Explained: How Kevin McCarthy’s bid for House Speaker could cause chaos in US Congress

On Tuesday, Republicans finally take control of the US House of Representatives. While the election of the Speaker of the House is usually a rote affair, this time there may be a twist straight out of a political thriller as GOP leader Kevin McCarthy is in a fight for his political life. Let’s take a closer look: The numbers game In politics, it all comes back to the age old question – do you have the votes? So far, the answer for McCarthy is an unfortunate ‘no’. The main problem for McCarthy is the Republicans’ wafer-thin majority in the House. The GOP has 222 seats to the Democrats’ 213 seats. McCarthy needs a simply majority of the House’s 435 seats to be elected Speaker – that’s 218 votes. However it must be noted that a Speaker can be elected with less than 218 ayes, like Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner were, if some lawmakers vote present or excuse themselves. At the moment, six House Republicans have said they will not vote for McCarthy. Three of these are “firmly against” him, while the rest are “almost certainly” opposed to his election.

That leaves McCarthy with 216 votes – two shy of the magic mark.

Making things even spicier is the fact that McCarthy has already begun moving his things into the Speaker’s Office – and might have to bear the embarrassment of having to move out if his bid fails. Worse, this isn’t even McCarthy’s first run at being Speaker. In 2015, he withdrew from the speaker race in 2015 amid a number of blunders and a right-wing revolt. So this may be the second time he goes down in defeat. This is also history in the making – exactly a hundred years have passed since the  last time a Speaker was elected after multiple ballots. Republicans in disarray McCarthy seems to have fallen short despite a furious campaign over the past couple of weeks  including closed-door meetings and promised changes to the House rules to win over far-right Republicans led by the ‘Freedom caucus’. A new generation of Trump-aligned Republicans are leading the opposition to McCarthy, inspired by the former president’s Make America Great Again slogan. They don’t think McCarthy is conservative enough or tough enough to battle Democrats. “Kevin McCarthy doesn’t have to 218 votes to be speaker,” Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., the chairman of the Freedom Caucus and a leader in Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election, said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Unless something dramatically changes, that’s where we’re going to be.” It’s reminiscent of the last time Republicans took back the House majority, after the 2010 midterms, when the tea-party class ushered in a new era of hardball politics, eventually sending Speaker John Boehner to an early retirement. Unusually, two prominent far-right Republicans find themselves on opposite sides of the McCarthy battle – firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz. [caption id=“attachment_10254381” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] Marjorie Taylor Greene is backing Kevin McCarthy’s bid for Speaker. AP[/caption] The two, usually unified on all things, penned dueling columns in the conservative outlet Daily Caller before Christmas. “Every single Republican in Congress knows that Kevin does not actually believe anything. He has no ideology,” Gaetz wrote. Greene, who is believed to have been offered considerable influence in return for her backing, retorted that McCarthy’s opponents were lying “when they claim a consensus House Speaker candidate will emerge.” The California Republican has tried to ingratiate himself with the “Never Kevin” crowd, bowing to calls for intensive investigations of Democrats. McCarthy, who defied a subpoena from the House panel probing the 2021 assault on the Capitol, has promised investigations of President Joe Biden’s family and administration, as well as of the FBI and CIA. But the more he is seen as giving away the store to critics on the right, the more likely he is to alienate moderates, sparking open war between Senate and House Republicans, where there is already little love lost. Several of the lawmakers withholding support from McCarthy said the House should block bills from Republican senators who voted for the $1.7 trillion government funding bill that passed before Christmas. In a sign of the leverage they hold over him, McCarthy agreed, pledging that those bills would be “dead on arrival in the House” if he is speaker. But he was largely ignored by the Senate leadership and much of the rank and file, as the bill passed by 68 votes to 29 – leaving his threat looking unsustainable. Why is the Speaker’s position important? The Speaker is arguably the second-most important person in Washington. As Washington’s top legislator, the Speaker is the parliamentary and political leader in charge of House business. He or she is also second in line to the presidency. The Speaker holds “massive influence over what sorts of bills and amendments get voted on in Congress”, Fong told Al Jazeera. That “gives them a tremendous amount of control over what becomes law”.

