WASHINGTON – What does it mean to break the establishment?
That’s what Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) says he’s doing when he runs for Speaker of the House against Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
“Change the trajectory of the country,” Biggs told HuffPost, describing his vision of success for destroying institutions.
“It democratizes this body,” Biggs said. “You take it out of the hands of four people … and you put it in the hands of committee chairs, you put it in the hands of committee members.”
In other words, Biggs and his right-wing colleagues in the House Freedom Caucus hope to force party leaders to share more power with their rank-and-file members instead of deciding on bills behind closed doors and then putting them to vote without too much. . . member entry.
But Biggs also described a less noble and more immediate outcome: He would screw up McCarthy’s bid for speaker and someone else would get the job.
McCarthy needs 218 votes to win when the House elects its speaker in January, and it will take just five votes to defeat him.
Biggs, who has served in Congress since 2017 and has been directly involved in former President Donald Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election, he also falls short of 218 electoral votes. But he believes someone else will rise to the occasion.
“You’re going to get a center-right consensus candidate as the out-of-body speaker,” Biggs said.
That’s almost exactly what former Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) became in 2015 after far-right Republicans impeached Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). McCarthy had been the spokesman, but the Tories were committed to denying him victory when it came time to vote on the floor, as they are doing now. So Ryan stepped in as the center-right consensus candidate.
But the story did not have a happy ending. The Tories are so disillusioned with their former speaker these days that Biggs to describe Ryan’s endorsement of McCarthy as a kiss of death from the dreaded establishment.
The whole idea of a center-right savior is “pretty fanciful,” said former Ryan spokesman Brendan Buck.
“I would say these people are not very imaginative – they’re doing the same show over and over again,” he said. “There is already a consensus centre-right candidate and his name is Kevin McCarthy. I’m on an island. Deep in the sea.
This time, McCarthy doesn’t hold back. Thirty-one Republicans voted for Biggs in one internal party vote last monthand six have publicly pledged to oppose McCarthy when the House chooses its leader on Jan. 3, enough to block his path. But the California Republican says it is confident that he will win and that faction of Biggs will settle for rule changes that empower conservatives.
No one else is officially in the running for speaker other than McCarthy and Biggs, suggesting a stalemate. But Biggs predicted a viable new candidate would emerge in January and said there had been work behind the scenes to ensure that outcome.
“I would just like to say that people have quietly approached those who are interested,” Biggs said.
A group of House Republicans formed the Freedom Caucus in 2015, in part in response to Boehner’s removal of conservatives from committees for not voting the way he wanted. But McCarthy has already said he will reinstate Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) to committee seats denied by Democrats because of conspiracy theories and their threatening behavior.
The big problem is that whoever the speaker is is automatically part of the establishment, and if they want to keep the federal government running and the bills paid, they will inevitably cut deals with the Democrats. It’s hard not to be part of the establishment when you’re Speaker of the US House of Representatives.
Greene, who hopes McCarthy will land him a coveted seat on the House Oversight Committee, is one of the Freedom Caucus members supporting McCarthy, another difference between now and 2015.
“The Freedom Caucus is responsible for having Paul Ryan as speaker,” Greene said. “Will this group do something like this again?”
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