Kevin McCarthy’s transparent ambition and decades-long dream of becoming speaker of the House was nearly brought down by a band of Republican radicals.
He raised the money. He logged the campaign miles. He walked the halls in a crisp suit with a salesman’s gleam. But this week Kevin McCarthy ran headlong into the most perilous challenge of his career when rebellious Republicans unleashed a crushing battle that nearly denied him the speakership of the House and underscored the deep rancor within his party.
McCarthy had sought the speaker’s gavel for decades. Every wrinkle and twist of his career — from a young California assemblyman to minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives — telegraphed his ambition. Some found him earnest, others calculating and duplicitous. But few believed the man from Bakersfield with the firefighter father and the high school sweetheart wife would be denied.
He wasn’t forsaken in his quest, but his dream came at a humiliating cost that called into question his hold over the party. McCarthy’s powers of persuasion, his stock-in-trade congeniality, were not enough to get through the first 14 rounds of voting, revealing as much about the highly charged nature of American politics as it did about his willingness to compromise principles and bend to concessions forced by the party’s small but potent band of disruptors and election deniers.
“Kevin is incredibly weakened,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican consultant who has known McCarthy for years. “This is doing him extraordinary damage. These holdouts [radicals] view him like a Democrat. He is part of the swamp they want to get rid of. Kevin is the last establishment Republican standing. These are the death throes.”
He was an unenviable man in the spotlight, unable, despite his gamesmanship instincts and late-night maneuverings, to stop the revolt against him until early Saturday morning when he clinched the 216 votes that redeemed him. It was dramatic American theater that went off script and turned embarrassing and then tedious as each voting round passed and McCarthy carried himself through the chamber smiling, yet diminished until a final, pulse-quickening bit of wrangling and arm-twisting pushed him over the top.
McCarthy ascended to the speaker’s chair, smiled, took the gavel and banged it twice.
“And now the hard work begins,” he said.
The congressman had staked much of his future on Donald Trump. But with the former president facing a tide of legal woes and less influential with radical Republicans determined to upset the act of governing, McCarthy was in jeopardy. Those who attempted to orchestrate his downfall, including Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), never saw McCarthy, an expert on House procedure and rules, as the consequential change agent they wanted to wreak havoc on the Biden administration and upend the way Congress works.
“The GOP civil war is in full swing. The MAGA caucus has the Speaker’s race held hostage, placing the nation in a dangerous moment in American history,” said a statement from the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump organization, after the first day of voting on Tuesday. “This is a direct consequence of what happened on January 6th and with the rise of the post-fact, post-conservative, and post-Republican MAGA nihilist caucus.”
McCarthy has long been more facilitator than leader, more strategist than visionary. Those traits helped in his contortions in defending Trump, even after the Jan. 6 insurrection when many moderate Republicans saw an opportunity to disavow the former president. He gauged that Trump and his loyalists were the path to the speakership. But the congressman’s chameleon qualities left him vulnerable to hard-liners who demanded allegiance not to convention and ideological flexibility but to revolution.
