WASHINGTON (AP) — When Rep. Kevin McCarthy emerged from a messy 15-ballot race to become Speaker of the House, he was encouraged rather than reprimanded by the battle, saying his father taught him early in life: “That’s not how can make. you start; that’s how you finish.”
But as the California Republican front-runner faces his first 100 days at the helm of a slim Republican House majority, it’s proving difficult to escape the show of shaky terrain that has become a defining rhythm for McCarthy’s speakership.
So far, McCarthy has had stunning successes in the new Congress: The Republican House has passed dozens of bills, many of them bipartisan, including strong policy efforts against crime and the COVID-19 pandemic that have prevented President Joe Biden from to choose rather than cartel. bills into law.
McCarthy has opened up the Capitol more to visitors, enjoying onlookers stopping to take selfies during his impromptu press conferences in the hallway. It hosted its first foreign leader, Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, with a diplomatic flourish, leading a bipartisan coalition of anti-China lawmakers.
McCarthy will give a speech at the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, another sign of his growing influence.
It’s 100 days into the new Congress, and McCarthy’s role as speaker is what one senior congressional Democrat likened to the spotlight on a theater stage, with the audience waiting for the show to begin and then suddenly realizing there’s no script . .
McCarthy occupies the speaker’s chair – second only to the presidency – but the Republican front-runner, allied with Donald Trump, remains stubbornly limited in action by his awkward grip on the gavel. Any parliamentarian can request a vote to remove the speaker from office.
As such, McCarthy has failed to get House Republicans to begin to realize their larger goals: For starters, the GOP promises border security or budget cuts to avoid a debt ceiling crisis. How he handles them will be the defining challenge that will make or break the next 100 days.
“This is where McCarthy is,” said Jeffery A. Jenkins, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California who has written about the House speakers.
“The power of any speaker is endogenous,” he said. “This Congress, McCarthy will always have a job. It’s going to have to be a razor’s edge.”
In many ways, it was inevitable that whoever succeeded the last speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., would act differently because of the immense role she played as one of the most powerful leaders of Congress in modern times. She often jokes that she became a speaker in decline under the Republican.
But McCarthy is remaking the speaker’s office in his own image, including requesting a private room up the steps from the House floor for meetings. The silver-haired father eschews many of the formal trappings of Congress—he may never return to the televised Capitol briefing room for formal press conferences—as he begins to use the extraordinary powers at his disposal.
He often suggests that he is underrated. House Republicans stunned Washington with some unexpected early victories when they took control in January for the first time in four years.
Republicans nearly forced Biden to sign bills in advance, including one that would have overturned the District of Columbia’s criminal code. Democrats were furious when the White House dropped efforts to oppose the measure and played to the GOP’s tough rhetoric.
On other measures, McCarthy found Democrats willing to push party lines — to create a Select Committee focused on U.S. competition with China, to require the administration to declassify as much information as possible about the origins of COVID-19 and to call for an abrupt end . to the national pandemic emergency.
Right-wing critics who denied McCarthy’s endorsement during the grueling 15 ballots it took to become speaker until he acceded to their demands seem relatively pleased with the outcome.
“He performed better than we thought,” Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., a former chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said in an interview. “I can’t complain.”
For conservative observers, the House under McCarthy is a welcome contrast to the past two years of Democratic rule in Washington.
“Now there’s actually a check and balance,” former GOP leader Eric Cantor said. “He does it every day and very effectively, obviously, to keep his troops together.”
But the fight to be speaker is never far away, thanks to a Trump-aligned powerhouse in Congress that has backed McCarthy and could just as easily oust him.
Trump’s endorsement ensured McCarthy won his race to be speaker, both said, but the former president’s endorsement can easily be lost.
While McCarthy balanced his Reagan-style optimism against more extreme Trump-aligned populists in his speech, he remained close to Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a top Trump ally. He led efforts to reduce prison terms for defendants facing some of the most serious charges stemming from the Capitol riot.
In another gesture to his right wing, McCarthy gave thousands of hours of riot video to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who promoted false conspiracy theories about the attack. McCarthy was among those members of Congress who, on January 6, 2021, voted against certifying Biden’s 2020 election victory over Trump.
The House Democrats’ caucus issued a memo last week saying the new GOP majority in the House is “too extreme to lead.”
Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., and longtime leader of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, said in an interview that the long election for McCarthy to speak “was the most embarrassing week in the history of Congress — and I don’t think that things have gotten a lot better.”
Even the House investigation into Biden and his family, which should have been a mainstay of the new Republican majority, has turned into a free-for-all, with multiple committees examining all aspects of the federal government.
“Hard work,” GOP Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, told The Associated Press about the speaker. “But it’s going great.”
Representative. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., a member of the Freedom Caucus who was among those detained during the week-long election, said it could make McCarthy “the best speaker” of his life.
“We’re proud of him,” said Clyde, whose bill was the first Biden signed into law.
“I mean, he’s proven he can fight. He showed that he would keep it. Well, that should horrify the White House and horrify the Senate. The house is under control.”
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