centralized decision making power and the inability of some bills to be passed.

The other congressmen who signed the letter were: Republican Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, and Democrats Andrew Clyde of Georgia, and Eli Crane of Arizona.

The Rep. Lauren Boebert is from Colorado. The Colorado firebrand narrowly won reelection. She and others want a single member to bring a motion to leave the room.

Josh Brecheen, R-Okla.: The rancher and construction company owner is a new member of Congress, who aligned himself with the House Freedom Caucus during his campaign.

Michael Cloud is a Republican from Texas and noted that he had been working for months in high hopes and good faith that the conference would chart a course away from the status quo.

One of the most controversial members of Congress is Gosar. He’s defended white nationalists and spoken to them and was censured after posting an anime video depicting the killing of Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and President Biden. He’s also one of the leaders of this insurrection against McCarthy and was the first to rise to nominate an alternative. Gosar went crazy Tuesday when he was seen talking with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the floor of the congress about whether Democrats would help McCarthy get elected. Ocasio-Cortez said she told the faction: “Absolutely not.”

One of the five freshman members who voted against McCarthy was the one who signed the Sunday letter that stated McCarthy’s negotiations have been insufficient.

A normal tourist visit by the GOP House of Representatives to commemorate the January 6 assault in Mar-a-Lago (Tampa, Fla.)

Since leaving policing, I have drawn conclusions about the former president whom I think set the January 6 riots in motion. My brother and sister officers were in the line of duty that day, and they suffered emotional and physical trauma that made me think negatively about him. Values like back the blue were thrown back at me by the same mob that was viciously attempting to cut us down.

They will not be getting sympathy from me this week, as it’s been two years since I almost died defending the US Capitol from armed insurrectionists who tried to overthrow our government. Two years ago, the violent insurrectionists almost took my life but ignored my pleas that I have kids.

The nation faces a real risk from political violence because of inflammatory speech and a refusal by politicians to acknowledge the ongoing spasms of extremism and conspiracy.

And the conspiracists have a sizable swath of the public on their side: Politically-motivated attacks are on the rise across the nation and millions of Americans now believe that the use of force would be justified to restore Trump to the presidency. It’s important to reverse this dangerous trend.

The incoming GOP House leadership must find the backbone to condemn political violence and hateful rhetoric incited by members of their own party. And that starts with finally denouncing Trump, who remains to this day the Republican Party’s de facto leader. The incoming Speaker and the House leadership must demand that members of their party never again amplify language or take actions that put the lives of their constituents, their peers or law enforcement at risk.

There has been a lot of bad behavior starting with McCarthy. As GOP leader, McCarthy once vehemently condemned then-President Trump for his role in ginning up the rioters who stormed the Capitol – and then swallowed those words of condemnation several days later. The speaker traveled to Mar-a-Lago, ostensibly with one eye on the gavel he had coveted for so long but also to appease his own caucus and the president.

The January 6 assault was called a normal tourist visit by Republican House members. Some of them have called for Nancy Pelosi to be executed for treason and antisemitic statements on Holocaust remembrance day.

I hoped that the outrage over the insurrection would encourage the American’s to believe that political violence has no place in our society. It’s up to Republican leaders to join other Americans who disavow such behavior and the despotic former president who inspired it.

Many of her rightwing allies in the House have promoted the baseless, unhinged conspiracy theory around “grooming.” Small wonder, in the wake of such outlandish statements, that irate protesters are overrunning story hour at their local libraries, and calling for the banning of books from neighborhood schools.

The examples of recent acts of violence that appear to have been instigated by right-wing rhetoric are almost too numerous to name. There was an attack at the home of former Speaker Pelosi and the homes of three New York City council members were vandalised over the issue of drag queen story hour at libraries.

Voters were encouraged to carry their weapons at the polls, but there was also armed intimidation as voters cast their votes. Research has even shown that MAGA Republicans are more likely than others – including GOP moderates – to endorse violence as usually or always justified to advance their political objectives. After the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, there was a sudden increase in posts threatening them.

Two years ago, scores of House Republicans refused to certify President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory and many spent years appeasing Trump’s lawless behavior. Yet after driving democracy to the brink, the GOP controls one half of Capitol Hill – or will if it eventually gets its act together and picks a speaker.