Even if McCarthy succeeds, he could be fatally weakened.

As Brendan Buck, a communications consultant who worked for Republican speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner, wrote in The New York Times, “The embarrassment indeed may be the point,” Buck wrote in an essay published in the New York Times on Monday. The dissident members believe a weak speaker would make them more powerful. In truth, it would benefit no one.” Christian Fong, a political science professor at the University of Michigan told Al Jazeera, the right-wingers are seeking a bigger say in the legislative process. “They see that they have some real leverage to try to get some rules changes through. They’ve staked out a really tough bargaining position for themselves,” he said. What happens if McCarthy fails? Chaos. Without a speaker, the House cannot fully form — naming its committee chairmen, engaging in floor proceedings and launching the investigations of the Biden administration that are expected to be core to the Republicans’ agenda. As NPR’s congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh explained, literally nothing can happen in the House until the Speaker is elected. [caption id=“attachment_11917042” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] The battle for Speaker might be brutal and long-drawn out. AP[/caption] “It’s the only leadership position specifically mentioned in the Constitution. Members of Congress cannot even be sworn in to start a new session of Congress without a Speaker first being elected. So opening day could be very chaotic.”

Tuesday will see one final meet before the Speaker vote.

More from Explainers

‘You f*** immigrant’: How an Indian couple was harassed, racially abused by Canadian teens ‘Every Pakistani ready to fight…’: How Bilawal Bhutto is ramping up war rhetoric against India after Munir

McCarthy’s allies are bracing themselves for brutal, drawn out battle. “To be honest, we are preparing for a fight. Not the way we want to start out in our new majority, but you can’t really negotiate against the position of ‘give us everything we ask for and we won’t guarantee anything in return,’” Representative Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota, told CNN. “I give Kevin a ton of credit. He’s brought everyone in and worked really hard to figure out a way forward. A way to make this place run better. But I get the feeling that not everyone is negotiating in good faith.” Who are the alternatives to McCarthy? Strategists expect fraught cloak-and-dagger talks between the two sides in the event of a McCarthy defeat that could see the emergence of a consensus Republican who can lock in 218 votes with some Democratic support. If the 57-year-old former storekeeper falls short, the process continues to a second ballot, probably also on Tuesday, and McCarthy’s critics get the chance to put forward different candidates. No credible alternative has been floated publicly, although the most obvious would be House Whip Steve Scalise, a loyal McCarthy deputy who has nevertheless been clear that he has ambitions of his own. Scalise of Louisiana, is a conservative widely liked by his colleagues and seen by some as a hero after surviving a brutal mass shooting during a congressional baseball game practice in 2017. Scalise’s office rejected as “false” a suggestion Monday by another Republican that Scalise was making calls about the Speaker’s race. Representative Andy Biggs from Arizona, a former leader of the Freedom Caucus, was running against McCarthy as a conservative option, but was not expected to pull a majority. McCarthy defeated him in the November nominating contest, 188-31. As per the website Roll Call, some moderate Republicans have floated the idea of electing Fred Upton, who retired from Congress at the end of the 2022. An interesting wrinkle is that the Speaker of the House does not necessarily have to a sitting member of Congress.

Thus the fanciful notion put forward by some of Donald Trump as Speaker of the House.

But that’s unlikely given the Speaker’s sheer workload. What happens to McCarthy if he comes up short? There has been behind-the-scenes speculation about how long McCarthy might stay in Congress if he were to lose out again. Allies point out that he would not be short of private-sector job offers. But some Congress watchers believe the career politician has the place in his blood and would want to remain as a backbencher. With inputs from agencies Read all the  Latest News,  Trending News,  Cricket News,  Bollywood News,  India News and  Entertainment News here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.