Scalise’s speaker fight turns Republican House into a goat rodeo - The Washington Post

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War in Israel. War in Ukraine. The federal government shutting down in 35 days. These are uncertain times. But there is one eternal truth, one unwavering constant to steady us when all else is in flux: Every time the House Republican majority tries to govern, it’s guaranteed to turn into a goat rodeo.

And so it happened again this week, as Republicans tried to elect a new speaker to replace Kevin McCarthy, whom they deposed in a coup the previous week. As the conference gathered on Tuesday night to hear from speaker candidates Steve Scalise (La.) and Jim Jordan (Ohio), Rep. Harriet Hageman (Wyo.), the Trump-backed slayer of Liz Cheney, walked into the caucus meeting wearing a big smile and carrying a lasso. Was she planning to rope some goats? She didn’t say.

A moment later, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), one of the eight Republicans who voted out McCarthy (Calif.), strolled into the caucus meeting with a big red “A” decal on her T-shirt. “I’m wearing the scarlet letter,” she later explained to a group of us, “after the week that I just had last week, being a woman up here and being demonized for my vote.” In her telling, wearing the 17th-century mark of the adulteress showed that “I’m going to do the right thing every single time.”

There was little time to dwell on Mace’s bold reinterpretation of Hawthorne, however, because the defrocked McCarthy himself soon emerged from the caucus meeting, which he quit after leading the opening prayer. Recognizing that he had a captive audience in the 140 or so journalists crowding the hallway, he gave a 13-minute news conference repeating the same thoughts about Israel he had offered in a news conference the day before.

Sadly, the former speaker’s oration was interrupted by the arrival of Patrick McHenry (N.C.), the interim speaker. “Mr. Speaker!” some journalists shouted, trying to ask McCarthy questions. “Mr. Speaker!” other journalists shouted a moment later, trying to ask McHenry questions. The confusion was all the greater because neither man was, actually, the speaker. Republicans didn’t have one of those.

No sooner had that commotion quieted than a new one erupted while the Republican members were meeting: Authorities had just unsealed additional charges against Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), alleging that he stole the identities of his campaign donors, used their credit cards and swindled the Republican Party. The famous fabricator was besieged by shouting reporters when he exited the caucus meeting: “Did you steal people’s identities? Will you resign?”

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“I did not have access to my phone,” Santos pleaded. “I have no clue of what you are talking about.” (This was plausible, for intraparty distrust has grown so intense that members had to check their phones at the door.) Reporters and TV crews chased Santos back to his office, crashing into furniture in the hallway. “How can you vote in the speaker election,” asked CNN’s Manu Raju, “when you’ve been charged with all these crimes?”

Santos slammed his office door in Raju’s face.

Scalise, the House majority leader, emerged from the caucus meeting full of confidence that he would win the speakership the next day. “We need a Congress that’s working tomorrow,” he said.

His colleagues were not so sure. “What are the chances we have a speaker tomorrow?” a reporter asked Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.).

Massie, in his 11th year in Congress, responded with a long pause, as if calculating the odds in his head.

Another long pause. “Uh, you know, it’s just the way things are going for us,” Massie replied.

Massie’s handicapping was spot on. Republicans narrowly tapped Scalise to be speaker at another meeting on Wednesday; he got 113 votes on a secret ballot, while Jordan and other candidates got 107. Applause sounded in the conference room at 1:03 p.m. when the tally was announced, and Scalise, rushing to build momentum, called for a speaker vote on the House floor at 3 p.m.

“We’re going to have to go upstairs on the House floor and resolve this and then get the House open again,” said the ebullient majority leader, referring to himself in the third person as “Speaker Scalise.”

“Is it true you don’t have the votes?” a reporter asked. Scalise walked away without answering.

Then, in rapid succession, a dozen House Republicans announced that they would oppose Scalise on the floor — and a dozen more threatened to do the same. Some were the same zealots who stymied McCarthy back in January, when holdouts forced 15 rounds of balloting on the House floor. Others were first-time participants in the GOP dysfunction game. But there were well more than the five needed to deny Scalise the speakership.

Texas Republicans Chip Roy and Michael Cloud said they would oppose Scalise because of the “unacceptable” and “underhanded” rush to vote on the floor. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) said she would oppose him because he’s battling blood cancer. Massie announced his opposition because Scalise had not “articulated a viable plan” on government spending.

Mace, no longer wearing her scarlet “A,” tried to plant a KKK on Scalise. “I personally cannot, in good conscience, vote for someone who attended a white supremacist conference and compared himself to David Duke,” she said on CNN of Scalise’s past comment that, as a Louisiana Republican, he was “David Duke without the baggage.” (This apparently didn’t bother Mace when she accepted Scalise’s campaign help in 2020.)

Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) responded to Mace on social media: “#GetADamnLife.”