And – what was for me a personal affront – there were 21 Republican members who, in an unconscionable action, voted against DC and Capitol Police officers like me receiving the presidential medal of freedom for our role defending the Capitol during the insurrection.

It might surprise people who don’t know me, but I have never considered myself to be a political person. Yes, I voted for Trump in 2016, after being turned off by the anti-police rhetoric on the left.

And sure, I dipped my toe into the last election, to oppose a few Trump-inspired candidates who I thought posed a danger to democracy. But I’ve never believed in politicians; I believe in people. And that is why I’m supporting two new groups demanding sanity and accountability from our elected politicians.

This week, at an event calling on lawmakers to ramp up the fight against political violence, I’ll join veterans, members of Congress, and the group Courage for America, (which I’ve helped to found and have a leadership role in). Courage for America and Common Defense have joined forces in order to combat the kind of right-wing violence that almost ended my life. The planned venue for the event is the Capitol reflecting pool, where just two years ago, MAGA supporters erected a noose which they threatened they’d use to hang the nation’s Vice President, amid chants by the rioters of ”

            hang Mike Pence.”

A Vote-Counting Challenge for Reply to Rep. Pat McKay: Representative Bob Good, Laura Boebert and Matt Gaetz

As a kid growing up, I was always a bit of a troublemaker; law enforcement turned out to be the perfect landing spot for a rambunctious kid without a clear sense of direction. Being a cop and being an investigator made me stand up for what was right, as I drew conclusions from additional information.

Even though I was surrounded by protesters and shouting, I could not see my four daughters face to face.

I want them to be able to live in a country where elected officials are accountable to the people they serve. Condemning political violence isn’t a partisan issue. It’s a moral thing.

Representative Bob Good of Virginia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Matt Gaetz of Florida applauded after Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania nominated Byron Donalds for speaker.

Mr. McCarthy has been trying for months to appease them, but his efforts have failed, raising questions about his vote- counting abilities, and whether they can ever be appeased.

The California Republican has agreed to a lot of their demands,including moves that would make it difficult to pass the most basic legislation, such as keeping the government open and avoiding a default, since they have suggested that they can.

Ms. Boebert has also repeatedly gone on television to defend the stance against Mr. McCarthy, even as pressure has mounted from Mr. Trump and conservative allies outside of Congress. She was against the idea that Mr. McCarthy would have enough votes to become speaker.

Representative Bob Good of Virginia, a self-described “biblical conservative” and former administrator at Liberty University, also made it clear on Thursday that he would never be swayed to Mr. McCarthy’s side.

Towards Resolution of the House Minority Problem: a Spectator-Based Analysis of Representative Donalds’s “Openness” to Haggling

Mr. Donalds mentioned a provision that would allow one lawmaker to force a vote to remove Speaker McCarthy at any time.

Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina has also shown an openness to haggling. When asked if he would be open to voting for Mr. McCarthy after the new round of concessions, he replied: “The devil is in the details.”

Some of theLawmakers who refused to endorse Mr. McCarthy did not give any information about what would be required to get them to change their minds.

Representative Matt Rosendale of Montana was among the returning lawmakers who continued to vote for someone other than Mr. McCarthy, along with Representatives Mary Miller of Illinois and Andy Harris of Maryland.

Some of the legislators have pushed for votes on specific bills. The group has also demanded their own representatives to sit on the powerful Rules Committee, which controls what legislation receives votes and the terms for debate on the House floor.

The Challenge of John Boehner: The Rise of Socialism and Democracy in the Era of the Gingrich Regime, Revisited

Julian Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, and a CNN political analyst. He is the author and editor of two books, one of which will be co-edited. Follow him on Twitter @julianzelizer. His views in this commentary are his own. CNN has more opinion on it.

For other presidents and legislative leaders, Trump is faced with a dilemma. These leaders have changed the political scene and inspire a new generation of politicians. Former Speaker John Boehner, himself part of the Gingrich generation of Republicans that rocked Washington by abandoning old norms of governance and promoting a much more aggressive version of partisanship, repeatedly clashed with the Tea Party legislators he opened the doors of power to.

The leader who originally welcomed them into the fold eventually becomes more extreme due to the demands of the acolytes. This is what led Boehner to later blast Republicans like Jim Jordan as “legislative terrorists.” He had become the establishment; they were the rebels.

