They got rid of McCarthy. Can Republicans figure out how to keep the lights on?

WASHINGTON —  Next Tuesday, one week after they brought the curtain down on the short, largely unsuccessful speakership of Kevin McCarthy, House Republicans will start trying to pick a successor.

Several Republican lawmakers already have begun to campaign. For those watching at home, here are two key things to know:

Someone will eventually win.

The dysfunction of the House won’t go away.

A House divided

The problem wasn’t McCarthy.

Yes, the former speaker of the House had a habit of making promises he couldn’t — or wouldn’t — keep. That caused elected officials in both parties to distrust him, contributing to his sudden downfall.

But three very different men have tried to lead House Republicans in the dozen years since the tea party insurgency pushed the party to the right in 2010. Speakers John A. Boehner, Paul D. Ryan and now McCarthy each tried different approaches. All came to unhappy ends.

There’s little reason to think contestant No. 4 will fare better.

“Someone will get 217 votes” — a majority because two House seats are currently vacant — “but I’m not sure that the Republican conference is governable,” said Matthew Glassman, a congressional expert at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute.

Although the speaker has significant authority, real power comes from a speaker’s ability to embody the will of the House majority. Right now, no coherent majority exists. Without it, a speaker is just a guy holding a gavel.

Why Pelosi had more success — and an easier task

In contrast to her three Republican contemporaries, Rep. Nancy Pelosi mostly succeeded during her eight years as speaker, despite a very narrow majority during the final two.

The veteran Democrat from San Francisco won praise for her ability to keep her majority in line, but the task wasn’t the same as what Republican leaders have encountered, said Molly Reynolds, a congressional expert at Washington’s Brookings Institution.

Congressional Democrats “have divisions, but they’re largely divisions over policy,” Reynolds said. The task for a Democratic leader is to “figure out where you can make trade-offs” in legislation to allow all members to live with the result. Pelosi had unsurpassed ability to do that.

By contrast, “the rump faction in the Republican conference doesn’t have a consistent set of policy preferences that they’re organized around,” Reynolds said. “Their political incentives are to sow some degree of chaos rather than drive toward policy goals.”

Polarization driven by voters

At the White House on Wednesday, President Biden, as he often does, urged civility and bipartisanship.

“More than anything, we need to change the poisonous atmosphere in Washington. You know we have strong disagreements but we need to stop seeing each other as enemies,” he said.

But a lot of voters — especially the ones who take part in party primaries — do see the other side as enemies — increasingly so, polls repeatedly have shown. That, more than any atmosphere in Washington, has driven the standoffs in Congress.

The desire for conflict, not compromise, is especially strong on the Republican right.

When voters’ top priorities are specific policy achievements, elected members of Congress pursue those. But what the far-right of the GOP demands is a radical reshaping of American government and society to restore a system more like the America of the 1950s.

That’s out of reach electorally. So voters in deeply conservative areas have rewarded members who focus, instead, on disrupting a system that many of them see as evil.

Freedom Caucus members like Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican who pushed the effort to depose McCarthy, have learned they can raise money and gain political support by blowing things up.

“They’re angry and they’re chaotic,” McCarthy said of Gaetz and his allies during a lengthy news conference after he lost the speakership. What he left unsaid is that they’re doing what many of their constituents want.

What happens next

The next speaker will face that same dynamic, but with much less time to adjust.

When McCarthy won in January, Congress already had passed a spending bill to fund federal agencies through the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. He had four months before his first big test — negotiations over raising the federal debt limit.

The new speaker will have, at most, five weeks to prepare for the next big test — less if the speakership election drags on.

The last bill McCarthy steered through the House — a short-term measure to continue funding federal agencies — expires Nov. 17.

As the 335-91 vote on that bill showed, a bipartisan majority in the House opposes a government shutdown and will pass legislation to prevent one if given the chance. But McCarthy’s decision to give members that chance was what caused Gaetz and his allies to move against him. They’re unlikely to allow a new speaker to do a repeat.

One option if the speakership election drags on could be for Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick T. McHenry of North Carolina to act as a political heat shield and allow votes on government spending bills, perhaps including aid to Ukraine, before passing the gavel to an elected speaker.

Whether McHenry has authority as a temporary speaker to do that is unclear under House rules, Reynolds and Glassman both said. For now, though, that’s a moot point: Republican leaders don’t want to bring up any measure that would further divide their ranks.

