WASHINGTON — Three Texas Republicans voted twice against their party’s top choice for U.S. House Speaker on Tuesday in a historic move that helped block U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid to lead the chamber and continues a monthslong right-wing crusade against business as usual within the GOP.
U.S. Reps. Chip Roy and Michael Cloud had long signaled their aversion to McCarthy, playing central roles in the bid to thwart his speakership in closed-door party meetings. But they wouldn’t reveal until their votes on the floor Tuesday whom they would support.
In the first round of voting, Roy threw a curve ball, voting for Florida’s Byron Donalds, a relatively new representative and fellow member of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus. Roy was the only member to vote for Donalds, who himself voted for McCarthy. Cloud and incoming freshman Rep. Keith Self, R-Plano, joined a handful of other right-wing members to vote for conservative standard-bearer Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio. In a second round of voting which yielded no additional votes for McCarthy, Roy put his name behind Jordan.
Roy, first elected in 2018, has a history of rebuffing the status quo, saying the rules of Congress stifle democratic representation and leave power in the hands of a few party leaders. In recent weeks, however, Roy has been especially vocal about his distaste for establishment party politics, rallying his ideological peers to push for more power for rank-and-file members and perhaps foreshadowing what the next two years could look like for the lawmaker who has never served before while Republicans have been in power in the lower chamber.
McCarthy, who led his party through the last four years in the House minority, was long expected to be the next in line to be speaker. But a handful of right-flank members are working to tank McCarthy’s bid over frustration with his leadership as minority leader in the last four years. The Freedom Caucus, which Roy and Cloud are a part of, is also pushing for several rule changes that its members say would keep leadership more accountable to the rest of the caucus. Roy has been particularly vocal in his dissatisfaction with Republican leadership in both the House and Senate.
“In the early days of the House of Representatives, individual members had the power to make a motion. If it’s seconded, you can debate it, you can have parliamentary engagement,” Roy told reporters. “And today it’s a handful of self-selected power brokers who make all the calls.”
The first and second votes Tuesday did not yield a majority sufficient to secure McCarthy’s speakership, and McCarthy and his allies have vowed to keep voting on the floor until they win.
If McCarthy’s bid falls apart, there is no replacement candidate with nearly as much support, meaning a prolonged selection process that could immobilize the entire Congress. Rules for the House’s day-to-day business would get delayed, and staffers could go without their paychecks. Committee assignments remain in flux, including a handful of chairmanships that Texans are gunning for. Such a delay would be historic in nature as the House has been able to easily elect its speaker on the first vote every Congress for the past 100 years.
The fallout would deal a substantial blow to public confidence in the already polarized House. But Roy and his allies say the confidence is already lost. A major driving force in their discontent in leadership is the party’s underwhelming performance in last year’s midterm elections, despite near-universal predictions of a knockout year. Roy said the lackluster electoral performance was a clarion call from voters fed up with a Congress unable to put into place sweeping conservative priorities on immigration, energy and competitiveness with China.
“You’re calling for unity? How about we unify around something meaningful? Like actually having a House of Representatives and a bunch of Republicans in a conference that are united to actually stand up for the people and do what we said we would do when we came here?” he said.
It has been an acrimonious internal fight, and several Republicans simply want it all to be over to get on with legislating. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Houston, said on Fox News that the debacle makes the party look "foolish." Roy responded in his own Fox appearance Tuesday that he is "not blinking."
Democrats ribbed Republicans for their lack of unity on the House floor Tuesday, but the consequences of legislating are front of mind as well. Rep. Joaquin Castro, R-San Antonio, said the fraught voting highlighted the difficult job the next speaker will have governor and "mostly sad."
"This hasn't happened in generations, right? Literally have not seen this in generations," Castro said. "But to me, it represents the the downward evolution, I guess, the devolution of the Republican Party since Donald Trump came along."
During a November internal party meeting, Roy nominated fellow right-wing member Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Arizona, to be speaker, with Cloud seconding the nomination. The majority of the caucus still voted for McCarthy in the meeting. It wasn’t Roy’s first time disrupting the expected course during his party’s leadership elections. Following the ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, as the No. 3 House Republican in 2021, Roy swooped in to make an 11th-hour challenge to Rep. Elise Stefanik, a New Yorker loyal to former President Donald Trump, for the spot. The former president issued a withering rebuke against Roy, and he lost the partywide bid by a wide margin.
Biggs was the only Republican alternative formally nominated for speaker during the first round of voting on Tuesday, with Rep. Paul Gosar lifting up his fellow Arizonan. But a sprinkling of Republican names came up in the final tally, including Donalds, Jordan, Jim Banks and Lee Zeldin. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Florida, nominated Jordan as an alternative in the second round of voting after first voting for Biggs.
Conservative activists close to the Freedom Caucus said Biggs was never the real end goal as an alternate speaker and was largely a placeholder to break McCarthy's momentum until another contender could garner enough support. Despite Jordan's vocal support for McCarthy in the past several months, his name has been floated as a contender, as has McCarthy's number 2, Steve Scalise of Louisiana.
But unlike November’s party meeting, Tuesday’s vote includes the entire chamber, with Democrats united in voting against McCarthy. If he can’t draw more of his own party members to support him, he’ll be short of the 218-vote majority needed to win the gavel.
McCarthy has scrambled in the weeks since to secure the support of the remaining holdouts, meeting with Roy and other Freedom Caucus members to go over their complaints with how Congress is run. McCarthy offered rule changes over the weekend meant to address several of the conservative demands, including lowering the threshold of members needed to force a no-confidence vote of the speaker to just five members. Roy and the rest of the Freedom Caucus had been pushing to allow just one member to force a vote that could oust the speaker.
