--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Noelle King: Our nation's representatives gathered today to try it again, to elect a Speaker of the House. They nominated Hakeem Jeffries. They nominated Kevin McCarthy. It's about our nation's future. The person who will lead us on that journey will be Kevin McCarthy. He has earned this position.
--:-- Noelle King: They nominated Kevin Hearn. They nominated Jim Jordan. Earlier today, Kevin McCarthy was on a conference call trying to appease the Republicans who are refusing to back his bid for Speaker. The compromises that he has made would diminish his power as speaker. But after 13 failed votes, McCarthy seems to have decided it's worth it.
--:-- Noelle King: We need to talk about Kevin coming up on Today Explained. What do you do when you love somebody? And you decide to go in alone, alone, alone. It never pays to give up. Support for this show comes from ServiceNow. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into, don't you know? That's why it's no surprise that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 use the ServiceNow AI platform.
--:-- Noelle King: Didn't know that. While other platforms duct tape tools together, ServiceNow seamlessly unifies people, data, workflows, and AI, connecting every corner of your business. And with AI agents working together autonomously, anyone in any department can focus on the work that matters most.
--:-- Noelle King: I've never met an AI agent. Learn how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people at servicenow.com. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Each Apple product, like the iPhone, is thoughtfully designed by skilled designers. The titanium Apple Card is no different. It's laser etched, has no numbers, and it earns you daily cash on everything you buy, including 3% back on everything at Apple.
--:-- Noelle King: Apply for Apple Card on your iPhone in minutes. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at AppleCard.com. What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered? It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Noelle King: Joining us in our 74-ish of the trials of Kevin McCarthy is Andrew Prokop. He's a senior politics correspondent at Vox. Andrew, describe what we are seeing on this day. It's pretty much disarray is the real word to describe it. The House is stuck in an endless groundhog day-like loop of repeatedly voting on the Speaker and repeatedly failing to come up with a majority choice for the Speaker.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They can't do anything as a result of it. They can't set up their committees. They can't move ahead with legislation. They can't do much to help out their constituents. Don Bacon and I were supposed to be meeting with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the SCIF here to talk about matters in the Indo-Pacific. But I'm informed by House security that technically I don't have a clearance.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Everything is just kind of messy and stuck and no one is really sure how it's going to end up. Why do they keep voting if Kevin McCarthy doesn't have the votes? And no one else seems to either. So because of House rules, they are kind of by default tasked with voting on a speaker until they come up with a speaker because there is no speaker to tell them not to do that.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So the only thing they can do if they come up with a majority to vote to do something else like change the rules of the speaker election or briefly adjourn until tomorrow, which they've done a couple times, they can do that if a majority of the House votes to do that. But even that has proved difficult.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It's been hard for Kevin McCarthy to line up a majority of votes to even get them to take a break from voting. The question is on the motion that the House stands adjourned until noon tomorrow. Those in favor say aye. Those opposed, no. No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No! No!
--:-- Noelle King: Give me a sense, Andrew, of the numbers. There were 222 Republicans elected in last year's midterm elections. And to have a majority of votes in the House, you need 218. So he could afford to lose four, but if he lost five, he'd fall short of the majority.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The way the speaker's election works, you really need an actual majority of the people present and voting in that speaker election. So Democrats vote for, in this case, Hakeem Jeffries, their new leader, now that Nancy Pelosi has stepped down. And Republicans, most of them, voted for McCarthy.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But a breakaway faction did not vote for McCarthy. They voted for a rotating cast of characters who they allegedly would prefer to be Speaker over McCarthy. They started out with my friend and colleague from Arizona, Andy Biggs. Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona. He's part of the hard right Freedom Caucus.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Then they threw their votes behind Jim Jordan. I'm nominating Jim Jordan from Ohio for Speaker of the House of Representatives. The likely chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which was interesting because Jordan is supporting Kevin McCarthy and even gave the speech nominating him on the second ballot.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And I think Kevin McCarthy is the right guy to lead us. I really do or I wouldn't be standing up here giving this speech. Then they switch to Byron Donald. Byron Donald's, a relatively new representative from Florida who some Republicans think is a rising star. And Representative Matt Gaetz.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Even through a vote to former President Donald Trump. The honorable Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida has received one Who been holding out. It's a motley crew with a variety of motivations. I think of them as falling into three main groups.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The first is the ideological hardliners. They're motivated by policy. This is about the future of the country. This is about the direction of the country. American people who are looking at this body and wondering why we can pass $1.7 trillion bills that are unpaid for. They really are against government spending.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They want to make big changes to the way the government passes its appropriation bills. They want to drastically cut perhaps government benefits. And so for them, this is about policy and it's about winning concessions that they think will help them win policy fights later in this Congress.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The second group I think of as kind of the fringe. It is not happening. And as it's been said, we need to get to a point where we start evaluating what life after Kevin McCarthy looks like. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Paul Gosar of Arizona. These are people who have embraced some pretty far out stuff. QAnon theories about child trafficking or election related conspiracy theories.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They just seem to have a really anti-establishment orientation and distrust in the establishment. That seems to be driving them more than specific policy grievances. Finally, the third group, for them, it's more personal. These are perhaps people who have reasons to just distrust Kevin McCarthy as a person or to dislike him and want to see him defeated.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Some of them just maybe want to make a little mischief. I think that describes pretty well Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who has been one of the ringleaders of this effort. Everything I heard hardened my resolve that this town desperately needs change. And if it's a few of us who have to stand in the breach to force it, we are willing to do so for as long as it takes.
