The collapse of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s bid for speaker was sudden, but conservative discontent with congressional Republicans was simmering long before the current leadership team was even in place.
Conservative activists didn’t feel they had much to show for unified GOP control of the federal government under George W. Bush nearly a decade ago. They liked Obama and three-fifths Democratic congressional majorities even less. Republicans won back the House and then the Senate promising to oppose and, where possible, roll back Obama’s agenda but were never able to do so to the right’s satisfaction.
What the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections did do, however, was add to the number of Republicans inside Congress who shared these conservatives’ frustrations. These lawmakers had almost as little use for leadership as the Tea Party groups clamoring for change on the outside.
It’s these conservatives who are happiest about recent events. To hear them tell it, they took down House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a Republican primary last year. They toppled Speaker John Boehner from inside the House. Now they have denied McCarthy his promotion to speaker.
Even though 2014 was not a particularly good year for Tea Party challenges to Republican incumbents — among conservative activists, Chris McDaniel’s loss to longtime Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran particularly rankles — their fellow travelers in the House have grown bolder. The question is whether they can move beyond the 40 to 50 votes necessary to thwart the leadership’s ambitions to actually lead the party themselves.
“The lazy narrative is we want a more conservative speaker,” Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., a member of the House Freedom Caucus, has been quoted as saying. “But what we want is a more process-focused speaker.”
To buttress Amash’s point, the House Freedom Caucus’ choice for speaker is Rep. Daniel Webster, R-Fla. Webster’s American Conservative Union rating for 2014 is lower than Boehner’s and a shade lower than McCarthy’s. Webster’s lifetime ACU rating is nearly ten points lower than McCarthy’s.
Lawmakers sympathetic to this approach would like to have the ability to offer more amendments and diverge from leadership without punishment. This last bit is especially relevant to some in the group, because Amash, Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kans., and Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C. have all lost committee assignment over votes.
Amash and Huelskamp were both booted from the House Budget Committee after voting against the budget promoted by its then chairman Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican currently running the Ways and Means Committee who many (reportedly including Boehner himself) are pushing as a compromise speaker candidate.
In his capacity as committee chairman, Ryan has managed to get the party to embrace entitlement reforms elected Republicans were reluctant to touch even during the Reagan administration. Despite accepting a slot on the 2012 GOP ticket with Mitt Romney, he has consistently rebuffed efforts to draft him into House leadership races. It is possible he could emerge as a consensus figure who can articulate conservative ideas, a skill McCarthy was widely viewed as lacking. But there is also a risk that Ryan, who has already sparred with members to his right on immigration and even spending, could be tainted as an establishment figure if he is viewed as leadership’s choice for the job.
At a time when populist Republican presidential candidates are actively trying to unravel the party’s consensus in favor of entitlement reform and the delineation between RINOs and true believers is fluid, this could endanger more than Ryan’s upward mobility in Congress.
Some Republicans, including fairly conservative ones, are skeptical the House can be run in the looser fashion reformers appear to want. Others wonder if the folks at home will be happy with process-based reforms if they don’t yield consistently conservative results.
The race for speaker is an opportunity, however public and messy to hash out these tactical disagreements. It’s also a chance for new blood to succeed where the old guard failed. Will anyone take it?
