On paper, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise is the natural Republican lawmaker to ascend to be speaker if his party wins the majority in November, if the current favorite, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, doesn’t make it that far.
Scalise of Louisiana is a well-liked member of the House Republican leadership, a close ally of former President Donald Trump, and a prodigious fundraiser. Scalise is next in line in the GOP leadership ladder to become House speaker if, as expected, Republicans win the majority in the midterm elections after four years in the minority.
But House leadership elections can be messy, and should McCarthy fall, very much a long-shot proposition currently, new candidates could emerge. It’s only a question at all at the moment due to a late-in-the-week contretemps over recordings that have emerged of McCarthy discussing how to respond to Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that sought to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory.
On Thursday, McCarthy issued a statement denying a New York Times report that he had been critical of Trump, which runs counter to the fealty the House minority leader usually shows to Trump publicly. The revelations come from the forthcoming book, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future, by Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin. The authors appeared Thursday on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show and played an audio recording of McCarthy on Jan. 10, 2021, discussing impeachment scenarios with Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, at the time the third-ranking in House Republican leadership.
House Republicans on Friday were mostly mum about McCarthy’s situation. The prevailing wisdom in House GOP circles is that it would take Trump turning on McCarthy to force him from his leadership role — and the speaker’s gavel in November should the party take the majority.
But McCarthy has fallen short once before in his quest for the speaker’s gavel. In September 2015, McCarthy was House majority leader when GOP Speaker John Boehner of Ohio announced his resignation. McCarthy announced his candidacy within days. But the effort collapsed after he said in a television interview that the purpose of a special committee investigating the deaths of four Americans at the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, was to drive down the popular ratings of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
McCarthy ended up staying on as House majority leader. Rep. Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican and then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, ended up becoming speaker.
If Republicans do win the House majority in the November midterm elections, it will create several new House leadership openings. If McCarthy and Scalise are elevated to the top two slots, there’s a brewing fight for the No. 3 position, House majority whip. Among the potentially interested candidates are GOP Conference Chairwoman Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York and National Republican Congressional Chairman Tom Emmer of Minnesota, as well as Reps. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina and Drew Ferguson of Georgia.
Authored by David Mark via Washington Examiner
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