--:-- Noelle King: What do they want from McCarthy, the ones who aren't just trying to cause trouble? So there are a few main things that have been under discussion. One involves what's known as the motion to vacate the chair.
--:-- Noelle King: It's a bit of a mouthful, but basically it forces a no-confidence vote of sorts on McCarthy. This is kind of a tool that the hardline conservatives want to use to hang over McCarthy's head. If he does something they don't like, they can use this motion to vacate the chair.
--:-- Noelle King: They can put it forward and perhaps force another speaker vote and bring us back here to Groundhog Day if McCarthy lacks a majority to stay in office. Through most of the House's history, it was very easy. It just took one member to advance this motion to vacate the chair and then the House would have to vote on it.
--:-- Noelle King: But almost no one ever did it. But when Nancy Pelosi took over in 2019, she changed the rules to make that more difficult, which she thought would make her better able to lead the chamber as she saw fit.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: McCarthy reportedly on Wednesday night acquiesced to this. He said, okay, my offer includes rolling back the rule to the way it used to be. He gave them what they want. Why aren't they voting for him? Well, there's a lot more that they want, too.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Some of the gripes from the really anti-spending faction have been about the basic ways that Congress handles its big spending bills. They just passed a huge omnibus appropriations bill funding the government last month, and conservatives had a lot of complaints about this process and about the bill itself.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So they are demanding that instead of one big omnibus bill, we want 12 separate appropriations bills and that everybody has to be able to put forward amendments to it. Again, McCarthy seems to have moved at least somewhat in their direction on that topic.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They also want certain committee seats and subcommittee chairmanships. One interesting one is about the House Rules Committee. They control what bills go on the House floor, how those bills are discussed and debated, how much time they will be debated for, and what amendments will be on offer.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Traditionally, the Speaker has pretty tight control over what this committee does. But these hardliners want some seats on that committee so they will be able to, you know, maybe not go along with what Kevin McCarthy might want on some of these bills.
--:-- Noelle King: And so it sounds to me like the holdouts are saying, Representative McCarthy, Kev, we want X, Y and Z, but we don't yet know if they're really going to move. Yes, there have been a lot of demands made, and McCarthy has given in on some of those demands.
--:-- Noelle King: But as they like to say, on Capitol Hill, nothing's agreed to until everything is agreed to. They're still talking. Some of them have sounded encouraging about these talks, while others of the holdouts who have been perhaps less involved in the talks have continued to reiterate that they will never support McCarthy.
--:-- Noelle King: And the key question is how many are in each camp. He really doesn't have much room to spare. He's got to win over almost all of these people. So even if there are only five truly dug in, really anti-McCarthy votes, then he can't get there.
--:-- Noelle King: Amid all of this, there is another party in the room, the Democratic Party. What are the Democrats doing? So the Democrats on every single round of balloting so far have remained united in support of their own speaker candidate, Hakeem Jeffries.
--:-- Noelle King: They are not offering up their votes to bail Kevin McCarthy out of this jam, and he is not asking for their votes. He actually promised that he would not seek any Democratic votes to help get him elected speaker.
