What the right-wing press thinks about the Republican House speaker vote chaos

Major outlets and media figures start to take sides

After a day of three failed votes to choose a Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, here’s how major rightwing outlets reacted.

The Wall Street Journal

The Editorial Board of the paper goes after the “rump faction” blocking Kevin McCarthy’s bid to be speaker, asking “for what?”

House Republicans say they want to drain the swamp and save America, but they can’t even get through Day 1 without a display of dysfunction. Stipulated, Rep Kevin McCarthy isn’t everyone’s ideal of a conservative Speaker. But he has led the House GOP since 2019, raised oodles of money for November’s midterms, and easily won a leadership vote last year, 188-31.

Later the board skewers the display that played out on Tuesday in Congress:

House Republicans have won two years in the majority to show the electorate they can govern better than Democrats and President Biden. They’re getting off to the kind of start that will persuade even their own voters to send them back.

New York Post

With a simple front-page headline of “Grow up!”, the New York Post attacks the “small group of Republican saboteurs” who are blocking Mr McCarthy from taking power as speaker of the House.

In the lead opinion piece, Michael Goodwin writes:

The GOP’s inability to elect a Speaker despite having a majority is more than a personal rebuke to the presumed leader, Kevin McCarthy of California. It’s a mark of incompetence and a worrisome sign the party is so fractured it will not be able to unite to accomplish anything of significance for the next two years.

Instead of being a check on the White House and the Democrat-controlled Senate and using its investigative power to probe President Biden and his family’s corrupt business deals, the chaos suggests too many Republicans are freelancing and engaged in a fools’ errand masquerading as an act of principle.

He later adds:

This is madness. The reasons for opposing McCarthy seem either vague or more personal than substantive, especially after he made so many concessions to win their votes. But it was never enough because their opposition is, at this late stage, fundamentally incoherent. Most important, a shootout in a lifeboat is not a persuasive argument that the party is ready to govern.

Fox News

On his Tuesday night show, Sean Hannity declared: “House Republicans now are on the verge of becoming a total clown show if they’re not careful.”

He continued: “But despite the cheering and elation from Democrats and the mob and the media, it’s not a dire situation – yet.”

Calling the holdouts against Mr McCarthy a “small but seemingly determined group of lawmakers” he then defended the GOP leader’s conservative platform to his viewers, calling it “exactly the America-first, MAGA agenda that so many of you I know like” andd added that Mr McCarthy has also vowed to go after the Biden family’s business deadline and the “politicised FBI”.

Tucker Carlson meanwhile framed the floor fight over who should be speaker as “chaotic” but “refreshing”, calling it “democracy” versus the “oligarchy” of the Democratic Party.

“The fact that this race has not been settled by now is being described especially online by many as ‘embarrassing’,” he said. “It is embarrassing if you prefer the Soviet-style consensus of the Democratic Party’s internal elections.”

He went on to defend attacks on Mr McCarthy for not being conservative enough, calling him “ideologically agnostic”, “flexible”, and adding that his real constituency is the lobbying community.

Mr Carlson then said that this could be a strength: “It’s not easy being speaker when the House is this closely divided. And in some ways, Kevin McCarthy is perfectly suited for that. He’s skilled in politics.”

On Wednesday morning’s edition of Fox & Friends, host Steve Doocy called Tuesday a “disaster for Republicans” with his cohosts Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade agreeing.

Over at FoxNews.com, Liz Peek took another view, writing:

“The Republican Party requires a serious reboot, and perhaps this public skirmish is a necessary first step. The midterm elections delivered an unmistakable message: voters are not buying what the GOP is selling.

Arguing that voters have no idea what Republicans stand for and noting the obliteration of the party’s claims of fiscal sobriety, Ms Peek lays out the demands of the holdouts against Mr McCarthy describing their demands as “valuable objections” and that despite their portrayal as “unreasonable by the liberal media”, she says that many Republicans would agree with them.