They’d make it harder for him to run the chamber — and perhaps for Republicans to hold on to it.
Continuing his desperate quest to line up the votes to become speaker of the House after two days of falling short, Kevin McCarthy offered new concessions to rebellious Republicans Wednesday night — and may offer still more, according to Politico and the .
So far, no deal is in hand, as a seventh failed vote in the House Thursday afternoon proved. But some of the holdouts have spoken positively about the continuing talks, in what’s basically the first good news for McCarthy’s prospects all week. Though in continuing bad news, some other holdouts reiterated that they’ll never support him. McCarthy needs to win over 16 of the 20 rebel Republicans to be elected speaker, and it is unclear how many of the objectors are truly motivated by procedural complaints rather than a simple desire to derail the basic work of Congress.
Substantively, McCarthy’s concessions fall on a spectrum from unimportant to potentially quite important indeed. But they all share a similar theme: They’d make it harder for him to run the House as he sees fit, and perhaps harder for Republicans to hold on to it as well. Here’s what some of them are.1) An easy trigger for a no-confidence vote in McCarthy’s leadership
For most of its history, the House gave any one member the power to file a privileged “motion to vacate the chair,” which would force the House to vote on whether to depose the speaker. And for most of that history, nobody used it (except Republican Speaker Joseph Cannon, who filed one against himself in 1910 for procedural reasons). But in 2015, then-Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) filed one to try to push out Speaker John Boehner, and though it never came to a vote, it was one of the factors that spurred Boehner’s resignation that year.
Democrats then greatly weakened this power when they took over the House in 2019, requiring not just one member but half of a party’s members to advance this motion.
Conservatives wanted to roll back this change, but McCarthy was initially reluctant to fully do so, offering instead to require five members. But Wednesday night, per Politico, he gave in and said he’d let one member do it.
All this matters because the dynamics of the speaker election, as we’re currently seeing, can give stubborn rebels great leverage over party leaders. With the full House voting and strong internal pressures against seeking Democratic votes (which aren’t on offer anyway), McCarthy needs 218 of 222 Republicans to win the speakership, so any five Republicans can block him. But once the speaker is elected, the hardliners lose that leverage — unless there’s an easy way to force another speaker election.
That’s why many have compared this concession to McCarthy offering hardliners a gun pointed at his own head. He can’t govern as he sees fit; he has to constantly please 218 of 222 House Republicans or else just five of them could approve a motion to vacate the chair and bring us back to endless speaker election Groundhog Day. The implication here is that if McCarthy cuts a deal with Democrats to fund the government or raise the debt ceiling that even a handful of conservatives detest, they have the power to put him through the wringer.
Still, there’s a reason almost nobody has ever used this in the House’s history — it would still take 218 votes to elect someone else speaker. Additionally, if McCarthy is put through this after cutting a deal with Democrats, it’s possible Democrats could then save him from a hard-right revolt in return.
