Americana

House conservatives are getting everything they want. It hasn’t always worked in states.

THE NEWS

Powerful influence over must-pass spending bills. A one-vote threshold for challenging a Speaker of the House. A clear path to add more and more members to their ranks.

House GOP leaders offered all of this to a rebel faction this week, in an effort to win over at least 17 of the 21 conservatives who refused to support Kevin McCarthy for speaker. To take the gavel, the Republican leader would give up some of the powers Nancy Pelosi had used to manage her Democratic majorities. After the deal was presented to members, 14 of the holdouts relented on the next vote.

“Almost everything they’ve asked for has been agreed to by Kevin McCarthy,” said Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon, a McCarthy supporter who suggested that the standoff could end with some Republicans joining Democrats to pick a compromise speaker.

“They still don’t know how to get to yes,” Bacon added, describing parts of the offer as “affirmative action for the smallest caucus we have.”

Some of the Republicans who blocked McCarthy intended to keep going. Early Thursday morning, in a Twitter space where conservatives asked for updates on the “Never Kevin” push,  Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz said that the holdouts fit into two camps. One could support McCarthy if they “put him in a straightjacket” and reduced him to “a portrait on the wall.” The other, which Gaetz himself belonged to, would keep voting no until the GOP leader surrendered.

“If I had half the votes I currently have, we would stop Kevin McCarthy,” Gaetz said. “If I had half of half of the votes I have, I would stop Kevin McCarthy.”

DAVID’S VIEW

The impasse in the House could end in one of three ways: A McCarthy victory with concessions to the holdouts, a different Republican taking the gavel with GOP-only support, or a speaker elected with bipartisan support.

That third scenario occurred in two state legislatures this week, places where the same kind of factional battles play out before far fewer cameras.

There are now “Freedom Caucuses” in 10 of 50 state legislatures, modeled after the one in D.C. and pursuing the same strategy to get concessions from Republican leaders. There are also two states, Alaska and Pennsylvania, where the party that won more seats in November doesn’t control the House floor.

In Pennsylvania, where a death and two vacancies temporarily deprived Democrats of their one-seat House majority, Republican legislators convinced Dan Rozzi, a moderate Democrat, to become an independent and grab the gavel, with their support. In Alaska, a bipartisan coalition now governs from the middle, as it has in previous years.

In Ohio, 22 Republicans voted with every Democrat to elect Jason Stephens, the most moderate of three candidates for speaker, over the candidate supported by the GOP supermajority.

“When you’ve got a well organized minority, and you’ve got factions within the majority, you can build a coalition,” said Allison Russo, the Democratic minority leader in Columbus. “Stephens is a little bit more interested in governing and getting things done, and not getting distracted by the culture wars that consumed a lot of our time in the legislature.”

The standoff in the U.S. House had plenty of observers inside and outside the Capitol asking why they couldn’t do something similar. Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb. has loudly threatened to talk to Democrats about a deal if conservatives don’t crack. Democrats like Rep. Mary Peltola — until recently, an Alaska state legislator — and Marcy Kaptur of Ohio have said they’re interested as well.

“If there are members who want to form a coalition majority like we often see in Alaska, I’m open to discussing that,” Peltola told Alaska Public Media.

Cutting a deal like that would always be harder in Washington, said Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa.. The stumbling block was the political press, which put an “intense national focus” on Congress, and made stars out of the most obstinate members.

“There isn’t as much focus on state legislatures, so it’s actually easier to be creative, and to do risky things,” Boyle said.

The anti-McCarthy holdouts don’t see their strategy as risky. Chased around the Capitol all week and asked how their protest would affect everything from national security to the party’s image, they echoed what Texas Rep. Chip Roy said on Tuesday: “Do you think anybody in America right now is like, oh my God, there’s not a Speaker?”

Their eyes were on must-pass legislation, from a likely debt limit increase this year to the twelve appropriations bills they were demanding, and getting more power to amend them on the floor. The last time that a Democratic president and Senate had to deal with a Republican-led House, those negotiations often ended with most House Democrats joining a rump of House Republicans to pass whatever came out of the Senate.

Conservatives who wanted to extract rules changes saw a way to empower a bloc who always got cut out at the end of negotiations. They could get seats on the Rules Committee, which traditionally is packed with the speaker’s allies to speed his agenda through. They had already gotten the Congressional Leadership Fund, the McCarthy-aligned super PAC, to stand down in primaries for safe Republican seats.

The rebels could still push too hard, and lose the concessions, if an Ohio-style deal gets struck at some point. But this factional pressure looks like the wave of the future, which worries some Democrats.

“It could set a precedent, going forward about how far members of each party will take their disagreements with a speaker,” said Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro. “Ordinarily, this is all handled within the conference, but this is a group of people who are insisting on using the floor process as a way to gain more leverage and concessions.”

To some people, eager to change how Congress worked, that doesn’t sound too bad.

National. Our team has the latest on the McCarthydammerung… Carl Hulse and Emily Cochrane zoom out to explain the goals of the Never Kevin rebels… Ben Jacobs watches “C-Span gone wild…” Paul Kaine looks at what power McCarthy could give up in order on the path to the gavel.

