UPDATE (Oct. 24, 2023 1:45 p.m. ET): On Tuesday, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., became the fourth Republican speaker-designee this year after five rounds of voting.
It’s now been about three weeks that the U.S. House of Representatives has been at a standstill without a speaker. Two Republicans have already failed to get the votes needed to win the gavel. And on Tuesday morning, eight new candidates will be voted on in a secret ballot to try for the chance to fail all over again.
I don’t just mean fail to get the roughly 217 votes that will be needed on the floor to become speaker, though that particular failure does seem likely. More generally, I mean fail at uniting the Republican caucus, which has already toppled Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California and rejected Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan of Ohio. I mean fail at passing legislation that can make it through the House and be signed into law. And failing at the very job of being speaker is what McCarthy did before being stripped of his office.
I don’t just mean fail to get the roughly 217 votes that will be needed on the floor to become speaker, though that particular failure does seem likely.
Normally with this many candidates in the running, I’d be loath to make such sweeping statements. But sort through the stack of mostly generic Republicans who’ve decided to shoot their shots and you’ll feel comfortable doing the same. I pay far more attention to Congress than the average American, and I’d still be hard-pressed to pick most of these candidates out of a lineup. (Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., the only Black candidate, is an obvious exception.)
Their bland anonymity exists even though many of them serve in House leadership. Tom Emmer of Minnesota is the majority whip, the third-ranking position in the GOP caucus, and a former head of the National Republican Congressional Committee. Gary Palmer of Alabama is two ranks below him as chair of the Republican Policy Committee. And Mike Johnson of Louisiana is the vice chair of the GOP Conference. Meanwhile, Kevin Hern of Oklahoma chairs the Republican Study Committee, the largest conservative caucus in the House. These are people who theoretically are at front and center of their party, and yet 95% of Americans will have heard of none of them.
Because they don’t have the kind of name recognition that sets them apart, one has to sift through the details to come up with any real discerning features among them. That’s essentially what their peers must have been doing Monday night as they gathered for a candidates forum with the (at the time) nine candidates. As my colleague Steve Benen has already noted, Emmer and Austin Scott of Georgia are the only candidates to have voted to certify the 2020 presidential election. Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania is the only who belongs to the Bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, a group of relative moderates that at least tries to work across the aisle. (He apparently immediately dropped out after making his pitch to his colleagues, so that tracks.) On the flip side, Donalds is the only member of the far-right Freedom Caucus.
But let’s consider the actual issues the House faces over the next several months. At the top of the list is funding the federal government before the stopgap bill passed this month expires on Nov. 17. McCarthy paid for his cardinal sin of passing that legislation with mostly Democratic votes, but the most tangible effect of his ouster has been to waste three of the six weeks that were meant to be spent finalizing and passing the remaining spending bills on the House agenda. (Talk about an own goal for the conservatives who hated McCarthy but who also hate stopgap bills.)
It’s doubtful that whoever becomes speaker will have time to hammer those out and get them in line with the Democratic-led Senate’s versions. And, tellingly, all eight candidates apparently told their colleagues that they would not bring an omnibus spending bill to the floor to fund the government for the next year. If that’s the case, then another continuing resolution is likely to be needed. And that’s where the trouble begins.
As Punchbowl News noted in a nifty chart, three of the candidates — Hern, Palmer and Johnson — voted against the funding bill that McCarthy passed. (Donalds didn’t vote but was probably a “no.”) That might make it easier for some of the more hard-line conservatives to get on board with them in Tuesday’s vote, but what’s going to stop them from turning on their new champion once a compromise bill with the Senate is required?
The question for the next speaker, then, becomes whether to follow McCarthy’s lead into yet another a stalemate or risk the wrath of the chaos caucus.
Also at play are the spending caps McCarthy baked into his deal with President Joe Biden to raise the debt ceiling. The far right insisted that McCarthy renege on that deal, which he did, signing off on bills with an even lower spending rate. Emmer was once considered a top choice among the Freedom Caucus to replace McCarthy, but he voted for that debt ceiling deal. So did Meuser, Scott and Rep. Jack Bergman of Michigan. The White House and the Senate are going to insist that House Republicans honor the deals passed into law. The question for the next speaker, then, becomes whether to follow McCarthy’s lead into yet another a stalemate or risk the wrath of the chaos caucus.
The nihilistic ethos that has embodied the House GOP for decades is premised on the idea that Washington is broken. The very act of passing laws that require compromise clashes with Republicans’ main selling point over this era: that only conservative purity can save the country. There is no breakout from that view among the carbon copy candidates who are battling over the speaker’s gavel now, and if there were, he’d also be unable to muster the votes needed to win.
Once Tuesday’s voting begins, the pool of candidates will narrow by one each round until somebody manages to get a majority. The only way the generic Republican model who reaches the floor has a shot at succeeding is by being so indistinguishable from all the others that there’s no harm in giving him a shot. After all, it’s not like he’ll hold the position for long before the forces that have been tearing the caucus apart rip it loose again.