“The House GOP conference is broken,” Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.) accurately observed, announcing his opposition to Scalise.

Michael McCaul (Tex.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, pleaded with his colleagues for sanity, saying the speakership is “going to have to be worked out in the next several hours. We can’t afford this dysfunction.”

But when it came time for the 3 p.m. vote, McHenry instead sent the chamber into an indefinite recess. A few hours later, House GOP leaders called off all votes for the night.

Finally, the day of disarray ended in farce: Santos, facing renewed calls for his expulsion from the House, delivered one more blow to Scalise. Because Scalise hadn’t reached out to the indicted liar, “I’m now declaring I’m an ANYONE but Scalise and come hell or high water I won’t change my mind,” he wrote. “We need a speaker that leads by including every single member of the team.”

Scalise, seeing his speakership slip away before it even began, set about doing what McCarthy had done in January: placating the hard-liners. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (Fla.), a holdout, stated her conditions for supporting Scalise: defunding the prosecution of Donald Trump by special counsel Jack Smith, issuing a subpoena to Hunter Biden and having the House vote on impeaching President Biden. After meeting with Scalise, Luna pronounced herself “confident” he would meet her requirements.

Even then, she changed her mind within 24 hours, saying “I will no longer be voting for Scalise.”

By late Thursday, after the umpteenth Republican caucus meeting of the week dissolved in recriminations and paralysis, it was looking doubtful that Scalise could get enough GOP votes to be elected speaker. Around 8 p.m., he made it official, telling colleagues he was withdrawing; he had been the speaker nominee for all of 31 hours. “There are some folks that really need to look in the mirror over the next couple of days and decide: Are we going to get it back on track? Or are they going to try to pursue their own agenda?” he told reporters in the Capitol basement. “You can’t do both.”

Nine days after they voted out McCarthy and started this crisis, the leaderless Republicans were right where they began. Would they give the far-right firebrand Jordan a shot? Someone else? Or would they — perish the thought! — finally offer to strike a deal with Democrats? It wasn’t obvious that this fractured and feuding majority could coalesce around anyone, or anything. Only one thing was perfectly clear: Whoever Republicans choose to be speaker will be a leader in name only. This House GOP majority, ungovernable at best, has collapsed into anarchy.

A group of us were talking Tuesday night with Rep. Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.), a McCarthy ally, about the chances that, of the 221 current House Republicans, the necessary 217 of them could agree on a candidate for speaker. “Do you think 217 of them can get behind anything at the moment, even if it’s mom and apple pie?” asked reporter Ben Jacobs.

Replied Ciscomani: “That’s to be seen tomorrow.”

The Republicans’ week of mayhem and madness began with former Speaker McCarthy offering himself as the future Speaker McCarthy.

Last weekend, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel said on Fox News that Hamas’s attack on Israel was a “great opportunity” for Republicans. McCarthy on Monday attempted to seize that supposed opportunity, accusing Biden of “appeasement” and left-wing Democrats of antisemitism. “Have we not understand the moment in life we are living?” McCarthy asked.

But the real purpose of this moment in life was to dangle the possibility that he would return as speaker. Though he had previously said he wasn’t running, he now said, “I’m going to allow the conference to do their work” and “the conference decides that.”

This threw the speaker race into more confusion. In a caucus meeting on Monday night in the Capitol basement, Rep. Carlos Gimenez (Fla.) and a couple of others said they would only support McCarthy for speaker.

Others used the gathering, the first since the day Republicans ousted McCarthy, to direct their fury at those who led the coup. “Matt Gaetz is, frankly, a vile person,” Rep. Michael Lawler (N.Y.) told reporters outside the room. Inside, over a barbecue dinner, one lawmaker reportedly called the anti-McCarthy eight “chickens---.”

“They’re just venting,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (Tenn.), one of the eight. He said he wouldn’t budge on McCarthy and called the process to find a new speaker “like junior high school.”

Republican staffers confiscated lawmakers’ phones at the door, in an attempt to prevent the likes of Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman and Politico’s Olivia Beavers from live-tweeting every utterance in the room. But so deep was Gaetz’s distrust of his colleagues that, rather than check his phone at the door, he walked it all the way back to his office.

McCaul, after the meeting, made one of his appeals to “wake up the members of my conference” to rise above the brawling. “The world is watching. They are seeing a dysfunctional democracy,” the Foreign Affairs chairman said. “This is what the ayatollah wants” and “Chairman Xi, when he talks about democracy does not work. We have to prove him wrong.”

Other sensible lawmakers urged colleagues to revise the “motion to vacate” so that a single lawmaker could no longer call a vote to topple the speaker. It “gives power to the most loony parts,” Rep. Don Bacon (Neb.) told several of us, “the most disaffected, the most fringe people in our conference.” Rep. Tom Cole (Okla.) offered a related metaphor to Axios’s Andrew Solender: “It’s time to take the sharp knives away from the children.”

