Kevin McCarthy’s degrading bid for U.S. House speaker puts on stark display power of few over many

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Their Kevin.

Representative Kevin McCarthy suffered public mortification when a real strongman, Donald Trump, once referred to him as “My Kevin,” a humiliating sobriquet that demonstrated one man’s suzerainty over another in America’s most public power game.

But that indignity was nothing compared with the ignominy that fewer than two dozen lawmakers – backbenchers, insurgents and ingenues, political figures who in another time would hardly be seen in the ancient chamber let alone be heard and who would quake in fear of a political leader – inflicted on the man who, after 15 ballots, finally ascended to the Speaker’s rostrum in the House of Representatives.

Instead, the new Speaker must quake in fear of the whims of just one House member – any single House member.

For in his degrading desire for the job of presiding over the “People’s House,” Mr. McCarthy has armed his greatest and gravest critics with the power – actually worse than that: the mere prerogative – of bringing him down and thrusting the chamber into the kind of chaos that dominated American public life this week.

The rebels did have one other substantial and fundamental achievement. They repealed what might be regarded as the iron law of the House: If you want to get along, go along. The phrase is attributed to former long-term Speaker Sam Rayburn, who worked his will on insufficiently obedient colleagues by inviting them to visit with him on his shabby furniture in a small hideaway on the first floor of the Capitol. The room was called the Board of Education.

There will be no woodshed in Mr. McCarthy’s House. His quest for what likely will turn out to be powerlessness cheapened the man even as it debased American politics.

The spectacle was, in a way, a reprise of the bedlam that consumed Capitol Hill precisely two years ago, when a mob besieged the lawmakers gathered to affirm the election of Joe Biden to the White House.

Reasonable voices pleaded with Mr. Trump to end the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, and he wouldn’t listen. Reasonable voices pleaded with the rebels to end the stalemate of 2023 and for ballot after ballot, they wouldn’t listen. In both cases, delay undermined the Republican Party even as it damaged the country at home (where the display of disorder undermined faith in democracy) and abroad (where it portrayed contemporary America as the sort of citadel of instability that 19th- and 20th-century European empires once reviled for lacking a mature political class and being unfit for self-rule).

Mr. McCarthy has delivered to a small group of rebels immense power that other Speakers have reserved for themselves, some of it invisible to the public but indispensable to the workings of the House.

By agreeing to include several members of the Freedom Caucus on the Rules Committee – a powerful panel ordinarily packed with lawmakers beholden to Speakers and reliable sentinels of their will – he has relinquished considerable power over the flow of legislation onto the floor and the conditions in which debate is conducted.

In the past, the Rules Committee has been the legislative equivalent of the executor of an estate, pledged to follow, quite literally, the will of another. Mr. McCarthy has put himself in the position of being the dead man with no power to shape the disposition of the treasures customarily the province of the Speaker.

But that is the least of it. American political figures have been derogated before. Usually, though, the phenomenon involves a strong senior leader – Lyndon Johnson, to cite a classic example, in his marquee role as Senate majority leader, haranguing and bullying senator Theodore Green of Rhode Island in 1957 –exerting power over subordinates. There are, however, few examples of an entire party bowing to the imprecations of a coterie of rebels.

When, for example, a mass of self-styled reformers surged into office in the wake of the Watergate scandal in 1974, the group numbered 49 – more than double the size of the 2023 rebels and a set of lawmakers who eagerly aligned themselves with senior members of the Democratic caucus and portrayed themselves as progressives. The last of those “Watergate babies,” Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, left office only days ago.

Today’s GOP rebels may endure just as long. Most of them come from safe GOP ridings, the beneficiaries of partisan gerrymandering that renders them all but impervious to challenge. Unlike congressional members of the past, beholden to the campaign funds of senior lawmakers, they have their own political trust funds, based on their ability to attract attention on cable outlets and social media. Their senior colleagues regard them as agitators determined to pull down the pillars of power on Capitol Hill.

But the past several days put on stark display the power of the few over the many – a substantial departure from the customary power dynamic in the House and a feature that until now was a characteristic of the Senate, with its filibuster and with a senator’s power to halt legislation or keep a presidential appointment “on hold.” The influence that Joe Manchin of West Virginia holds over the Senate is an example of what the House now has welcomed into its own chamber.

Not that this was fully unanticipated. Mr. Trump conferred respectability on Republican rebellion, and former Speaker Newt Gingrich (1995-1999), himself a onetime GOP rebel, saw this coming, when, six years before he finally won power, he told the Ripon Society, a centrist Republican organ: “What you’re going to see is an argument between a governing conservatism, which is proactive and willing to solve problems with conservative values, and a more theoretical conservatism.”

Today, Washington insiders believe that the distinction is between those who want to solve problems and those who luxuriate in creating problems. Perhaps that critique is simply the bleating of a fading elite unwilling to accept or acknowledge that it is going into eclipse.

One way or another, it is unlikely Washington will look back upon this week of bedlam with the famous phrase Aeneas told his soldiers: “perhaps one day you’ll even delight in remembering this.”