BY NIK POPLI
POLITICS
WHEN ASKED THE ADVICE HE WOULD GIVE THE NEXT Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy replied, “Change the rules.” The California Republican was addressing the press on Oct. 3, the day he lost the job he had held for only 10 months, a decent run for an Italian government but a mortifyingly brief interval to hold a position that draws power from longevity. The marble edifices of the Capitol campus that surrounded McCarthy as he spoke are named for House Speakers like Joe Cannon, Nicholas Longworth, Sam Rayburn whose grip on the gavel spanned decades. McCarthy held it for 38 weeks. But then the majorities managed by those leaders, two Republicans and a Democrat, were elected when parties, not insurgents, ran politics.
For McCarthy, and even more so for his successor, the brutal truth was that the rules have already changed. The specific bylaw that McCarthy alluded to is one allowing any member of the Republican conference to call for a vote to recall the Speaker at any time. It’s a rule McCarthy agreed to in January in the course of being elected, after 15 ballots, by a margin of four votes. The recall option was the price the former Bakersfield sandwich-shop owner paid to win the support of the very far-right-wing House members who deposed him 10 months later.
But it signaled a larger change, away from governing and toward performance. “My fear is the institution fell today,” McCarthy said at his farewell press conference following the 216-210 vote. Eight Republicans had joined the Democrats in voting against him—as punishment for McCarthy’s agreeing with Democrats three days earlier on a compromise bill that kept the federal government running, just hours before it was to shut down. “They don’t get to say they’re conservative because they’re angry and chaotic,” McCarthy said. He singled out Representative Matt Gaetz, the flamboyant Florida Republican who had toyed with McCarthy through the roll calls of January, and invoked the rule calling for his removal. “It was all about getting attention,” McCarthy said.
Yet the next Speaker will inherit a House that is not only divided but subdivided, with the GOP’s narrow nine-seat majority diminished by an angry split between establishment Republicans and the far-right populist faction egged on by Donald Trump. Add to that a broken power structure that allows even a handful of dissent
