Critics of Kevin McCarthy, the new House speaker, say he gave away too much to fulfill his longtime ambition to lead that chamber of Congress.
What did they think he would do? Concede the job to someone else?
By the time it got to the 15th and final vote, the Republican congressman from California had nothing to lose. He could either give up completely on the idea of being two steps away from the presidency, or he could agree to the concessions that would give him the speaker’s job, though with more limited powers than that of his predecessor.
It is not surprising that he opted for the latter.
Although the complete scope of concessions McCarthy made to his party’s hardliners are still to come out, the ones that have drawn the most attention would make it easier to oust him and would pressure Congress to reduce spending.
Neither of those two is necessarily a bad thing.
Until recent history, the rule in the House had been that any one member could call for a vote to unseat the speaker. That was raised to five members during the tenure of Democrat Nancy Pelosi. McCarthy’s concession, assuming the operating rules are approved by a majority, would lower the threshold back to one.
Whatever the threshold, it needs to be remembered that one irate member of the House cannot get rid of a speaker. It would still take a majority vote. What the change does is make it easier to call the question.
As for a clampdown on government spending, Congress needs to be moving in that direction. Washington busted the bank during the COVID-19 pandemic, piling on debt in order to avoid a total economic meltdown. The infusion of trillions of borrowed money into the economy staved off a calamity, but it also had the unintended consequence of driving inflation to a 40-year high.
With $32 trillion in debt already and increasing at a clip of another trillion dollars a year or more, it is time to ratchet things down. Otherwise, we’ll be passing on to the next generation or the generation after that a burden that will drive up taxes and drive down government services.
It is going to take some finesse to reach a spending agreement on which the majority of the House can agree. The GOP hardliners showed last week that they have no qualms about jamming up the wheels of government. Making McCarthy stew for four days, though, was of modest consequence. Shutting down the government, which has on occasion been the outcome of spending disagreements, is a much bigger deal, impacting hundreds of thousands of government employees and millions of program beneficiaries.
One of McCarthy’s big tests in coming months is whether he can broker a deal to raise the debt limit, without which the government will be unable to pay its bills and pay out benefits. Conservatives are going to demand spending cuts in exchange for raising the government’s borrowing authority, and they will be holding McCarthy’s feet to the fire if he doesn’t concur. Democrats are going to fight most of those cuts. The scenario has the makings of another drawn-out standoff.
That would have been the case as well, though, if someone other than McCarthy had been elected speaker. The margins in the House are so thin that almost any faction within the majority party has a disproportionately high degree of leverage.
Besides, if Democrats did not like the concessions to which McCarthy ultimately agreed, they should not have stood back and watched him be held hostage. Had just a few moderate Democrats peeled off and voted for McCarthy, he could have told the GOP hardliners to kiss off. Politically unthinkable perhaps, but not impossible.