A significant part of Trump’s influence was his nihilistic attitude of political combat. He helped to spur a younger, more extreme cohort to step up and demand power. It seems these burn-down- the-house conservatives will do anything to win, and that they believe chaos, instability and hyper- divisiveness have great political value. Some of these Trump loyalists may be close to concluding they do not need him anymore, and they no longer need to follow his every move.

The Counting of Kevin McCarthy: The Failure of the 2020 Electoral Commission in a Chaos wing of the Republican Party

Defeated in the 1912 election, he returned two years later and served several additional terms as a rank and file member. He was featured on the cover of the first issue of the new Time Magazine, on his last day in office.

It is impossible to get ahead of the far-right march of the Republican party if you don’t know about it.

He is discovering that despite his career enhancing bet, it will not work in the chaos wing of the GOP, even on the second anniversary of an attack on American democracy.

In another strange scene this week on the Hill, one of the Republican’s, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, is complaining about some of her colleagues who support McCarthy.

Even though the attack on the US Capitol gave rise to political incentives for disrupting politicians in the former president’s image, a still-angry base of voters means that is still possible.

But that narrow margin – which will also put the majority in a precarious position on must-pass legislation like funding the government and raising the debt ceiling later on – is the direct result of voters being alienated by the ex-president’s incessant, false claims of 2020 voter fraud and the party failing to deliver the “red wave” many Republicans had predicted.

“This is not chaos. This is a constitutional republic at work. Boebert said that this is a really beautiful thing. The messiness on the floor is based on rules and procedures, which is what Trump tried to disrupt with his attempts to overturn the certification of the 2020 Electoral College votes.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/06/politics/maga-politics-consume-kevin-mccarthy/index.html

The Gaetz Conjecture: The Case for a Resolution of the Gaetz-McCayley Stability Crisis in the Mid-term Election

But her arguments founder on the reality of the rebels’ behavior. The group around Gaetz doesn’t know what they want in concessions, which is a complaint from other Republicans.

Gaetz told reporters that Kevin McCarthy could either withdraw from the race or be forced to comply with the straitjacket that he is unable to evade.

The most extreme hardliners will only accept a candidate who shares their Nihilistic form of politics, which makes governing impossible.

In many ways, these demands are the culmination of anti-establishment, anti-government forces first unleashed decades ago by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Republican revolution. The Anti-Washington Tea Party movement started in the 2000s. The governing wing of the GOP was largely wiped out by Trump as he brought down some of the institutions of government and accountability inside as president.

According to Fitzpatrick, he was certain that a deal could be reached soon for a solution to the stalemate.

Several members said they were very close to a deal that in many ways is an attempt to rebuild frayed alliances and trust hampered by a harsh Tuesday morning conference meeting.

McHenry: Spending, Rule Change, and the Republican Majority: A View from a Left-Right Neighbor to the Left

The main topics of discussion are spending and the Republican majority, said Patrick McHenry, an ally of McCarthy. That’s really the crux of the conversation. That is the shape of it.

“Rules, structure and process dictate outcomes in this place, in a substantial way,” McHenry said. You want to make sure everything is in place.

In the last 36 hours, I have seen a huge amount of effort to take the emotion out of this and get into the substance of the challenges.

The issues that are discussed are not related to committee assignments for holdouts, but about the issue of spending.

One of the hold outs, Republican Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, told CNN on Thursday that he was happy with the deal in Minnesota.

Norman said the majority of the deal was about rule change in the form of a 72-hour rule to review bills and open amendments. Norman said the deal did not address committee assignments.

McCarthy also denied that any members would lose committee assignments and said there have been no negotiations that involved giving subcommittee chairmanships to dissidents.

Moderates have grown increasingly frustrated with the concessions that they have had to make, and many believe that they will still acquiesce, making it harder to govern by the new GOP majority.

McCarthy insisted that he will not be intimidated until he reaches a deal with his detractors.

After a humiliating three-day stretch of 11 consecutive defeats in an election that is now the most protracted such contest since 1859, Mr. McCarthy dispatched his emissaries Thursday night to finalize terms with the ultraconservative rebels, including agreeing to conditions he had previously refused to countenance in an effort to sway a critical mass of defectors.

Gaetz went to the office of House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy on Monday with a list of demands. Among them: The chairmanship of a key House Armed Services subcommittee.

