Kevin McCarthy’s Dilemma

In March, we published an edition of Uphill questioning House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s ability (and willingness) to keep his conference in line. It’s a story we could have updated and published nearly every week since then.

A cycle of distractions and inflammatory rhetoric from members on the far right keeps playing out. Reps. Paul Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert, in particular, have continued to embarrass themselves and their colleagues, and McCarthy has continued to steer clear of criticizing them. The dynamic isn’t likely to play a huge role in the 2022 midterms, which Republicans are favored to win, but it has implications for McCarthy’s support among moderate members who would like to see leaders play a larger role in outlining standards of acceptable behavior in the conference. 

The latest conflagration: Boebert, a Colorado Republican, has repeatedly made a joke at fundraisers this year suggesting Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is one of only three Muslims in Congress, is a terrorist. 

Beyond the blatant bigotry underpinning her comments, Boebert simply appears to have been lying about having an interaction in an elevator with Omar. Videos of her comments in September and another instance last month indicate she workshopped the joke, adding a concerned Capitol Police officer as a flourish in the more recent version. Omar, for her part, says the interaction did not happen.

McCarthy has stuck to his playbook of avoiding any outright condemnation of her remarks. He spoke with Boebert privately and facilitated a call between her and Omar, which went poorly. 

At a press conference on Friday, McCarthy was asked why he has such a hard time condemning comments that are so clearly wrong.

“Let me be very clear: This party is for anyone and everyone who craves freedom and supports religious liberty,” he said. “Lauren Boebert, I called her when it came forward, we talked, she apologized publicly. She apologized personally.”

But Boebert herself has said she refused to apologize directly to Omar. Boebert broadly apologized last week to “anyone in the Muslim community I offended with my comment about Rep. Omar.”

McCarthy indicated Friday he is not considering removing Boebert from her committees for the comments. His laid back approach during this Congress has been a far cry from his early days as the top House Republican, when he stripped former Iowa Rep. Steve King from his committees for questioning what is wrong with the phrases “white nationalist” and “white supremacist.”

The far-right members in question not only launch disturbing attacks on Democratic lawmakers, such as Gosar’s creepy anime video depicting him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but they have also increasingly trained their sights on fellow Republicans.

This week, Greene feuded with fellow freshman Rep. Nancy Mace after Mace condemned Boebert’s comments about Omar. In tweets, Greene repeatedly said Mace is “trash,” and Mace said, through a series of emojis, that Greene is batshit crazy. It culminated in Greene calling former President Donald Trump to complain about Mace. 

This wasn’t a policy dispute, and it wasn’t a behind-closed-doors conflict that was revealed only later. This fight was carried out publicly all day Tuesday, with masses of Twitter followers ready to participate. It was somewhat embarrassing for other House Republicans to witness.

“I feel like I’m back in junior high again, and I hated junior high,” one Republican lawmaker told The Dispatch. 

At a conference meeting on Wednesday, McCarthy told members he wasn’t there to be their babysitter. He didn’t mention any lawmakers by name, but he urged them to stay focused on their message, according to a Republican who was in the room.

On Friday, McCarthy was asked if Greene, Gosar, and Boebert are distractions to winning back the majority next year. 

“It’s things we would not want to deal with,” he said of their behavior. “The American people want to focus on stopping inflation, gas prices, and others, and anything that deviates from that causes problems.”

But McCarthy has largely maintained a strategy of appeasement with the fringe wing of the party this year, which critics argue has emboldened them. 

While Republican lawmakers and former senior staff say it’s easy to understand why McCarthy would avoid making enemies in his quest to be speaker after the 2022 midterms, some members are becoming increasingly frustrated with his lax approach, especially as they have come into the crosshairs of the right.

“Most of us in the conference want to give a chance for the leadership to talk to individuals and say, ‘Hey, we need to tone it down. Be professional,’” Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon told Axios’ Andrew Solender this week. “But at some point, the conference as a whole is going to be frustrated and speak up.”

Bacon was one of 13 House Republicans who supported the Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure package when it came forward in the House last month. Greene labeled them traitors, ginning up anger among her followers after the vote and posting their office phone numbers on Twitter. Some of those Republicans became the targets of death threats for supporting the bill, which was really just a beefed-up highway reauthorization package—one that received support from nearly half of Senate Republicans, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. 

Bacon received a voicemail from someone hoping he would slip and fall down a staircase, for example. His office is still dealing with the fallout: He’s holding a tele-townhall next week to discuss “misinformation regarding the infrastructure vote.” 

“I don’t want to add to Leader McCarthy’s heartburn,” he said this week. “I’m not here to be a burden, but at some point, you’ve got to defend yourself.”

Brendan Buck, previously an aide to former Speaker John Boehner and later a senior adviser for former Speaker Paul Ryan, told The Dispatch that attempting to strike down conservative members with a large following among the base can oftentimes make them stronger. 

“There is such a martyr complex among so many of these members that they would love to be held out as the ones fighting with leadership,” he said. 

Buck added that members like Greene don’t want or need a lot of the benefits leadership can provide, which are the tools used to keep lawmakers in line.

