The sudden end of a speakership
Here’s what I saw in the room on an extraordinary day
For the first time ever in American history, the Speaker of the House has been fired.
I’m writing this just after the vote. I just left the Capitol. Here’s what I saw in the room.
When I walked through the doors of the House chamber and onto the floor for the vote, the first thing I noticed was about 200 reporters up in the gallery. That’s not normal. It’s usually four or five.
Then the presiding member banged the gavel and called us into session. Everybody sat down and things got really quiet. The last time I saw everyone quietly seated was during the Speaker election in January.
In short, after just a few minutes it was clear that we all felt the weight of history with this moment. No matter how long any of these people have been in Congress, none of them had ever seen this happen before. It’s been over a hundred years since anyone has even tried to fire the Speaker.
To top it off, we didn’t know which way the vote was going to go. We almost always know what to expect on the House floor - there are very few real surprises - but this was the biggest vote of the year and we figured it was 50/50.
However, there was a small, early clue as to what would happen.
The whole effort to fire the Speaker was led by the right-flank. They’ve been upset with the Speaker for months, but what really set them off was last week when the Speaker went around them and relied on the minority party for the votes to keep the government from shutting down. They were furious about that.
We figured if the Speaker lost three members of his party, he’d probably survive, but if he lost six or seven, he was probably toast.
And when I looked around the chamber, I saw six members of the right-flank, sitting together, all in a row, and away from the rest of their party.
We hadn’t even begun the debate yet, but seeing those six people sitting together like that told me that he was probably toast.
The Speaker knew he was going to lose those folks, but he was hoping to peel off a few votes from the minority party.
Some folks in the minority were expecting him to reach out and say, “Hey, let’s make a deal. I’ll offer you this, and I want your vote.”
But instead, he went on TV the day before and basically said, “Here is my offer to the other party: Nothing.”
The minority party heard that from him and said, “Well, ok then, best of luck.”
That said, I’m not sure the Speaker could offer anything to the minority party. If he did, and his party found out, they’d be furious, and then he wouldn’t need six votes anymore - he would need 20 or 30 or 50.
For those of you who very much wanted to see this chaotic moment become some kind of bipartisan success, that was the core challenge. There was no way for McCarthy to reach any kind of agreement with the minority party that wouldn’t blow up his remaining support within his party. Even if the agreement had been relatively small (i.e., let some bipartisan bill come to a vote), the result would have been major political fallout for McCarthy within his party. My sense is that if he had felt it were at all possible for him to stay in power by working with the minority party, he absolutely would have done it - he just knew it wasn’t.
Before the vote, there was about an hour of debate. It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The only people who spoke were members of the majority party. It alternated between allies of McCarthy and his right-flank ousters. It was basically one party having an internal fight in the most public way possible. They went back and forth yelling into the microphones about how angry they were with each other.
Then we voted, and when they announced that he had lost, there was no cheering, no booing.
Everyone just sat there in silence for a moment. This had never happened before - ever.
Then a congressman from North Carolina (not me!) walked to the podium and told us that he was now the Acting Speaker.
Which was a surprise to us. As it turns out, under the rules, the Speaker is allowed to secretly pick someone to be the acting Speaker if anything happens to them, and he had picked this person.
So this person stood up and basically said that we would be in recess until further notice.
Then he brought down the gavel as hard as he possibly could. He just smashed the heck out of it, because he’s good friends with the Speaker and he was really upset.
Some people started going over to the former Speaker to hug him and shake his hand. I saw one person crying.
And I was about to tell you that I expect the former Speaker to run again, but as I was writing this I got a text message that he’s announced he will not run again. He’s done.
One more thing.
I’ve told you a few times that the real motivation for a lot of folks on the right-flank is media attention.
Well, just so you can picture how dramatic those incentives really are, here was the situation for the leader of the right-flank immediately after the vote:
More soon,
Rep. Jeff Jackson
I was also originally hoping the Ds would bail out McCarthy simply for the sake of governance. But see below an excerpt from another newsletter yesterday:
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Why Democrats might not want to save Kevin.
Let us count the ways — and it’s quite a list: Via the Wapo:
*McCarthy didn’t vote to certify the election on Jan. 6, 2021. The attack on the U.S. Capitol is still raw on Capitol Hill, and Democrats will never forgive McCarthy for voting against certification after the mob was cleared from the building.
*McCarthy said former president Donald Trump was responsible for the Jan. 6 riot — and then, a few weeks later, traveled to Mar-a-Lago and took an infamous picture with Trump with their thumbs up. Democrats are still furious about the incident, which helped revive Trump politically and whitewash the severity of his role on Jan. 6.
*McCarthy worked against the creation of the Jan. 6 select committee, which Democrats viewed as an attempt to protect Trump.
*McCarthy gave the Jan. 6 security footage to since-fired television host Tucker Carlson without releasing it to news outlets.
*McCarthy delivered votes for the Cares Act — a $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief bill passed in 2020 and signed by Trump — and later became highly critical of pandemic relief legislation.
*He worked with Democrats to help put together the microchips manufacturing bill last year and then whipped his party to vote against it.
*McCarthy backed out of a spending agreement he made with President Biden as part of a deal to lift the debt limit less than two weeks after Biden signed the law in an attempt to placate the furious conservatives in his conference. Democrats on the House floor on Saturday chanted, “Keep your word!”
*McCarthy said in August that he would hold a vote on the House floor to open an impeachment inquiry against Biden. In September, on the first day back from summer recess, McCarthy opened an impeachment inquiry and did not hold such a vote.
*On Saturday morning, McCarthy didn’t give lawmakers 72 hours to read the short-term spending bill to keep the government open despite House rules. Republicans argued that it was an amendment and not a full bill so the 72-hour rule didn’t apply. But Democrats were given just minutes to read it and vote on it despite asking Republican leadership for more time. (Democrats deployed stalling tactics to get about two hours to read and discuss the bill.)
*On Sunday, McCarthy went on CBS’s “Face the Nation” and charged Democrats with wanting a shutdown. That infuriated Democrats, who voted nearly unanimously for the government spending bill when fewer than half of Republicans did.
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McCarthy effectively did this to himself. If he had set up a bipartisan approach in January with even a loose power-sharing arrangement, it might have helped.
Thanks for this quick update from someone in the room where it happened. Once again the majority party has demonstrated that it not only has no interest in governing, but that "majority" and "party" are quickly going out of favor too.