Just after teatime in Washington on Tuesday about 200 or so Republican Party members of the US House of Representatives convened to discuss what had just happened. Some were stunned, some were furious and a smaller number were quietly (or not so quietly) satisfied.
For the first time in history the speaker of the House, the person next in the line of succession to the White House after the vice-president, had been ejected from office.
Opposition Democrats had voted to remove Kevin McCarthy. But in the Republican conference room there was no mistaking that the impetus for the move and the crucial votes to oust the speaker had come from some on their own side.
The House was now effectively leaderless and unable to pass any legislation until a new speaker was elected.
Some candidates for the post have spoken about the requirement for party unity. But others in the party have spoken of a need for “a reckoning”.
The Republican Party is essentially a coalition. Some members are fiscal conservatives, others social conservatives, and yet more are ardent supporters of former president Donald Trump and his Maga (make America Great Again) movement. Some are all three of the above, but others are more moderate centre-right politicians, sometimes representing areas that voted for Joe Biden as president.
McCarthy was the latest Republican House leader to grapple with the tensions among the different groups. And, in particular, the difficulties in keeping happy a relatively small hard-right faction for whom compromise with political opponents appears synonymous with betrayal.
Speaking to Biden ‘as one Irish American to another’, McCarthy said he was striving to live up to the example set 40 years ago by two other politicians of Irish heritage – Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill
After just 269 days as Speaker, McCarthy was gone. In the Republican Party conference room at teatime on Tuesday he told his members he would not seek re-election to the position.
Leaving the closed-door meeting, one Republican politician, Dusty Johnson from South Dakota, said: “Frankly, one has to wonder whether the House is governable at all.”
Seeds of demise
On St Patrick’s Day last March, McCarthy hosted Biden as well as Taoiseach Leo Varadkar at the traditional speaker’s lunch on Capitol Hill.
Speaking to Biden “as one Irish American to another”, he said he was striving to live up to the example set 40 years ago by two other politicians of Irish heritage – the then Republican president Ronald Reagan and the then Democrat Speaker Tip O’Neill.
McCarthy said their goals should be the same as those of Reagan and O’Neill – “to put the country first”.
Reagan and O’Neill were poles apart politically. But they were able to work together and reach agreements on taxation and spending.
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But the politics of Washington in the 1980s was very different. There were more centrists and the modern political media and social media environment did not exist.
On two occasions over recent months, McCarthy appeared to secure the bipartisan approach that he seemed to advocate on St Patrick’s Day.
The son of a fireman in California, he won money on a lottery ticket which he used as seed funding for a successful sandwich shop that propelled him into the business world and later to politics
Despite initial reluctance, Biden had to enter into talks to the then speaker on raising the US government’s borrowing limit to avoid a debt default that would have caused chaos worldwide.
Last weekend McCarthy and Democrats reached another deal that temporarily averted a looming Government shutdown which would have left millions of federal employees, including military personnel, without pay.
But within both those arrangements lay the seeds of McCarthy’s demise. For some on the hard right, compromise with Democrats was a bridge too far. Democrats viewed McCarthy as having gone back on commitments about government spending contained in his earlier debt ceiling agreement with Biden in an attempt to appease his critics on the right.
Good fortune
Good fortune had always played a key role in McCarthy’s life. The son of a fireman in California, he won money on a lottery ticket which he used as seed funding for a successful sandwich shop that propelled him into the business world and later to politics.
In Washington, others in the Republican Party leadership fell by the wayside to open a path for McCarthy. In 2014 the then House majority leader Eric Cantor was defeated in a primary election. In 2015 the then speaker John Boehner resigned just in advance of his right-wing pursuers who had the same fate in store for him as befell McCarthy on Tuesday. In 2018, another Republican speaker, Paul Ryan, said he was stepping down, seemingly tired of the divisions and identity politics in Washington and a strained relationship with Trump.
On Tuesday his critics on the right in his own party joined with his Democrat opponents. Ironically, both said they could not trust him. McCarthy’s luck had finally run out.
Douglas Kriner, professor in the department of government at Cornell University, maintains that under the two-party system in the United States those with different ideologies all have to live under the same tent. He says in Europe they would be scattered among a variety of parties.
“In any other parliamentary democracy in western Europe for the most part the dynamics, discussions and bargaining [between them] would be inter-party while in the United States they are internal party [issues].”
He said the Republican majority in the House of Representatives is so small that “the factional politics has really brought things to a grinding halt to the point that the caucus is largely ungovernable”.
This, according to Kriner, stems from a combination of the small majority and irreconcilable differences between some on the far right wing and more moderate members. He says that there are differences and tensions among the Democrat party in Congress also but Nancy Pelosi, when she was speaker with a relatively narrow majority, was able to keep her party together.
