WASHINGTON — A stunning inability to elect a speaker Tuesday highlighted fissures within the Republican Party over strategy and vision, grinding the House to a halt and raising fresh questions about the future of the GOP.
“We have to make a choice today: Are we going to be the party of the radical 2%? Because that’s what it comes down to,” a frustrated Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Fla., said after a caucus meeting. “Kevin McCarthy will be the speaker of the House — and I don’t care if it’s the first ballot or the 97th ballot.”
The standoff was demoralizing for a party that had hoped to use the new majority to show Americans how it would govern — before it asks voters to give the GOP control of the White House and the Senate in the 2024 election. Instead, the displays of dysfunction threaten to further alienate independent and center-right voters, who drifted toward Democrats in 2022, causing the GOP’s underperformance in the midterm elections and its current paper-thin margin.
“I think it’s a problem for the party. It absolutely is,” said former Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., a co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus, home to the rebels. “How is it not a problem for the party if we can’t even decide on who our leader’s going to be?”
Mulvaney, who fought to depose former Speaker John Boehner in 2015, sounded baffled by the group’s tactics, calling it hypocritical to demand a rule that requires a majority of the GOP caucus to pass bills but then refuse to accept that standard to elect a speaker.
“This is completely absurd. It makes no sense to me at all. And I know a little bit of something about challenging speakers of the House,” Mulvaney said.
Mulvaney left the House in 2017 to serve in senior positions in former President Donald Trump’s White House. Trump, who has backed McCarthy, R-Calif., for speaker, had little to say about whether he is staying by him Tuesday: “We’ll see what happens. We’ll see how it all works out,” he told NBC News.
The House adjourned Tuesday after three failed ballots — the first time in a century a speaker election had gone past the first vote — and with no clear path forward.
It foreshadows more divisions in the narrow House majority, which will have to compromise with a Democratic-controlled Senate and President Joe Biden to keep the government functioning and avert economic crises. And it was a bad omen for GOP hopes of unifying a caucus of moderates and far-right members to advance conservative legislation.