WASHINGTON (AP) – When Rep. Kevin McCarthy came out of a crowded 15-ballot election and rose to become speaker of the House, he was more enthusiastic than condemned to war, saying that his father taught him early in life: “It’s not how you start; it’s how you finish.
But as the defeated Republican leader from California navigates his first 100 days at the helm of a slim House Republican majority, it’s hard to shake off the spectacle of a volatile launch that has been a clear backbeat for McCarthy’s speakers.
So far, McCarthy has been successful in the new Congress: House Republicans have passed dozens of bills, many of them bipartisan, including powerful political efforts targeting crime and the COVID-19 pandemic that have left President Joe Biden with little choice but to sign. bill to law.
McCarthy has opened the Capitol more fully to visitors, delighting onlookers who stopped to take selfies during an impromptu hallway press conference. It hosted its first foreign leader, President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan, diplomatically flourishing, leading a bipartisan parliamentary coalition that stood in China.
On Monday, McCarthy will deliver a speech at the New York Stock Exchange, another sign of his growing influence.
It’s 100 days into the new Congress, and McCarthy’s speech as one of the senior congressional Democratic aides is compared to the spotlight on a theater stage, with the audience waiting for the play to begin and then suddenly, there is no script.
McCarthy performed the role of speaker – second in line to the presidency – but the Republican leader allied with Donald Trump remained stubbornly limited in action due to his restless grip on the gavel. Any member of parliament can request a vote to remove the speaker from office.
So, McCarthy has not been able to steer the House Republicans to start delivering on the broader pursuit – GOP promises for border security or budget cuts to prevent the debt ceiling crisis, for starters. How to deal with them will be the challenge that makes or breaks the next 100 days.
“This is where McCarthy finds himself,” said Jeffery A. Jenkins, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California who has written about the House speaker.
“The power of a single speaker is endogenous,” he said. “This Congress, McCarthy certainly has a little wiggle room. He’s going to have to walk a tightrope.”
In many ways, anyone who followed the last Speaker of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., will be different because of the large role she played as one of the most powerful congressional leaders of the modern era. He often quips has become a shrinking speakership in the Republican.
But McCarthy remaking the speaker’s office in his image, including reclaiming a private room just a few steps from the floor of the House for meetings. The silver-haired father shuns many of the official trappings of Congress – he may not return to the televised briefing room in the Capitol for an official news conference – as he begins to tap into the enormous powers at his disposal.
He often suggests that he is being underestimated. House Republicans stunned Washington with some unexpected early victories when they took control in January for the first time in four years.
Republicans all but pressured Biden into signing early bills into law, including one to restore the District of Columbia’s criminal code. Democrats were outraged when the White House rebuffed efforts to veto the measure and played into the GOP’s rhetoric of crime.
In other measures, McCarthy found Democrats willing to cross party lines – creating a select committee focused on the US competition with China, so that the administration should disclose the most intelligence about the origin of COVID-19 and the need to stop it quickly. national pandemic emergency.
Hard-right critics who withheld the support of McCarthy during the excruciating 15 ballots took to become speaker until he agreed to the request that seemed relatively satisfied with the results.
“He performed better than I thought,” said Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., past Chairman of the Freedom Caucus, in an interview. “I can’t complain.”
For conservative observers, the House under McCarthy is a welcome contrast to the past two years of Democratic Party government in Washington.
“Now there really are checks and balances,” said Eric Cantor, former GOP leader. “They deliver every day and are very effective, obviously, in holding their forces.”
But the fight for the speakership is not far off, because the center of power that Trump has established in Congress is supporting McCarthy and could easily tear him apart.
Trump’s support ensured McCarthy won the race for speaker, the two said, but the former president’s support could easily disappear.
As McCarthy balanced his own Reagan-style optimism against more extremist Trump-aligned populists at the conference, he remained close to Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a top Trump ally. He has led efforts to ease detention conditions for defendants facing some of the most serious charges stemming from the Capitol uprising.
In another far-right move, McCarthy released thousands of hours of riot video footage of the riots to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who promoted a false conspiracy theory about the attacks. McCarthy was one of the members of Congress who voted on January 6, 2021, against certifying Biden’s 2020 election victory over Trump.
The campaign arm of House Democrats issued a memo last week saying the new House GOP majority is “too weak to lead.”
Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., and long-time leader of the Asian Pacific American Congress Caucus, said in an interview that the election was pulled out to make McCarthy speaker “is the most embarrassing week of all in the history of Congress – and I don’t think the situation has gotten better.
Even the House investigation into Biden and his family that was supposed to be the capstone of the new Republican majority has become a free-for-all with multiple committees examining all aspects of the federal government.
“It’s a tough job,” GOP Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, chairman of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, told The Associated Press about the speaker. “But he did well.”
Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., a member of the Freedom Caucus who was among the holdouts during the weeklong speaker election, said it all could make McCarthy “the best speaker” in his lifetime.
“We’re proud of him,” said Clyde, whose crime bill was the first law Biden signed.
“I mean, he’s proven that he can fight. He’s proven that he’s going to stick it out. Well, that should scare the White House and scare the Senate. The House is in control.”