“The debate is just some simple one: Should a member of the body be able to make a motion and then have the body execute on the motion?” Roy said last month. “That’s the question.”
It was one of the biggest concessions McCarthy could give and one he was particularly slow to budge on. Lowering the threshold further would mean two years of immense leverage among his opponents within a party that already has massive philosophical divisions on major policy priorities, including government funding and continued assistance for Ukraine.
Several Texas Republicans, including ardent conservatives, say McCarthy is the only member with the support and political capital to guide the party through the next two years, when Republicans will have a minuscule three-seat majority.
“Leader McCarthy has led us to the majority and is the only one who can unify the party to hold the Biden administration accountable for its failures at home and abroad,” Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, tweeted ahead of the GOP leadership election.
“I will always fight to put the American people first, not a few individuals that want something for themselves,” McCarthy told reporters Tuesday after a final GOP conference meeting Tuesday before the new Congress convened.
McCarthy and Roy saw some agreement in their virulent opposition to the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill that passed last December to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year. The package was a laundry list of everything Roy hates about Washington — the over 4,000-page legislation spanned hundreds of priorities largely negotiated behind closed doors and included continued funding to assist Ukraine — an issue dividing House Republicans, with Roy and other conservatives opposing.
House Republicans presented a relatively united front against the measure. Fort Worth Rep. Kay Granger, the top House Republican appropriations negotiator, dipped out of talks over objections to the amount of non-defense spending.
The deal ended up being an agreement between Democrats and Senate Republicans, with Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, heralding it as helping Texas by increasing defense spending by 10%, boosting Border Patrol, offering funding for agriculture drought relief and investing in grants to tackle school violence. Cornyn was the only Texas Republican in Congress to vote for the package.
But Roy’s objections went further. He and 30 other Republicans in or incoming to the House vowed to stonewall any priorities put forward by Senate Republicans who voted for the omnibus package, writing in a letter to the upper chamber that “for at least nine months, this omnibus will deny the incoming House GOP majority any leverage to enact crucial policy changes needed to secure our border through the power of the purse.”
Roy also has a history of putting up a fight against legislation through tactics his peers decried as onerous, including forcing a lengthy series of roll call votes on a $1 trillion spending package in 2019 that prolonged passage into the early morning hours. He is armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of legislative procedure from his time as chief of staff to Sen. Ted Cruz.
Roy and the rest of the Freedom Caucus are demanding that new Republican leadership do away with bulk legislative packages like the omnibus all together. The bills, which can stretch thousands of pages, are rife with priorities that legislators could not possibly sift through, they argue, and that never see daylight through debate on the House floor. McCarthy’s rules proposal includes a measure that would require members to keep bills to a single subject, but it does not have any robust enforcement.
“As such, we reiterate that if any omnibus passes in the remaining days of this Congress, we will oppose and whip opposition to any legislative priority of those senators who vote for its passage — including the Republican leader,” they wrote. “We will oppose any rule, any consent request, suspension voice vote, or roll call vote of any such Senate bill, and will otherwise do everything in our power to thwart even the smallest legislative and policy efforts of those senators.”
Reps. Randy Weber, R-Friendswood, and Ronny Jackson, R-Amarillo, also signed the letter, as did outgoing Reps. Louie Gohmert, R-Tyler, and Mayra Flores, R-Los Indios. Rep.-elect Keith Self, R-Plano, also signed on.
McCarthy signaled his support for the effort, tweeting last month that “when I’m Speaker, their bills will be dead on arrival in the House if this nearly $2T monstrosity is allowed to move forward over our objections and the will of the American people.”
But for all of McCarthy’s concessions to the right flank, he has still not been able to convert enough members to have a comfortable majority in time for Tuesday’s vote. After he revealed his rules proposals, nine House Republicans including Roy released a statement on New Year’s Day that the proposals didn’t go far enough to assuage their concerns, though they made progress.
“At this stage, it cannot be a surprise that expressions of vague hopes reflected in far too many of the crucial points still under debate are insufficient,” the members said. “This is especially true with respect to Mr. McCarthy’s candidacy for speaker because the times call for radical departure from the status quo — not a continuation of past, and ongoing, Republican failures.”
Following his initial vote Tuesday, Cloud said in a statement that "many of the promises made [on rules changes] lacked enforcement mechanisms necessary to ensure their implementation, casting doubt on the sincerity of reforms.” When the chamber went into another round of voting, Cloud revoted for Jordan.
Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry, R-Pennsylvania, said in a statement Tuesday morning that McCarthy rebuffed the group’s request for promised votes on a border security plan created by Texas Republican members, balancing the budget, a phase-out of funding for the IRS and term limits for Congress.
Other rules McCarthy put forward include the end of proxy voting and set the stage for new investigations into the Biden administration and the Jan. 6 committee, but McCarthy had been indicating his intention to do so for months. The Californian also characterized several Freedom Caucus demands as largely self-interested, including plum committee assignments for the group's members.
Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Massachusetts, who led the House Rules Committee in the last Congress, lamented McCarthy’s proposal as targeting civil servants and regressing on accommodations made to make the chamber run more practically during a pandemic.
“Republican leaders have once again caved to the most extreme members of their own caucus: allowing the far-right to hold the incoming Speaker hostage,” McGovern said in a statement. “The American people elected a divided government because they want us to put people over politics and operate in a bipartisan way — not empower extremists who have no interest in working together to get things done.”