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[ Analysis: McCarthy's fall was always on the cardsOpens in new window ]
“You didn’t see this chaos, even though there are tensions within the Democratic Party coalition as well, to be sure. But on the right, it has been more of a nightmare. And it has claimed multiple casualties. Most clearly from a leadership role, speaker Boehner and speaker Ryan.”
“Cantor was different. He lost his primary [election] to someone even further right, and now you have speaker McCarthy.”
‘Mayor of Crazytown’
In his 2021 autobiography, Boehner said his time leading the Republican Party in the House was like “the mayor of Crazytown”.
“Every second of every day since Barack Obama became president, I was fighting one bats**t idea after another.”
He suggested that some who were elected on the right of the Republican Party just wanted to go to Washington “and blow everything up”.
Compromise, which used to sort of be seen as an inherent strength of the American system and what it was designed to produce, is now seen by some as the ultimate form of sell-out
— Douglas Kriner, professor in the department of government at Cornell University
Under the US political system the House, the Senate and the presidency are different branches of government. But when different parties control different parts, it leads either to compromise or deadlock.
Kriner says that in some quarters there is sense that compromise is bad. And that compromise can now represent “the absolute death knell of a speaker”.
“Compromise, which used to sort of be seen as an inherent strength of the American system and what it was designed to produce, is now seen by some as the ultimate form of sell-out. ”
He suggests it is easier for those on the right not have much of an active governing agenda than it is for those on the left. “Because the left generally tends to see Government as a solution to problems. And [for the] right it is part of the problem.”
Kriner also says that media outlets with ideological preferences, as well as social media, have changed the political dynamic. He says there is now a platform for people on the extremes that didn’t exist before. “They’re able to build their own independent bases of political support, their own independent fundraising apparatuses.”
Right flank
If, as many political commentators believed, a challenge to McCarthy from his right flank was almost inevitable, it was also extremely likely that Florida congressman Matt Gaetz would be among those wielding the knife.
Republicans secured a majority in the House in elections last November. However, the anticipated red-wave never materialised and McCarthy was left with a majority of just nine in the chamber.
This gave great leverage to those on the right who never really wanted McCarthy to be speaker and did not view him as being sufficiently conservative.
As Gaetz and some others held out for hours last January, it took 15 votes before McCarthy finally secured the speaker’s gavel, which conventional political wisdom in Washington maintains he had coveted for many years.
To secure their support, McCarthy made a number of concessions. The most consequential was to allow just one member to essentially propose a motion of no confidence in the speaker. This is precisely the measure Gaetz used to topple McCarthy.
To Gaetz and some of his colleagues, McCarthy conceded too much to Biden in their debt ceiling agreement. They believe the US is spending far too much, owes far too much and that a significant retrenchment is needed.
The deal with Biden allowed the government to borrow more money, but a budget for 2024 still had to be passed, providing those on the right with another opportunity to press for spending cuts.
The White House and Democrats contend that the deal with McCarthy in June on the debt ceiling also contained a formula for addressing spending issues for 2024. They argue that McCarthy backed away from this to appease his right-wing flank.
Mar-a-Lago visit
In Democrat eyes, McCarthy always wanted to be speaker and was prepared to go along with the hard right to ensure he secured the position as well as to stay there.
They point to McCarthy criticising Trump for his role in the January 6th attack on the US Capitol but then visiting him in his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida several weeks later in a move that was seen as part of an initiative to rehabilitate the former president.
Trump is believed to have backed McCarthy for the speakership in January. But Trump supported a US debt default and a government shutdown if Republicans did not get everything they wanted.
McCarthy, as Speaker, had authorised his party to investigate the business affairs of Hunter Biden, son of the president, and more recently backed an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden – although there has been no concrete evidence of wrongdoing.
However, ultimately the concessions to the right were insufficient to dissuade eight Republicans from voting to remove him.
Gaetz suggested that in going after McCarthy, he had the backing of Trump. Trump said he had not encouraged the move.
McCarthy, after his defeat this week, suggested that Gaetz’s action to remove him was “personal” and not about government spending.
Gaetz is facing his own potential difficulties. An House ethics investigation is under way into allegations of sexual misconduct, drug use and misuse of campaign funds. This had been paused while the US department of justice carried out an investigation but resumed after it was decided that the congressman would not face criminal charges.
More fireworks
On foot of his successful efforts to bring down McCarthy, Gaetz may face attempts to expel him from the Republican Party in the House.
Last January, when tempers flared on the House floor during the vote to elect McCarthy, one of his supporters was seen on national TV lunging at Gaetz before being pulled away.
There may be more fireworks next week as Republicans reconvene to try elect a new speaker and deal with any fallout from the toppling of McCarthy.
And in the meantime the clock is ticking down toward a potential new government shutdown in about 40 days.
