House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy knows the first thing that he would do if he becomes speaker of the House in 2023: “Grab that gavel out of Nancy’s hands” and “bang it down for the American public.”
After that, the California Republican plans to change House rules and processes in part by reversing norms under Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s strict leadership.
McCarthy laid out his blueprint for the House and policy priorities to Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel on her podcast, Real America, first shared with the Washington Examiner. It was filmed before the Jan. 6 select committee requested Wednesday that McCarthy voluntarily appear before the committee.
“We’re going to change the rules. Members are going to have to show up to vote,” McCarthy said, referencing a COVID-19-era rule that allows members to vote remotely by proxy. “To get paid, they’re going to have to go to work. Bills are going to come out of committee.”
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McCarthy criticized Pelosi for taking away tools of the minority.
“This may be inside baseball. They have something that is called a motion to recommit,” McCarthy said. “It guarantees the minority to have an amendment on every bill. Just one. OK. Never before has it ever been taken away. She took it away.”
Republicans in 2019 effectively used the motion to recommit to get Democratic support on an amendment that would require a notification to be sent to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement if an illegal immigrant tried to buy a firearm.
He also lamented metal detectors set up outside the House chamber. “You’re going to get frisked eight times a day like you’re going to the airport. And what it means is, ‘I don’t trust the people I work with.’”
This week, McCarthy also floated the idea of banning members of the House from trading individual stocks. Punchbowl News reported the idea, which also has some support from Democrats. Pelosi, who has made millions of dollars from her husband’s stock trades, opposes the idea, citing support for a “free market economy.”
Another major focus for a Republican majority, which would still face a Democratic president unlikely to sign many of its policy priorities into law, will be oversight activities.
“We’re going to hold this administration accountable. They’re not going to be getting away with anything,” McCarthy said, adding that “every single committee” could have some oversight responsibility.
McCarthy noted that House Democrats pulled out of a planned bipartisan committee on China in early 2020 that he had worked for eight months to get Pelosi to agree to.
“We literally bring a Washington Post reporter in to interview everybody so they can lay out the article when we go. The night before, they pull out of it and say no,” McCarthy said. “They didn’t tell me why, but … my inkling is because COVID hit, and they thought it would give Trump an advantage if we were doing something about it.”
A Democratic aide told the Washington Post at the time that they worried the committee would be “the Trump administration’s scapegoat for its utter failure.”
When it comes to policy, McCarthy also said there would be a focus on the U.S.-Mexico border, lowering gas prices, combating inflation, and making the U.S. energy independent.
McCarthy will have to be elected by his members to become House speaker, and there is always the possibility that intraparty controversies in the House complicate or derail his quest to hold the gavel. But McCarthy did receive some credit from members for a record-breaking speech, lasting 8 1/2 hours, on the House floor in a symbolic delay of Democrats’ Build Back Better bill in November.
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McCarthy said that he didn’t plan to speak for so long. “I wrote a speech for about an hour,” he said. “I drink a lot of water, and I didn’t know I could last that long, to be honest with you.”
He also got a thumbs-up from McDaniel. “You’re going to be great as speaker,” she said. “You becoming speaker is going to be the last gasp or the last step in preventing us from becoming a socialist or communist nation.”