Louisiana. Sam Karlin checks in on the race for governor, after Sen. John Kennedy decided not to run.

Michigan. Arpan Lobo and Todd Spangler send off the retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow.

Ohio. Anna Staver and Laura A. Bischoff detail the drama in Columbus, where “behind-the-scenes fights for control of the House chamber” ended with a humbled GOP majority.

Pennsylvania. Gillian McGoldrick and Jonathan Lai reveal how Republicans in Harrisburg elected a moderate Democrat as House speaker.

In the House, Democratic reactions to the HFC’s power play veered between shame and schadenfreude. Outside the Capitol, some on the left asked why House progressives never dared to hold the speaker’s gavel hostage to extract demands themselves.

“Do you have regrets about progressives not using that opportunity to do the same thing back in 2021, when there was a Force the Vote moment?” asked Briahna Joy Gray, a host of The Hill’s news show Rising, when California Rep. Ro Khanna sat for an interview on Thursday. “Progressives could be the ones that are grandstanding.”

Before there was #NeverKevin, there was #ForceTheVote. After the 2020 election gave House Democrats a four-seat House majority, Gray, Jimmy Dore, and other anti-establishment pundits called for progressives, like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to demand concessions from Nancy Pelosi. If they were serious about getting a vote on Medicare for All, why not tell Pelosi that she couldn’t be House Speaker without it?

“The Republicans are currently doing what I was told could not be done and was performative,” Dore tweeted on Tuesday. “They are extracting concessions for their vote for speaker.”

Other Democrats who identified with the “Squad” rejected that premise. They did get some of what they wanted from Pelosi, working within party structures and more quietly using their votes to bargain on must-pass legislation.

“How do you think we got historic investments in climate for the first time in history?” asked Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who was elected in 2020 and cast his first vote in the House for Pelosi. “That wouldn’t even have been on the table if it weren’t for the left doing what it does. How did we get a $35 insulin cap? That’s all the left, doing the work.”

In the interview with Gray, Khanna said there was a fundamental imbalance between the left and right in their goals that also informed their tactics. The GOP’s holdouts were ideologically inclined to “shut everything down.” Progressives weren’t.

Conservatives were demanding rule changes to block vanilla government funding bills that kept getting 218 votes over their objections. Progressives, who wanted to “affirmatively pass legislation,” needed to write ambitious bills and then wrangle 218 votes to make them law.

As if to confirm Khanna’s point, one of the Republican rebels in the speaker’s race, Bob Good of Virginia, described the current paralysis as “probably the most productive couple of days I’ve spent” in the House. “Most of what Congress does is bad,” he told Fox News.

Rick Scott for Florida, “Got to Change.”  Starting today, the most recent chairman of the Senate GOP’s campaign committee is spending more than $1 million to run this 30-second spot on national cable TV. Scott, who’s up for re-election in 2024, has often drawn on his campaign account to run commercials blasting Democrats, but this ad’s aimed at Republicans, commemorating Scott’s unsuccessful challenge to Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell. “We’re on the road to woke socialism, and the Republicans are just a speed bump,” Scott says, urging viewers to read his Rescue America agenda.

For 24 years, Chicago has held nonpartisan mayoral primaries in February, and elected three mayors. Only one, Rahm Emanuel, was forced to a runoff by challenger – Garcia, who narrowly tops this poll. Mayor Lori Lightfoot could be the first to miss the April runoff altogether. Seventy-three percent of Chicagoans in this sample are “somewhat unwilling” or “very unwilling” to support Lightfoot, identical to the number who won’t vote for perennial candidate Willie Wilson. Fifty-eight percent say they could support Garcia, who told Semafor this week that he’ll be rolling out endorsements of his candidacy next week.

Flickr/Gage Skidmore

Ralph Reed made us wait a while for his take on the midterms. His Faith & Freedom Coalition had spent $40 million on a Republican victory, and scheduled a post-election press conference to discuss the results. That got canceled after the Nov. 8 vote count didn’t produce a “red wave,” sending conservatives everywhere back to the drawing board. Reed shifted his focus to Georgia’s U.S. Senate runoff, which GOP nominee Herschel Walker ended up losing.

Reed caught up with Semafor this week, as House Republicans tried to elect a speaker with the slimmer-than-expected majority they won last year.

Americana: Right before the Dobbs decision, you mentioned to NPR that abortion wasn’t a top issue for most voters. What’s your analysis now of how it played out in the midterms?

Ralph Reed: There’s no question that up until Dobbs, the Democratic base was in a coma. Dobbs woke it up. But what really hurt us was that when it happened, there was no strategy as to what we were going to do, on the state level or the federal level, and no messaging strategy. There’s going to be a fair amount of Sturm and Drang on the abortion issue, because we’re still kind of finding our way in a post-Roe environment.

We did kind of get our footing at the end of the midterms, because Schumer and Pelosi made everybody vote on codifying Roe. We were able to hit Raphael Warnock on that. “Wait a minute, this guy is a preacher and a minister of the gospel, but he voted to not only overturn George’s heartbeat bill, he not only voted to overturn our state law.” But it was probably too little, too late.

