WASHINGTON — Republican leader Kevin McCarthy surely could have seen defeat coming: The wave that swamped him has been building for years.
In 2015, attacks from the right wing drove House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio to quit in frustration. Boehner’s successor, Rep. Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, stuck it out for just 2½ years before announcing that he, too, would quit the House.
On Tuesday, the division that stymied the last two Republican speakers reached its logical conclusion: For the first time in 100 years, the majority party in the House proved unable to elect its nominee as speaker.
And on Wednesday, as of press time, nothing had changed.
For Republicans, the political pain has probably only just begun. On Wednesday, McCarthy again failed repeatedly as the House reconvened to try again.
The problem for Republicans is that the contest over the speaker’s job isn’t what divides the party. Instead, “the contested race is the symptom of the underlying problems they face,” said Sarah A. Binder of George Washington University, an expert on Congress.
The roughly 20 House conservatives who repeatedly voted against Bakersfield’s McCarthy, who had won the endorsement of the right-flank Republican Freedom Caucus, “aren’t building a coalition” aimed at winning a majority to pass specific policies, Binder said.
Instead, their main power is to “throw sand in the gears” and try to block Democrats and less conservative Republicans from passing key legislation. That gives them little incentive to compromise — either on the speakership or, as Ryan and Boehner both discovered, on bills that leaders in both parties consider “must pass” legislation.
“It’s not clear that they have a price McCarthy could pay” to convince them to support him, Binder added.
Indeed, over the last several weeks, McCarthy made repeated concessions to the right only to see opposition to his candidacy grow. It’s going to be hard to pass any major legislation with 20 members of the caucus willing to blow up the place.Longtime strategist Mike Murphy
Whoever eventually emerges as speaker — McCarthy, in the increasingly unlikely possibility that he can win over his deeply entrenched opponents, or another candidate such as Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana — will face that same problem over and over in the next two years, Binder and others said.
“It’s going to be hard to pass any major legislation with 20 members of the caucus willing to blow up the place,” said longtime Republican strategist Mike Murphy, now co-director of the Center for the Political Future at USC.
“Being speaker of the House is going to be like being mayor of hell.”
The political danger for Republicans is that many swing voters already see the GOP as too much in the thrall of ideological extremists. In November’s midterm elections, Republicans lost the support of independent and moderate voters, costing them a score or more hotly contested congressional districts they had hoped to win.