“You rein them in by committee spots, bills on the floor, positions at a press conference, you know, attention that you can direct towards these members. Obviously fundraising,” he said. “Someone like her, someone like Gosar, they don’t need any of that. They can get attention for themselves. They don’t care about policy-making, so they don’t have any committees that they really care to serve on. So the tools that you would use to ‘do something’ are relatively limited in these cases.”

Buck said the House GOP conference has had its fringe members for years, and leaders have contended with these dynamics at various times, but “it’s really hard to even compare this Congress with the ones from just 4, 6, 8 years ago.”

“It’s a whole new ball game with a lot of these folks. And we had a handful of cranks, frankly,” he said. “But you have a lot of members practicing a whole different brand of politics in a way that didn’t exist just a few short years ago.”

And the fringe caucus is powerful. According to OpenSecrets, Greene has brought in nearly $6.3 million this year, making her the fourth-highest fundraiser among House Republicans who are running in 2022. McCarthy, for comparison, has raised almost $9.1 million this cycle. Boebert has raised $2.7 million, 13th among House Republicans seeking reelection.

McCarthy’s approach to his far right members is primarily a numbers game, said Michael Steel, another former Boehner aide. He told The Dispatch that McCarthy’s strategy makes sense politically, because it isn’t certain how large of a majority Republicans will have if they take back the House as expected. 

“It’s probably the smartest option available,” he said of appeasing the likes of Greene, Gosar, and Boebert. 

“Getting from the number of seats that House Republicans currently have to the largest possible majority next year is a process of addition, not subtraction,” Steel said. “It would be counterproductive to deliberately alienate any portion of that prospective Republican coalition.”

But McCarthy isn’t just tolerating these members. He pledged that Greene and Gosar will be restored to committees if Republicans take the House, and not just the ones they were previously on, but “they may have better committee assignments.”

It’s not clear his efforts to keep Greene, Gosar, and their allies in the fold will be enough to win their support for speaker if Republicans take the House, though. Greene recently said on Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz’s podcast that McCarthy does not have the votes to be speaker. 

Other Republican members and aides largely agree Greene didn’t know what she was talking about and the odds, for now, are still overwhelmingly in McCarthy’s favor. 

But there are several other members with sizable online followings who have likewise indicated McCarthy isn’t their first choice. Boebert, for instance, told Politico last month that she thinks former President Trump should be speaker. Gaetz said the same. (Technically, the speaker of the House does not have to be a member of Congress, although it is very unlikely.)

As of right now, there isn’t much doubt that McCarthy will be the speaker if Republicans win the House. Part of that is politics: He’s done a lot of fundraising and campaigning for incumbents, and it would be difficult for members to mutiny unless reality falls far short of the victory members anticipate.

And if you ask House Republicans, most express support for him.

“It’s a lot to manage,” Texas Republican Mike McCaul said of the GOP conference. “I’ve been very supportive of him, and I do think he’s going to be the next speaker.”

“Kevin has done, I think, very effective outreach to all the different factions within the conference,” McCaul added.

And Rep. Jim Banks, the ambitious Indiana Republican who chairs the Republican Study Committee, told The Dispatch “there’s nobody better skilled at handling conflict than Leader McCarthy is.”

Banks was one of the only senior members of the conference who explicitly criticized Gosar for attending a conference attended by a white nationalist earlier this year. Asked about McCarthy’s silence on that and other controversies since then, Banks said, “To any Republican who’s criticizing him for how he’s handling it, I guarantee that Leader McCarthy has had more conversations than anybody knows, because he handles things in a proper way that’s often done privately.”

Rep. Tom Cole, the top Republican on the Rules Committee and an ally of leadership, also downplayed the spat between Mace and Greene. 

“I’m usually not into comparing speakers,” he said when asked about how former Speaker Boehner would have handled the feud. “Kevin McCarthy is a very capable leader, and the idea that he doesn’t discipline people—ask Steve King. He does, and I just think he’s pretty adroit, and he’s right now trying to make sure the main subject is the main subject, which is what the Democrats are doing.”

Cole added that he believes some of the conflicts stem from being in the minority and not having much of a say in the legislative process. He predicted this week’s controversies won’t matter for voters.

“People get past it, and I think we will,” he said. “And our electoral prospects are awfully bright, and I don’t think the American people care a lot about these issues. I think they really care about how much their gasoline costs and what it takes to feed their families and what they think their long term job prospects are, and all of those measures they’re not very happy.”

In the meantime, the number of Republicans who have been removed from their committees could soon grow to include Boebert. Progressives are pushing for Democratic leaders to hold a vote on the matter.

“That language, that behavior, can’t be normalized. It’s violent,” said Rep. Jamaal Bowman, a New York progressive. “It literally leads to an increase in death threats for Congresswoman Omar.”

“We’re in a dangerous time, and we have to respond forcefully and respond with our humanity. It’s just common decency,” Bowman added. “It seems like every week we’re here. It seems like every week we’re having to respond to a Republican member of Congress doing or saying something that’s, in my opinion, complete insanity.”