Americana: How did you interpret Donald Trump’s Truth Social post? “It was the ‘abortion issue’, poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on no exceptions, even in the case of rape, incest, or life of the mother, that lost large numbers of voters.”

Ralph Reed: I have not spoken to President Trump about this, so this is somewhat speculative, but I think he was saying that Roe was overturned because he kept his promise to appoint pro-life Justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, and as soon as that victory was finally achieved, too many Republican candidates, to quote Haley Barbour, ran like scalded dogs. 

When it comes to the abortion issue, you have to always be on offense, and whenever possible portray your opponent’s position as too extreme. That’s not hard to do when virtually every Democratic Senate and Congressional candidate favors codifying Roe into federal law.

Americana: So how do you see the issue playing out in 2024, regardless of who runs? What do candidates need to say they’ll do?

Ralph Reed: It begins with the judges and the Supreme Court, because that’s the bar that Trump set in 2016. That bar is never going to be lowered again. Donald Trump was the first Republican nominee for president, since Roe v. Wade, who didn’t use euphemisms like “strict constructionist” or “judges who don’t legislate from the bench.” He said, “I’m going to appoint pro-life judges.”

I think that a federal solution includes a comprehensive ban on taxpayer funding of abortion, going way beyond the Hyde Amendment. Rep. Chris Smith has legislation that would ban abortion promotion and taxpayer funding throughout the government. We can also make the Hyde Amendment permanent, so that it doesn’t have to be voted on every budget cycle under the Medicaid program. Finally, the candidates for president will need to favor a federal restriction on abortion at the point the child is pain-capable or viable, whether that is at 20 weeks or 15 weeks.

Americana: I saw a lot of gender identity messaging in Latino districts, the idea being that this could turn a lot of voters away from the Democratic Party. But the results seemed pretty mixed.

Ralph Reed: [Alabama] Sen. Tommy Tuberville had an amendment to preserve the integrity of Title IX, which was intended to guarantee equality in education and athletics for women and girls. Every Democrat voted against. That really helped us.

The American people are overwhelmingly with us on this issue. It just doesn’t move that many voters. So you have to target it either to minority voters who may not normally vote Republican, or base voters, reaching them digitally or in a targeted way. It was less effective in 2022, in my view, as a broadcast message.

Americana: Whoever the GOP nominee is, how hard is Biden going to be to defeat?

Ralph Reed: I’m in the distinct minority in the Republican party here. I think Biden is simultaneously very vulnerable and quite formidable. I’ve known Joe Biden for decades, and when everybody else was talking about how easy it was going to be to beat him, either because he didn’t know what day it was, or was gaffe prone, I felt that he was the strongest candidate the Democrats could have nominated. He was Roman Catholic, he was going to be stronger in Pennsylvania than Hillary was in 2016, and he had significant union support. Add an African-American female running mate, which boosted turnout among black women in Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia, and I felt that was a formidable ticket.

Yes, Biden’s going to be 82 when he’s on the ballot in 2024. We saw concerns about age with Eisenhower; we saw them with Reagan in 1980 and even more in 1984. But absent falling off the stage or a major health episode, those concerns tend to be more expressed than acted upon. Most voters are going to put on their blue or red jerseys and vote for their parties. If you don’t believe me, just ask Sen. John Fetterman.

Flickr/Gage Skidmore

The Democratic Party’s effort to re-draw its primary calendar faced new complications this week, from a predictable source: Republicans in New Hampshire and Georgia who didn’t feel like adapting the party’s schedule.

Last month, the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws committee set a Jan. 5 deadline for five states to show that they could hold primaries in February 2024. Each state had a different set of conditions to meet, and three — South Carolina, Nevada, and Michigan — showed the DNC that it had met them.

Democrats in the final two states couldn’t get there. In Georgia, the DNC needed GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to pledge that a Feb. 13, 2024 election was possible, an act that would require a sign-off from the GOP-led legislature. They didn’t get it, with a Raffensperger deputy telling the New York Times that the primary needed to be “equitable to both political parties.”

In New Hampshire, the party required letters from Gov. Chris Sununu and the leaders of the House and Senate, all Republicans, pledging to schedule a Feb. 6, 2024 primary, with early voting. Sununu had called that “dead on arrival,” and the letters submitted by Democrats confirmed that this wasn’t going to happen.

“The DNC’s waiver requirement is unrealistic and unattainable, as the New Hampshire Democratic Party cannot dictate to the Republican governor and state legislative leaders what to do,” New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman Ray Buckley told the RBC. “What’s worse, the DNC has handed New Hampshire Republicans a salient political attack to use against both state and national Democrats.”

Democrats will meet in Philadelphia next month to finalize the calendar.

• Four days until special legislative elections in Virginia
• 46 days until the special election for Virginia’s 4th district
• 53 days until Chicago’s mayoral election
• 88 days until Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court election
• 669 days until the 2024 presidential election

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