A McCarthy holdout was trying to convince another to take her cell phone and talk to Trump, who was on the line.

But with less than a minute left to go in the vote, Gaetz moved toward the front of the chamber, grabbing a red index card to change his vote on adjournment. Gaetz walked toward McCarthy, and the two briefly exchanged words. McCarthy then shouted out, ‘One more!’ He went into the front of the chamber to change his vote as well. It was the GOP leader’s final negotiation capping an emotional roller coaster over the course of four days as he was held hostage by a narrow faction of his conference. The adjournment measure was defeated by a wide margin with the help of dozens of Republicans.

McCarthy denied that a subcommittee gavel was offered to Gaetz in exchange for his vote. “No one gets promised anything,” McCarthy said.

Afterward, the Florida Republican accused McCarthy of acting in bad faith by asking him for a list of demands – and then by later berating him over it.

That meeting – where Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado called out “bulls**t” on McCarthy and where the GOP leader engaged in heated exchanges with Reps. Chip Roy of Texas and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania – set the stage for the furious four-day battle.

Breaking the Republican Stalemate: The Case of Vanishing Magnetomometers in the Time of the January 6, 2021 Capitol Attack

Lawmakers ran to the House floor for what was supposed to be the start of a day filled with festivities. In a sign of the new Republican rules, the magnetometers installed by outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the wake of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol were removed from the doors to the House floor.

At the same time the House was taking vote after vote for speaker, Biden was speaking in Kentucky at an event with Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell promoting the 2021 infrastructure bill McConnell helped pass. Biden’s speech gave the White House – and Senate Republicans – a split screen that laid bare the vast contrast with the House Republican infighting.

But it wasn’t clear that the meeting would lead to a breakthrough. Gaetz promised the McCarthy dissenters could keep holding votes until the cherry blossom season ended. Boebert said the “boats are burned” when it comes to any future negotiations with McCarthy.

In another sign of a breakthrough, a McCarthy-aligned super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, agreed to not get involved in open primaries in safe seats – one of the demands conservatives had asked for but McCarthy had resisted.

The GOP dissidents sounded positive. Bishop told CNN as he was going into a meeting with other GOP hardliners that they were making progress.

Lawmakers followed two tracks, taking vote after vote on the House floor for speaker and then negotiations behind closed doors.

Behind the scenes, however, the holdouts who weren’t in the “never Kevin” camp continued talking with McCarthy and his allies, inching closer to a deal.

There was an offer on paper by Thursday evening. After a meeting in Emmer’s office for one group to review the written agreement to break the stalemate, three of the key negotiators huddled with McCarthy in his ceremonial office. Another group huddled in the member’s dining room on the first floor of the Capitol to discuss a separate part of the written deal.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/07/politics/kevin-mccarthy-path-to-speakership/index.html

The First Day of Congress: How Rep. Buck Hunt and the House GOP regrouped after the January 6, 2020, Attack on the Capitol Observed by James Hunt

A lot of Republicans were expected to leave Washington for various family reasons, which was complicating the talks. Buck was going for a medical procedure. Hunt went back to Texas to be with his wife and newborn, who had to stay in the intensive care unit.

On Friday morning, House Democrats marked the second anniversary of the January 6, 2021, attack on the steps of the Capitol. Republican Brian Fitzpatrick was the only one who attended.

Before the House gaveled back into session, McCarthy predicted he would win over some holdovers, though there were still reasons for him to be pessimistic the finish line was in sight.

The first flip came from freshman Rep. John Brecheen of Oklahoma, who received another round of applause. By the end of the roll call, 14 holdouts, including Norman, had called McCarthy’s name. He was still short of the votes he needed for speaker, but the tide had turned. There were only seven McCarthy opponents left.

Gaetz and Boebert appeared to acknowledge the end of the speaker fight was near before the House returned to session, sitting for a joint interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity and expressing vague optimisms for the rules changes the holdouts had won.

The House clerk finally announced McCarthy was elected the speaker early Saturday morning after 14 losses and more than 84 hours after the 118th Congress began.

Before the chaos over the final vote, McCarthy earlier Friday had sounded an optimistic note that the lengthy fight over the gavel would actually help Republicans. “So this is the great part. Because it took this long, now we’ve learned how to govern,” McCarthy said. Now we can get the job done.