No Way To Run a House

If the parties fight each other to a draw in the gerrymandering wars, who wins? Democrats can probably carve about as many safe congressional seats out of blue states as Republicans can out of red states. More safe seats means narrower partisan majorities. In those conditions, losing just a few votes can be fatal, so the advantage belongs to whichever party is better at keeping its members onside.

That doesn't describe the modern congressional GOP. In Glory, Grief, and the Gavel, John Leganski tells the story of Kevin McCarthy's slow rise and rapid fall as speaker of the House of Representatives. In the process he reveals a decade of House Republican fractiousness—between competing ideologies, yes, but also between competing personalities and egos that are hard to subdue when a GOP Congress is facing off against a Democratic president.

It's an insider account. Leganski interned for McCarthy as a Stanford student in 2012 and joined his staff right after graduating, when McCarthy was majority whip. The young Leganski was instructed to commit all 247 House Republicans' names and faces to memory. He became an expert at herding votes—an endeavor that "was more a study in psychology" than political science—and quickly became one of McCarthy's most senior aides.

McCarthy's first shot at the speakership came in 2015, when John Boehner left the post amid opposition from the nascent House Freedom Caucus. The group argued that Boehner hadn't done enough to confront the Obama administration over spending despite a series of bruising confrontations. As majority leader, McCarthy was next in line, but his candidacy was derailed by lingering mistrust on the Republican right as well as his own inartful comments about the Benghazi hearings (of all things). Those experiences—in the shadow of Eric Cantor's upset defeat in a 2014 primary election—gave a taste of the Republican Party's frustration with its leadership that would explode in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump's first presidency lowered the stakes of internal House GOP politics. But Leganski notes that McCarthy was an effective partner for Trump, having worked closely with another outsider GOP executive, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, when he was in the state's assembly in the 2000s. Trump's support, beamed in from Mar-a-Lago, would come in handy during McCarthy's next bid to be speaker in 2023.

The first indication that McCarthy would have an uphill battle in his second go-around came on election night in 2022. President Joe Biden was unpopular, inflation was high, and House Republicans were expected to win a decisive majority and wave their leader into the top slot. But the midterms turned out to be much closer than expected (which Leganski attributes to the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade). With just 222 GOP seats, McCarthy would need near-unanimity in his conference to get elected speaker.

That gave the Freedom Caucus substantial leverage, and its members knew it. As Matt Rosendale of Montana said: "I was praying each evening for a small majority because I recognized that that small majority was the only way that we were going to advance a conservative agenda." McCarthy started with a base of about 200 members, but the remaining 10 percent had to be persuaded.

The most substantive members of the Freedom Caucus, led by Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, wanted McCarthy to commit to significant changes to "decentralize" power in the House so that leadership couldn't control the conference through last-minute diktats. Others wanted to extract influential posts in the House hierarchy. But the unofficial leader of the resistance to McCarthy, Florida's Matt Gaetz, seemed to simply revel in the spectacle and the publicity it brought him.

Slowly but surely, McCarthy's operation was able to break the 20 holdouts. He convinced the caucus there was no alternative (even though, as Leganski tells it, Steve Scalise of Louisiana was waiting a little too eagerly in the wings). The specter of Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries becoming speaker in the face of GOP divisions—something Gaetz explicitly threatened, according to the book—spooked the base.

McCarthy's team negotiated vigorously to bring the "maybe Kevins" around, including, fatefully, by agreeing to a rule change allowing any single member to introduce a "motion to vacate" and recall the speaker. It helped that the office had "assiduously built relationships over the past seven years" with figures such as Charlie Kirk and Sean Hannity "after we learned the hard way in 2015 what it felt like to have next to no air cover on our rightmost flank," Leganski writes. McCarthy got 203 votes on the first ballot but 216 on the 15th, five days later, enough for a majority with a handful of holdouts (including Rosendale and Gaetz) voting "present."

One theme in Leganski's account is that the Freedom Caucus is held to a different standard in negotiations than the rest of the GOP coalition. They could "sling arrows and issue ultimatums, but the second a different corner of the conference did so, they cried foul." The populist and right-wing members advocated for a rule saying that only bills with support from the majority of the majority could go to the floor—but were also willing to hold the majority of the GOP "captive to a small minority" in the race for speaker.

It's unimaginable that House Republican moderates would hold up the election of a speaker with the support of 90 percent of the conference. But rebellions from the right are seen as carrying a special kind of authenticity in the modern GOP—especially when the conservative movement feels under siege by a left-wing administration.

Though McCarthy's speakership lasted just 270 days—making his the shortest tenure as the U.S. government's third-ranking official since the 1870s—it can't be called a failure. He successfully rolled the Biden administration and Senate Democrats in debt limit negotiations, passing a major spending reduction in June.

But Gaetz's grudge against McCarthy hadn't faded. He saw a chance to trigger a motion to vacate after legislation to avert a government shutdown split the conference in September. Gaetz's real motivation, Leganski suggests, was "halting an ongoing bipartisan House Ethics Committee investigation into his alleged sexual conduct with a minor." The day before the vote to oust McCarthy, Gaetz submitted his legal response to the investigators.

Still, seven Republicans joined with Gaetz—enough to remove McCarthy. That prompted the scramble leading to the speakership of Mike Johnson (a dark horse who Leganski suspects was more interested in the job than he let on). When the right flank of the GOP conference tried to remove Johnson in May 2024, Democrats, having had enough of the tumult, voted against the GOP speaker's removal.

Leganski hopes this sort of bipartisanship will become the norm for the sake of the institution, because "holding any leader to the standard that they must have 100 percent support from their party at all times" is untenable. The House GOP raised the threshold to trigger a motion to vacate in 2025. Alternatively, Leganski wonders if the House should "vest the lion's share of the power" with the majority leader, making the speakership a ceremonial position based on seniority (like the Senate's president pro tempore).

These ideas are worth considering. The House speakership is the first office identified in the Constitution, but today American politics is dominated by the presidency. That means under divided government, a Republican speaker has to survive simultaneous negotiations with a Democratic president and the House Freedom Caucus—an act that's almost impossible to sustain for long with narrow margins.

Perhaps a figure will emerge who can discipline and control the GOP House conference under those conditions. But he or she would presumably need to be a legislative veteran, and this Republican Party seems increasingly to look for leadership and authority outside of Washington.

Glory, Grief, and the Gavel: An Inside Guide to Running for Speaker of the House
by John Leganski
Regnery, 256 pp., $32.99

Jason Willick is an opinion columnist at the Washington Post.

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