--:-- Noelle King: Andrew, is there another candidate who could replace McCarthy, i.e., maybe not a Biggs or a Jordan who have got a handful of votes, but somebody who really could get, you know, 200-plus-odd votes?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That's a bit of a mystery right now. How much of this opposition is really just a personal thing about Kevin McCarthy and how much of it is an opposition to mainstream Republican leadership in general?
--:-- Noelle King: A little over seven years ago, there was a similar situation unfolding in the House. The Speaker John Boehner had resigned and a guy named Kevin McCarthy put in his name to be his replacement. But McCarthy couldn't line up the votes on the right, so he withdrew from contention before actually any votes took place on the House floor.
--:-- Noelle King: There was a lot of consternation among Republicans. Who could unify us? And then Paul Ryan stepped forward. He became the unity candidate that got the mainstream Republicans and the hardline conservatives on board.
--:-- Noelle King: I never thought I'd be speaker. But early in my life, I wanted to serve this house. I thought this place was exhilarating.
--:-- Noelle King: There are some theories that if the hardliners did succeed in tanking McCarthy, they might just vote for his number two, Steve Scalise of Louisiana. That if Scalise ran, maybe, you know, maybe they would feel that they made their point and they would be happy to give Scalise a shot.
--:-- Noelle King: It could also be theoretically a dark horse candidate who nobody is really thinking about right now. Somebody in the Republican conference somewhere who is liked by all sides, who could have the trust of both sides and somehow bring the group together.
--:-- Noelle King: But we do appear to be pretty far from that happening right now. Both sides are pretty dug in, the pro-McCarthy faction and the anti-McCarthy faction.
--:-- Noelle King: Do you want to know how we got here? More with Andrew Prokop coming up.
--:-- Noelle King: Support for today's show comes from Adio. What is Adio? Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies.
--:-- Noelle King: They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model. According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up, and within seconds you will have your email and calendars synced.
--:-- Noelle King: You'll see all your relationships in a fully-fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data. And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes to seize so that you can focus on what matters, building your company.
--:-- Noelle King: You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more. You can go to adio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year.
--:-- Noelle King: Every day, millions of customers engage with AI agents like me. We resolve queries fast. We work 24-7 and we're helpful, knowledgeable, and empathetic. We're built to be the voice of the brands we serve.
--:-- Noelle King: Sierra is the platform for building better, more human customer experiences with AI. No hold music, no generic answers, no frustration. Visit sierra.ai to learn more.
--:-- Noelle King: Kevin! Today Explained, we're back with Vox senior politics correspondent Andrew Prokop, who says this week's mess in Congress is at least a decade in the making.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: I would trace these current dynamics really back to the Tea Party. We can't spend more than we take in. You can't do it as an individual. You can't do it as a family. You can't do it at your place of work. And we can't let the government do it anymore.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: After the George W. Bush administration and the early Obama administration, The issue that was really motivating a lot of the new breed of Republican politicians and a faction of the incumbent Republicans who disliked the previous leadership was government spending.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They wanted to cut government spending badly. And so in the Tea Party wave of 2010, a lot of these members were elected to Congress and Republicans took the House. And what happened was that these anti-spending Republicans really wanted to use very aggressive negotiating tactics to try to force the Democrats to accept major conservative policy changes.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: There were a couple of bills over the ensuing few years that were viewed as must-pass bills in Washington. The first was raising the debt ceiling. The overwhelming numbers of Democratic leaders and Republican leaders both know that not extending the debt limit is not a responsible option.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Before 2011, there was a lot of political posturing around the debt ceiling. But that year is when the new Tea Party Republicans really decided to take things to the brink. Shame on this country for making this a political exercise yesterday. Shame on a Senate who said we will not take up the bill.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: How are we going to deal with the bigger problem of the national debt when we get to next year's budget if we can't cut a few pennies now? They really argued that they would not raise the debt ceiling unless Obama drastically cut spending.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: In the end, they were somewhat successful because Obama wanted to come to the table there. He did want to be seen as a spending cutter for his reelection. So a deal was eventually made. They didn't get everything they wanted, far from it, but they did force some concessions.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Now, is this the deal I would have preferred? No. So they tried this again in 2013 about another must-pass bill funding the government. Basically, Congress has to pass appropriations bills every year, keeping the government funded, or else there will be a government shutdown.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Republicans didn't say they wanted to shut down the government. What they said in 2013 was, we will only fund the government if Obamacare the newly passed Affordable Care Act was defunded.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The House has made its position known very clearly We believe that we should fund the government and we think there ought to be basic fairness for all Americans under Obamacare. And there was a government shutdown. It lasted two weeks.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Republican poll numbers plummeted. They looked terrible and they eventually caved. It's kind of this desire on the right to drive a really hard bargain to ask for things that Democrats mostly obviously would not agree to, but to refuse to fund the basic mechanics of governments as bargaining chips to try to get their way.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: Are the fights such as they exist the same today or were different battle lines drawn in the post-Donald Trump world or during Donald Trump's presidency?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: So the rise of Trump kind of scrambled Republican policy priorities a bit. The spending issue, which had been so consuming during the Obama years, dropped in relative importance. Other issues like immigration, the culture war, or even just Trump's personal scandals and the desire to defend him from them rose in interest and importance on the right.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But it's not as if, you know, there's zero interest in the Republican Party and cutting spending now. There are still some people who care about these issues and some activist groups and well-funded organizations that are still trying to push this agenda.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And because McCarthy's and the Republican House majority this year is so small, even if you have just a handful of members who still really care about this, they can make it a big deal when it comes to something like the speaker vote where he really needs their support.
