Republicans should consider a speaker who doesn’t want the job
Timothy P. Carney
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With a wafer-thin majority and an anti-establishment fervor holding sway, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is unable to lock up the speakership. It takes a majority of all members voting in order to become speaker, and so 90% of a slim minority doesn’t do the trick.
Dissident Republicans have voted for Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Jim Jordan (R-OH), and former Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY), who recently ran a close race in New York’s gubernatorial race. The speaker need not be a sitting member of Congress, but some commentators find these protest votes silly for another reason:
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I disagree. I think not wanting a position of power is a pretty good qualification for being given that very position of power. Of course, sometimes people don’t want a job because they are unqualified for that job. At the same time, in Washington, most of the time people who do want a position of power want it for bad reasons.
I don’t know Kevin McCarthy’s reasons for wanting to be speaker of the House, but I do know that he’s spent the past decade-plus staying close to power and doing what it takes to climb the ladder. At times this has involved sucking up to Donald Trump, who was woefully unfit for the presidency and a curse on McCarthy’s party.
These days, McCarthy has tried to win the speakership by agreeing to rules that are probably bad for the party and for the House.
Specifically, McCarthy has agreed to a rule that effectively allows a rump of five Republicans to depose him. In a conference call Sunday with dissident Republicans, McCarthy agreed to a rule allowing a vote of no confidence in the speaker if five members sponsor it.
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Kevin McCarthy wants the job too badly for conservatives to trust him with it. A guy like Lee Zeldin or Oklahoma Rep. Kevin Hern might have the ability to be speaker.
An unwilling speaker has some downsides, but so does a speaker who becomes speaker in order to attain power. The upside of an unwilling speaker is that he or she would be more likely to wield his power for what he thought was best for the party, the House, and the country, rather than what he thought was best for himself.