After the failed speaker election on Tuesday, Donald Trump called on the rebellious Republicans to back Kevin McCarthy. But they did not give up their resistance. Even the impossible now seems conceivable: a pact with the Democrats.
Still no speaker: Kevin McCarthy after losing the fourth ballot on Wednesday.
It’s been a hundred years since it took more than one round of voting to elect the speaker in the American House of Representatives. After 1923, the respective majority party settled possible disputes before the start of the new legislative period in order to be able to choose its leader in a ballot. On Tuesday, however, Kevin McCarthy, the Republican favorite for the office, clearly missed the necessary 218 votes in three rounds. After this historical disgrace, the session of the grand chamber was postponed to Wednesday. But McCarthy also lost the fourth and fifth votes.
McCarthy had already made far-reaching concessions to the 20 rebels on the far right of his party. Among other things, he was prepared to accept a vote of no confidence against him in the future, should this be the case be requested by only five MEPs. It was therefore questionable on Wednesday what McCarthy could offer his opponents to get them on his side. The 57-year-old Californian didn’t want to give up just yet. He commissioned five deputies overnight to negotiate with the resistance.
A complicated love triangle
McCarthy’s words of support may also have given McCarthy hope. After the three voting defeats, the former president was initially cautious in a short interview on Tuesday evening. When asked if he was still with McCarthy, Trump replied, “We’ll see what happens.” On Wednesday, however, he clearly called on rebellious Republicans, most of whom are die-hard Trump supporters, to vote for McCarthy: “It’s now time for all the great Republicans to vote for Kevin, the deal finish, get the win », wrote Trump on his short message service Truth Social.
However, the triangular relationship between Trump, his supporters and McCarthy is complicated. After the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, McCarthy was initially one of the critics of the president who was voted out. Within a few days, however, the Republican party leader made a U-turn. In order to please Trump and his supporters on the right wing, he has been downplaying the attack on American democracy ever since, and at times also tries to play the right-wing conservative rhetorically. For example, in August he said before a Republican party delegation about longtime Democratic speaker Nancy Pelosi: “I want you to see how Nancy Pelosi hands me the gavel (of the speaker). It’s going to be hard for me not to hit her with it.”
After November’s midterm elections, McCarthy traveled to the Mexican border with far-right MP Marjorie Taylor Greene, among others, to emphasize his focus on tightening immigration policies. He also pledged to stop giving Ukraine blank checks in order to win over the isolationists on the right wing of the party. In addition, McCarthy has shown willingness to support parliamentary inquiries that are likely to be used to manage sham problems rather than to uncover real grievances. According to this, a commission is to determine whether the Biden administration has used the FBI and the Department of Justice politically against their opponents, among others.
Biden takes center stage
But neither his concessions nor Trump’s support helped McCarthy on Wednesday. Republican MP Chip Roy nominated his relatively unknown party colleague Byron Donalds as speaker. In contrast to the majority of the rebels, Roy is not one of the “election deniers” who doubted Trump’s defeat in 2020. In his short speech, the Texan criticized the $1.7 trillion spending bill passed just before Christmas, which also included the $45 billion emergency aid for Kyiv. It needs a separate debate on Ukraine, Roy said. He called for more open discussions and more say for backbenchers in drafting legislation. The point is that the state no longer spends money that it does not have. In the end, Donalds received 20 votes each in the fourth and fifth ballot, while McCarthy again clearly failed with 201 votes each.
McCarthy received one vote less than in the third ballot on Tuesday. This increased the pressure on him to withdraw his candidacy. If the rebels are primarily concerned with a personal feud against McCarthy, whom they deeply distrust, Republican number two, Steve Scalise, for example, could step into the breach. However, should the rebels insist on further concessions that the moderate wing of the Conservatives find unacceptable, the impossible could also become possible: choosing a bipartisan compromise candidate with the help of the Democrats. There are such exploratory talks, said Republican Congressman Don Bacon on Wednesday. However, the observers agreed that the probability of such a solution is still small.
Meanwhile, as Republicans in the House of Representatives continued to tear each other apart, President Biden and conservative Senate leader Mitch McConnell celebrated the virtues of pragmatic collaboration across party lines on Wednesday. Together, they visited the Brent Spence Bridge, which connects Kentucky and Ohio, to announce the bridge’s over $2 billion renovation and expansion. The money comes from the $1 trillion infrastructure program driven by Biden but also supported by moderate Republicans. So said the American President: «We can move the nation forward if we pull back our egos just a little bit.»