--:-- Noelle King: Let's say the holdouts do come around. Let's say Kevin McCarthy is elected speaker. What has the debacle this week illustrated to us about how a McCarthy Congress would operate?
--:-- Andrew Prokop: It seems to me like Republican speakers of the House are kind of stuck in an endless cycle of recurrence where they face the same tensions that eventually consume them, that they can't deal with.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The issue is that these must-pass bills, government funding and the debt ceiling, they really do have to pass. And the Republican leaders know they have to pass. They believe that their own party will pay a very serious political price if they're blamed for breaching the debt ceiling or if the government is shut down with no end in sight.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: They just got to deal with it. But there is a faction of the House Republicans who refuse to accept this logic and this way of thinking. And so what happened under Speaker Boehner and Speaker Ryan was that they needed to get Democratic votes to pass these things, the debt ceiling increase and government funding bills.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: And that became the basic status quo of how the government kept operating. Even when there was a Republican majority, dozens of Republicans would vote against these spending bills and Ryan or Boehner would rely on Democrats to actually get them over the finish line.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: But the more they deal with Democrats and anger the right, the angrier the right gets, the dissatisfaction rises and then you get something like an effort to depose Boehner as was launched by then-Representative Mark Meadows in 2015, which helped lead to Boehner's resignation.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: That's how you get Paul Ryan kind of getting fed up with politics and deciding to retire in 2018. And that's how you get these tensions right now that are already consuming McCarthy when he hasn't even really done anything yet.
--:-- Andrew Prokop: The conservatives, they understand this cycle and they understand that McCarthy is going to probably cut deals with Democrats eventually because he has to. But cutting those deals will undercut his support on the right and may lead to his ouster.
--:-- Noelle King: Is there a way out of this? There are two scenarios in which kind of the loop could be broken. One is if the mainstream Republicans just get so fed up with these malcontents on the far right that they're willing to work with Democrats and they see no problem in kind of isolating the far right, making them irrelevant and creating a kind of durable governing majority that would both pass the bills keeping government running and would also save McCarthy if there's an effort to depose him.
--:-- Noelle King: The other way out, I think, would be kind of if the members of Congress on the far right themselves just decide to chill out a little bit. And that might sound a little fanciful, but occasionally they do decide to do that. Sometimes this is more about posturing and making an impact and not necessarily about diehard lockstep commitment to a specific course of action.
--:-- Noelle King: And if this doesn't stop, it doesn't get resolved, what happens? It's going to be a tumultuous couple of years under this dysfunctional Republican House majority and Democratic Senate and presidency.
--:-- Noelle King: Like how are they going to come to agreement? It's very difficult to see, but it is possible in the end. It may be inevitable if enough Republicans really do accept that it's unthinkable to breach the debt ceiling or to keep a government shutdown indefinite.
--:-- Noelle King: But, you know, probably some government shutdown, I would anticipate, is pretty likely in the next year or two. The problem is getting to the point where the compromise happens in a way that does not lose McCarthy all of his support on the right and get him pushed out.
--:-- Noelle King: Today's show was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and Victoria Chamberlain. It was edited by Amina El-Sadi and fact-checked by Serena Solon and engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.