For Tuesday night’s candidates forum, Republicans moved their meeting to the Ways and Means committee room in the Longworth building. One-hundred forty journalists crowded into “Gucci Gulch” — as the lobbyist-filled hallways outside the committee room are known — and, because the building is open to the public, so did some right-wing activists. One of them, Ivan Raiklin, informed me that “38,000 were murdered” by the coronavirus vaccine and explained how Trump could be installed as House speaker.

Another activist interrupted McCarthy’s impromptu news conference in the hallway to inform him that it was the birthday of Ashli Babbitt, the woman fatally shot inside the Capitol as she tried to breach the House chamber on Jan. 6, 2021, and to demand the release of more security footage from the insurrection. “That’s another day, another question,” McCarthy said, asking reporters for a different question.

For the moment, there was really only one relevant question: “How do we get to 217 and how do we bring this party back to a functioning majority?” as Rep. Mike Garcia (Calif.) put it. And the answer to that was ... well, nobody knew.

Inside the forum, both Scalise and Jordan said the House would need to pass a “continuing resolution” to keep the government open after Nov. 17 — even though it was McCarthy’s passage of just such a “CR” that caused him to be booted from the speakership in the first place. The coup had achieved nothing.

Outside the forum, Rep. Marcus Molinaro (N.Y.) went up to the microphones, shouting: “George Santos should resign!”

But Republicans won’t force Santos out, because they can’t afford to see their four-vote majority become a three-vote majority. So what if the congressman is charged with identity theft and credit-card fraud in addition to unemployment fraud and all the rest? Let he who is without a superseding indictment cast the first stone!

Wednesday opened with cursing and shouting even before the Republicans returned to the Longworth building to choose a speaker candidate. At a briefing for lawmakers on the war in Israel, Rep. Derrick Van Orden (Wis.), who recently made news for launching an obscene tirade at teenagers serving as Senate pages, launched an obscene tirade at the Biden administration officials giving the briefing.

The shouting was only beginning. Santos called a few reporters into his office (inexplicably, I was not one of them) to deliver a Mr. T-style rejoinder to colleagues threatening to oust him: “They can try to expel me, but I pity the fools that go ahead and do that.”

Entering the caucus meeting, increasingly cranky lawmakers again had their phones confiscated, then put in manila envelopes piled haphazardly into yellow plastic boxes. Texas’s Roy offered a proposal designed to avoid a repeat of Republicans’ January debacle by requiring them to have 217 votes for their speaker nominee before they went to the floor.

Scalise’s allies roundly defeated that proposal. An hour later, Scalise had won the nomination with his slender majority, and his team, trying to railroad Jordan’s supporters, made plans to go straight to the floor. The leader of the coup against McCarthy, Gaetz, pronounced himself thrilled. “Long live Speaker Scalise!” he cried.

But “Speaker Scalise” didn’t make it to the floor on Wednesday. Trump, who had endorsed Jordan, did nothing to help Scalise. And, by various accounts, McCarthy was privately undermining his old rival by encouraging support for Jordan. The House Freedom Caucus met to discuss the matter — and more members announced opposition to Scalise.

On Thursday, McHenry opened the day’s session and immediately declared another recess. Back in the House basement that afternoon, Republicans entered yet another caucus meeting while rumors swirled. Rep. Greg Steube (Fla.) told reporters that he heard (incorrectly) from the MAGA outlet OAN that Scalise had dropped out of the running. Rep. Troy Nehls (Tex.) said if Republicans hadn’t elected a speaker by Sunday they should “bring in the closer” — Trump — to serve as speaker.

An exasperated Rep. Dusty Johnson (S.D.), chairman of the moderate Main Street Caucus, complained to us about colleagues “refusing to do your damn job.” Mike Rogers (Ala.), chairman of the Armed Services committee, called his colleagues who ousted McCarthy “traitors.”

Inside the room, Republicans resumed their venting. Rep. Mark Alford (Mo.) told reporters it was “marriage therapy.”

“We’re celebrating our diversity,” Rep. Brad Wenstrup (Ohio) joked as he stepped into the hallway.

“Everything’s at gridlock,” Greene said, leaving the meeting. “It’s not a good look for the Republican conference.”

As the meeting broke, lawmakers raged against their own incompetence.

“If you see smoke, it’s not a speaker — someone just set the place on fire,” Rep. Ronny Jackson (Tex.) told NBC’s Ali Vitali.

“This is the worst team I’ve ever been on,” Rep. Mike Kelly (Pa.) told Huffington Post’s Arthur Delaney.

Even George Santos couldn’t lie about the grim state of affairs for the GOP. “It was a waste of time," he complained, “like every single meeting we’ve had.”