Ousted US House speaker Kevin McCarthy says he is leaving Congress
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It took 15 rounds of voting for Mr McCarthy to muster the support to be elected Speaker in January 2023, and the defection of just eight dissident conservatives to topple him nine months later.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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WASHINGTON - Republican Kevin McCarthy, whose brief and tumultuous turn leading the United States House culminated in the first voted ouster of a speaker, said on Dec 6 he will resign from Congress at the end of 2023.
“I have decided to depart the House at the end of this year to serve America in new ways,” he wrote in the Wall Street Journal.
“I know my work is only getting started.”
The 58-year-old California Republican styled himself as part of an emerging generation of “Young Gun” conservative leaders when Tea Party Republicans swept into power in 2010. Yet, by the time he realised his ambition to become Speaker, Mr McCarthy was viewed with suspicioun by an ascendant populist right aligned with Donald Trump.
The seat, in a safely Republican district, will need to be filled by a special election. Republicans will at least temporarily lose a seat in their narrow majority.
It took an extraordinary 15 rounds of voting for Mr McCarthy to muster the support to be elected Speaker in January, and the defection of just eight dissident conservatives to topple him nine months later.
Mr McCarthy announced his plans to depart Congress barely two months after he lost the leadership post.
He expressed mixed feelings about remaining in Congress at a New York Times Dealbook conference on Nov 29.
“If I decide to run again, I have to know in my heart I’m giving 110 per cent,” he said.
“Look, if you just got thrown out as speaker, you go through different stages, would you not? And then you’ve got to turn around and make a decision.”
Mr McCarthy was dogged during his speakership by bitter ideological divisions among House Republicans and the party’s slender majority, which allowed him to lose only a handful of lawmakers on party-line votes.
Mr McCarthy maintained an unsteady alliance of convenience with the party’s dominant figure, Donald Trump.
Mr McCarthy criticised Trump as bearing “responsibility” for the Jan 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection in the immediate aftermath, but three weeks later flew to Mar-a-Lago to be photographed at the side of the former president. Trump habitually belittled Mr McCarthy as “my Kevin” when referring to him.
Earlier in 2023, then Speaker McCarthy forged a deal with President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats to avert a US debt default and economic disaster. But that angered hard-line conservatives who had hoped to use the crisis as leverage to force deep federal spending cuts.
His friction with party conservatives came to a head after his decision to allow a vote on a bipartisan Bill to keep federal agencies and operations funded beyond September, even though that prevented what would have been a government shutdown. His chief detractor, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, then led the overthrow against him in early October.
The last time such a motion led to an actual vote on removing a speaker was in 1910, and that failed. The only speakers who held office for less time than Mr McCarthy were Theodore Pomeroy, elected speaker-for-the-day on his last day in office in 1869, and Michael Kerr, who died in office in 1876 after 258 days.
It took House Republicans more than three weeks to elect a successor,
Mr McCarthy rose to prominence in 2010 as one of a trio of Republicans – along with former Speaker Paul Ryan and former GOP majority leader Eric Cantor – who proclaimed themselves the “Young Guns”, representatives of the future of conservatism. A book they co-authored portrays Mr McCarthy as the strategist of the three.
Mr McCarthy was the last of the group to remain in Congress. Mr Cantor was defeated in a 2014 party primary by a populist seeking to curtail immigration. Mr Ryan became Speaker but decided not to seek re-election after two years serving under the Trump presidency.
The son of a Bakersfield, California, firefighter, Mr McCarthy entered politics as head of the California Young Republicans, and later was chairman of the National Young Republicans.
Mr McCarthy eventually worked for his predecessor in Congress, Republican Bill Thomas, starting as an intern and rising to the post of district director, before election to the state legislature and then Congress. BLOOMBERG
