There can be no talk of a march through. Kevin McCarthy sat out vote after vote after vote, which can at best be described as an embarrassment. Only after the 15th attempt did the Republican cross the finish line as the new chairman of the US House of Representatives (stern reported). He bought the post dearly.
Election to the chair of the Chamber of Congress is usually a formality, but for McCarthy it turned out to be a fiasco. Several MPs from the far right corner of the parliamentary group refused to support him, successively undermined the power of his position and strengthened their own – because they could. McCarthy needed every vote given his party’s slim majority in the chamber and was ready to scrape it together under sweeping concessions.
“He’s going to be the weakest speaker,” said MP Ruben Gallego, a Democrat. “The problem is that he has also weakened the institution in general – all because he wants the vain title of speaker but without the power or potential responsibility.”
In fact, McCarthy has made sweeping concessions to the extreme right in the Republican ranks, leaving him hostage to their favor. In the future, a single MP will be able to apply for a vote of no confidence against the speaker, the “New York Times” and CNN report – a repeated concession by McCarthy, who initially wanted to lower the hurdle to five MPs.
Theoretically, he could be deposed at any time, but in practice it could be blackmailed. Hardliners in particular are likely to be tempted to push through their extreme positions with the threat of a vote of no confidence – especially since McCarthy gave the fatal impression that he was prepared to make all kinds of concessions for his supremacy.
McCarthy also had to promise, put simply, that the party leadership would no longer interfere financially in certain Republican primaries for the House of Representatives. The result could be that in the future even more hardliners will prevail against more moderate candidates and move into the House of Representatives.
In addition, McCarthy assured the right wing a few posts in the influential Rules Committee. The committee decides which law is put on the agenda and in what form – or not. As a result, important legislative projects could already fail before they even reach the large semicircle in Congress. On top of that, legislative proposals for spending state funds, so-called spending bills, are to be examined in the future according to so-called open rules, which enable each member to put an unlimited number of changes to the vote – and potentially to grind them off.
Last but not least, a struggle to raise the US budget debt ceiling is looming. To prevent a default that would likely result in a global financial crisis, the House and Senate must agree on a common line. McCarthy has apparently allowed the hardliners to persuade him to only raise the debt limit in combination with a budget cut – which is likely to meet with solid resistance in the Democrat-controlled Senate.
“The concessions he (McCarthy) has made mean that because of the Freedom Caucus (the right-wing wing) it will be a minority of a minority of the minority who can dictate the outcome of legislative performance,” said Rep. Richard E .Neal of the Democrats. “The problem for him is that with every concession, he has to wake up every day and wonder if he’ll still have his job. Because the slightest disagreement could lead to a motion to remove him from the speaker’s post.”
Even after the election as spokesman, the hardliners are likely to keep McCarthy on their heels, knowing that he’s putty in their hands, so to speak. That doesn’t make it any easier for him to organize the narrowest possible majority of divided Republicans in the House of Representatives.
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, fears “devastating consequences for our country”. McCarthy surrendered himself to a “fringe element” in his party in order to get the necessary votes. His “dream job” could become “a nightmare” for the American people.
Sources: The New York Times, CNN, The Hill, Politico, Bloomberg, with DPA news agency footage
