Kevin McCarthy has turned the House of Representatives into a circus to keep power

The mayhem in the House is the price he must pay to keep his gavel. But it may cost Republicans their majority

U.S. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) speaks during a stamp unveiling ceremony in honor of the late Congressman and civil rights activist John R. Lewis of Georgia, in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol on June 21, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Getty Images)

Earlier this month, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy looked like a hero after he successfully brokered an agreement with the White House to raise the debt limit. Rather than a protracted and drawn-out fight with his own conference that his Republican predecessors faced, most of his conference joined him.

Nevertheless, it looked like his strategy of embracing right-wing lawmakers like Reps Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Thomas Massie (R-KY) might have paid off. All three voted to make him speaker and then voted to raise the debt limit.

Similarly, as much as members of the once-mighty Freedom Caucus might have crowed, they lacked the votes, the strategy or the guts to actually mete out punishment against Mr McCarthy the way they did to former speaker John Boehner. Even when the right-wingers committed a minor revolt and bottlenecked votes in the House for a few days, the conflict seemed to resolve itself.

But bringing them into the fold always had a cost and Mr McCarthy is now paying the price. With a potential Republican-created economic crisis off the table, Mr McCarthy now faces a House GOP conference that has turned into a full-blown circus, with the California Republican alternating between being a ringmaster orchestrating the spectacle and being stuck in the arena as a lion licks its chops.

On Wednesday, the House floor devolved into chaos when it voted to censure Rep Adam Schiff (D-CA), with Democrats shouting “shame,” in an almost exclusively party-line vote.

In fairness to Mr McCarthy, he has long disliked Mr Schiff, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and booted him from his seat on the panel for allegedly spreading misinformation about former president Donald Trump and Russia, so there is no love lost between the two. But it was Rep Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), one of the initial holdouts against Mr McCarthy during the marathon 15 rounds to make him speaker before she flipped, who proposed the legislation.

Mr McCarthy and Republicans as a whole have wanted revenge against Democrats who they feel unfairly pursued Donald Trump during his presidency and it makes sense that they’d want to go after Mr Schiff, who led the first impeachment against Mr Trump. But having shouting and chaos on the House floor and taking the extraordinary step of censuring Mr Schiff shows that he is basically letting the House conservatives do whatever they please to stay in their good graces. (Incidentally, the whole censure might be moot since Mr Schiff is running for Senate and will either go back to California or pack up his boxes and move to the big kids’ table).

The real headache for Mr McCarthy became apparent when Rep Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who never voted for him to be speaker, began to push for a privileged motion to impeach President Joe Biden. Holding such a vote would certainly be political suicide for the House GOP conference when many people would see it as simple retaliation after Mr Biden’s son entered a plea deal and Mr Trump faces indictment.

Rep Maxwell Frost (D-FL), the progressive Generation Z congressman, articulated it perfectly to me when he said: “I think it puts a lot of their members in a tough position, especially the what, 18-plus Republicans who are in districts that the president won.” Those blue-district Republicans would almost certainly lose their re-elections if they voted to impeach Mr Biden on spurious charges.

But Mr McCarthy might not have a choice since, as I reported on Wednesday, his ally Ms Greene has said impeachment and a vote on her legislation to restrict gender-affirming care for transgender youth are her price for being his close ally.

“I got the votes for McCarthy to become speaker. I voted on the debt ceiling bill even though I called it a s*** sandwich because I found things I liked in it,” she said. “But I can't get my protect children's innocence bill passed? I can't get that to happen? Protecting kids? And then I can't have them even start the process on [House Judiciary Committee] for impeachment?”

Mr McCarthy must have known when he decided to cozy up to Ms Greene that it was the equivalent of taking a credit card with conservatives and running up the bill. Now, it’s time for him to pay, which might cost him his House majority. But to defer on paying his bill would mean surrendering the very gavel which he fought so desperately to earn.