A long shutdown affecting most government agencies has become much more likely.

Will voters care?

The average voter doesn’t carefully watch proceedings in the House. But Democrats have invested heavily in portraying Republicans as the party of chaos. The fighting over the speakership reinforces that message.

As David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report wrote this week, the internal warfare also could prompt some frustrated House Republicans from swing districts to decide not to run again. That would put the GOP’s hold on those seats at risk.

An early test of voter sentiment could come in Virginia, which holds its statewide legislative elections this year. In part because of the large number of government workers who live in Washington’s northern Virginia suburbs, the prospect of a government shutdown attracts more attention there than in most of the country.

Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has invested heavily in gaining a majority for his party in both houses of the Legislature. Success would boost his own political prospects. If he falls short, the battle over the speakership won’t be the only reason, but could be a big contributing factor.

Early voting in the state is already underway.

A political earthquake for California

California knows earthquakes. This week, a temblor reshaped the state’s politics
The landscape of California evolves through earthquakes. Sometimes its politics do as well. The confluence of events over the last week — Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s death early last Friday morning, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s surprise choice of Laphonza Butler to replace her, and the hard-right revolt against McCarthy — combined to create a temblor that has reshaped both sides of the state’s political divide, Benjamin Oreskes and I wrote.

With San Francisco memorial service, Dianne Feinstein’s political life comes full circle
Feinstein was honored with a grand memorial service at San Francisco City Hall on Thursday — marking a full-circle ending to a pioneering political life that began in the same building more than half a century prior, Kevin Rector reported.

Laphonza Butler sworn in as California’s newest U.S. senator
Butler is California’s newest senator, following a historic swearing-in ceremony with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday afternoon at the U.S. Capitol, Erin Logan and Faith Pinho reported.

Will she run or won’t she? Laphonza Butler’s appointment could scramble California Senate race
Will Butler run for a full term in the Senate in next year’s election? And if she does, how seriously will she shake up the race that is well underway? The first question remains unanswered; Butler said she had not decided, Oreskes, Laura Nelson and Seema Mehta reported.

California’s incoming senator describes her whirlwind trip into history
Butler was in Colorado for a work trip late Saturday when she spoke with Newsom’s team for the first time about filling the U.S. Senate vacancy left by the death of Feinstein. “I had not talked to anyone: Not the governor, not the governor’s team,” Butler said in an interview with The Times. “I was unaware that my name was even seriously being considered” she said. “And it’s been a sort of whirlwind ever since,” Taryn Luna and Hannah Wiley reported.

Senate appointment extricates Newsom from a major screw-up
There’s an old political axiom that cautions: Never make a decision until you have to. Newsom ignored that doctrine when he did a double flip-flop over a Senate replacement for Feinstein. But his appointment of Butler seems to be a winner for him, George Skelton wrote in his column.

McCarthy’s fall was sudden, but a long time coming
“How did you go bankrupt?” a character asks in one of Ernest Hemingway’s classic novels. “Gradually,” was the famous response. “Then suddenly.” And so it is for the politically and morally bankrupt Kevin McCarthy, Mark Barabak wrote in his column.

McCarthy’s once formidable powers of persuasion couldn’t stop a humiliating, historic defeat
Kevin McCarthy’s long career has been about calculating the odds and working the backrooms, but those traits, which barely won him the House speakership earlier this year, were not enough to stop several far-right Republicans from pushing him out of the job he had craved since he was a young California assemblyman from Bakersfield, Jeffrey Fleishman wrote.

‘Evil,’ ‘delusional,’ ‘Benedict Arnold’: In Kevin McCarthy’s Bakersfield, Matt Gaetz draws ire
In McCarthy’s Central Valley congressional district, the most Republican in the Golden State, many residents fumed about the summary political execution of California’s first Republican speaker of the House, Nelson reported.

The latest from Washington

Supreme Court sounds skeptical of lenders’ challenge to Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
The Supreme Court gave a skeptical hearing Tuesday to payday lenders who are challenging the constitutionality of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Most of the justices — conservatives as well as liberals — suggested they were not ready to strike down the bureau, David Savage reported.

The latest from California

California workers will see more paid sick time off under new law
California workers will be entitled to five paid sick days, up from the current three, under a new law signed by Newsom on Wednesday. The state’s powerful labor unions lobbied heavily for the legislation, Mackenzie Mays reported.

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