There is a flip side to Kid Kev's torture:
Unrest swells among McCarthy’s backers
Around Christmas, Texas Republican Rep. ROGER WILLIAMS’ wife suffered a medical emergency. This week, as she underwent treatment, her husband was eager to be by her side.
Instead, he has been stuck in Washington taking failed vote after failed vote in KEVIN McCARTHY’s quest to become speaker.
“This is killing him,” one of Williams’ GOP lawmaker friends told us late Thursday night. “I’ve never seen Roger as down as he was yesterday.”
...
On Thursday, Rep. KEN BUCK (R-Colo.) felt ill; his colleagues had to convince him it was OK to duck out of the speakership drama and go home for rest. Rep.-elect WESLEY HUNT (R-Texas) is eager to return to Texas after his wife gave birth this week. Rep. KEVIN HERN’s (R-Okla.) mother died this week; he wants to attend her funeral on Saturday.
“There’s a lot more at stake than whether Kevin McCarthy’s going to be able to get the gavel,” the aforementioned GOP lawmaker told us. “We’ve got lives that are being impacted right now, and this is tough for people.”
There’s been wall-to-wall coverage of the 20 anti-McCarthy rebels. But as the GOP leader faces down what will likely be his 12th failed bid for the gavel today, the story is about to shift to McCarthy’s increasingly tenuous support network.
Now, days into this protracted speakership standoff, with little to show for the mountain of concessions McCarthy has given conservatives, some of those supporting his bid are privately getting frustrated — and think he might need to consider calling it quits.
We consistently heard four main issues fueling the growing frustration among McCarthy’s supporters:
1. Changes to rules and policy:Some members are privately angry that McCarthy is empowering hard-liners with rules changes to the point that they worry it will be difficult, if not impossible, to govern. There’s also concern about policy commitments he’s considering for the far right, including a vote on steep budget cuts that defense hawks will never swallow.
2. Committee deal-sweeteners:Many Republicans are fed up with his apparent willingness to hand plum committee posts to his detractors — especially, talk of possibly awarding them gavels. Some senior members have “forcefully” warned McCarthy not to go there, as our colleague Sarah Ferris scooped on Thursday evening. In fact, late last night, we heard a group of Appropriations cardinals huddled in a room off the House floor with panel Chair KAY GRANGER (R-Texas), pressing her about whether McCarthy would truly allow someone like Rep. ANDY HARRIS (R-Md.) to lead the Labor-HHS subcommittee.
“That’s not going to happen,” Granger assured them, arguing that Harris, a McCarthy foe, would need to earn his way up the ladder, just as they all had. We’re told McCarthy’s staff later assured some of these folks that he won’t be handing out gavels to his detractors. But whether that’s enough to hold his coalition intact for much longer is yet to be determined.
3. The lack of a clear path to victory: A third group just wants to know whether there is still a path for McCarthy to succeed, because after three long days, hours of negotiations and round after round of failed votes, they don’t see it.
4. The human factor: Some, like the members mentioned above, are facing personal and familial struggles as they’re trapped in Washington indefinitely since McCarthy needs every last one of their votes due to the GOP’s narrow majority.ODAY: A PUSH FOR CLARITY — On Thursday, Rep. ANN WAGNER, a Missouri Republican known for her candor, told McCarthy he owes his members an explanation about what’s going on, voicing frustrations many are feeling. We caught up with her late last night just off the House floor, and she told us that she presented the GOP leader with the names of more than 80 Republicans who agreed with her and demanded a conference meeting.
McCarthy only partially relented: He agreed to host a conference call this morning, on which he’ll walk through the state-of-play on his negotiations with his detractors.
“That’s a bit cowardly, if you ask me,” Wagner said of his decision to do a call instead of facing his conference face-to-face. “We are all human beings,” she continued, arguing that keeping members in Washington day after day without showing progress is not sustainable.
Meanwhile, senior Republicans are increasingly whispering that if McCarthy can’t wrap this up soon, he needs to step aside and let someone else try. (On Thursday, we spoke to one top Republican backing him who is thinking of confronting McCarthy himself on this topic.)
Adding to the exasperation is that McCarthy’s latest concessions to conservatives that we reported on Thursday morning have not yet yielded McCarthy any new support. Negotiations continue, and even if a deal is finalized today, the subsequent vote will be a make-or-break moment.
“He needs to move several people from the ‘no’ column so he can keep the temperature down with the members who are becoming, as you well know, very impatient,” one lawmaker said. “There is a limit to how much of this crap we can take.”
A number of McCarthy backers now think he is prolonging the inevitable: another failed speakership bid. Even if he flips a dozen or so holdouts, they worry, there seems to be a large enough bloc of members who will never back him. “This is no more about process or about substance; for some of them, it’s about, ‘We want Kevin McCarthy’s scalp,’” the above lawmaker told us.
###
Awesome reporting by Politico.
