What Doomed Kevin McCarthy

The marvel of Wile E. Coyote isn’t that he eventually falls off the cliff but that he makes it so long running in midair.

In the same way, what’s noteworthy about Kevin McCarthy’s nine months as speaker of the House isn’t that it was the shortest tenure since the 19^th century but rather that he somehow managed not only to get elected to the position but to scrape together nine months with the gavel.

On Tuesday, McCarthy was removed as speaker after his longtime nemesis, Florida Republican Matt Gaetz, led a motley coalition of eight dissident Republicans to oust him. The votes of those Republican rebels, along with 208 Democrats in the chamber, ensured that, for the first time in history, a speaker was forcibly evicted from office midterm.

McCarthy sat through the vote next to an aide, often with a broad smile on his face, as he let others keep a tally of what was happening. The nearly hourlong process proceeded with each member standing up to announce their vote. ​​Eventually, Rep. Steve Womack, the veteran Arkansas Republican presiding over the House, prepared to announce the result.

The packed chamber was quiet and tense. Womack looked at the parliamentary script on the upper right corner of the speaker’s dais and announced McCarthy’s fate: “On this vote, the yeas are 216; the nays are 210. The resolution is adopted. Without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid upon the table. The office of speaker of the House of the United States House of Representative is hereby declared vacant.” Out of the Republican side of the chamber, an exclamation of “damn” could be heard, as members processed the history that had just been made. Afterward, a long line of colleagues walked down the aisle of the House to hug and embrace the California Republican in the aftermath of his historic defeat.

The math for McCarthy was always perilous. Republicans had anticipated a “red wave” during the 2022 midterms and a majority well into the double digits that would have been jampacked with moderates from swing districts, the kind who would be risk-averse for fear of losing their seats in two years. Instead, McCarthy ended up with a narrow majority of just five members in a House Republican Conference that has long been habituated to mounting coups against their leaders. In the process of shoring up support for his speakership, McCarthy had to woo all wings of the party—backing those members who voted to impeach Trump against primary challenges in the midterms, while also turning Marjorie Taylor Greene into a critical ally. It would have been enough of a coalition with a healthy majority. Instead, with such a thin margin, hard-liners used their leverage within the conference to force McCarthy to face 15 ballots—a modern record.

In the course of the effort to win the speaker’s gavel, McCarthy made concession after concession to rebels. Even then, six Republicans could not bring themselves to formally cast a ballot for him in January and voted “present” to allow McCarthy to become speaker without their official support. Five of those six voted to oust him on Tuesday.

The hope of the hard-liners was to pin McCarthy to commitments that would empower them and leave him enfeebled. Not only did they extract a number of policy commitments and force McCarthy to put conservative skeptics on a key committee that controls the House floor, but they also ensured that he restored an obscure and rarely used House procedural rule, the “motion to vacate,” which had been abolished by Nancy Pelosi. The rule allows any individual member to propose to remove the speaker, at any given time. Even the specter of it had been enough to eventually force out John Boehner in 2015. For McCarthy, this was a key red line that he would not cross throughout negotiations. Until, of course, he yielded.

In doing so, McCarthy created the mechanism by which opponents could and would eventually remove him. OnTuesday night, after he announced he would not mount another effort to run for speaker, McCarthy said, “I don’t think that rule is good for the institution.” In fact, when asked if he had any advice for his successor, it was to change that rule. But it was what he had to agree to in January in order to take power. It was concessions like these, made to the hard right, that set McCarthy up for failure when he had to make tough legislative choices and negotiate deals over the past few months, including raising the debt ceiling and avoiding a government shutdown.

Although McCarthy had built much stronger relationships with figures on the right of his conference over the long, bruising struggle to become speaker, he spent a lot of the chits he had earned since then. Gaetz, the ringleader of the efforts to oust McCarthy, described the debt ceiling vote in May as “the original sin.” That month, on a procedural vote that traditionally strictly follows party lines, McCarthy relied on a last-minute switch from over 50 Democrats to advance a bill allowing the United States to pay its debts after 29 Republicans rebelled. This prompted an almost-immediate floor rebellion as hard-line conservatives sank a messaging bill on gas stoves just to prove they could.

There was little goodwill left when McCarthy avoided a government shutdown this fall by pushing through a bill to fully fund the federal government for the next 45 days after conservatives sank an initial effort that they felt violated the commitments made in January.

Still, at that point, McCarthy’s fate was by no means sealed. The high-water mark of opposition against him during the speaker’s race was 20 votes, and it was unclear if Gaetz could muster even half of that in opposition. But to stay afloat, McCarthy would have needed the Democrats to save him. And there was no way they were going to do that. Especially when McCarthy was unwilling to concede any of his limited power to them.

It wasn’t simply partisanship. First, there was a fundamental sense shared by Democrats and the Republican dissidents that McCarthy could not be trusted. “Nobody trusts Kevin McCarthy,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the leader of the Progressive Caucus, matter-of-factly told reporters on Tuesday. California Rep. Adam Schiff amplified this, contrasting McCarthy to his predecessors. “There ought to be a speaker who gives his word to the president. … I think we had that kind of leadership with Boehner and with [Paul] Ryan. We might disagree on policies, and we did, but they cared about the institution in a way that Mr. McCarthy doesn’t.”

But it wasn’t just about the lack of trust they had for McCarthy—a product of how much he had to first reach bargains with the White House and then massage that bargain with his conference. McCarthy was forever tainted by Democrats for his ties and perceived obsequiousness to Trump. On Tuesday, Jamie Raskin, one of the Democrats on the Jan. 6 committee, went through a long list of McCarthy’s sins against democracy in a conversation with reporters, including how the California Republican helped to rehabilitate Trump by visiting him at Mar-a-Lago only weeks after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. At the end of the laundry list, Raskin scornfully and rhetorically said: “You’re asking me whether I’m going to vote for Kevin McCarthy?”

But of course, McCarthy had had no choice but to appease Trump if he wanted to be speaker. Any opposition would have been politically fatal in a conference in which he needed to rely on members like Greene as crucial allies. It was the political stance necessary for him to take the speaker’s gavel, but on Tuesday it ultimately doomed any chance of him keeping it.

Already, a number of hopefuls are getting ready to launch campaigns to succeed McCarthy. There’s no reason to think they will be any more successful than their predecessor. They face the same fractured political dynamics and have to manage the same narrow congressional majority. But that won’t stop them from trying. After all, Wile E. Coyote never stopped trying to catch the Road Runner.