Mad House

Mad House

Chapter 1


Now we learned how to govern. —­Kevin McCar­thy

On January 6, 2023, day four of a sensational political fight, with the nation wondering when and even whether House Republicans could elect a Speaker of the House, Rep. Matt Gaetz, the wolfish MAGA congressman from Florida, had what he thought was a brilliantly devilish idea for humiliating the party’s nominee, Kevin McCar­thy: He would nominate the woman once widely rumored to be McCar­thy’s mistress for the job McCar­thy was trying desperately to get.

That woman, Renee Ellmers, a nurse turned Republican congresswoman from North Carolina, hadn’t served in Congress since 2017. But at the Capitol, the name “Renee Ellmers” was often invoked as shorthand for one of the chief reasons McCar­thy blew his shot at the speakership when he first hoped to win it in 2015. Ellmers and McCar­thy, both married, denied the affair rumors at the time, but the chatter was pervasive enough that it was referenced by Republican lawmakers as a reason McCar­thy should be prevented from holding the post of Speaker.

In that less jaded, pre-­Trump political environment, extramarital affairs were seen as damaging for politicians who talked up family values. And Ellmers didn’t behave in a way that tamped down the rampant speculation. “I can’t vote for someone who doesn’t ask for my vote. I’m apparently not high on his priority list,” she told reporters at the time, sounding like a spurned lover and making the process feel more like a student council race than one about choosing the most powerful person in Congress, who is also second in line to the presidency.

But that was all ancient Capitol Hill lore by 2023. Despite the ballyhooed “red tsunami” failing to crest in the previous year’s midterm elections, Republicans were back in power in the House with an excruciatingly slim majority, thrusting Washington back into a moment of divided government and placing McCar­thy, eight years later, once again within spitting distance of the speakership. And that’s when the specter of Ellmers threatened to rise and re-­humiliate him.

McCar­thy arrived in Washington ahead of the long week with the shorn-­sheep look of a man with a too-­fresh haircut, smiling big even as he anticipated a rocky path ahead. The sunny demeanor was the Kevin McCar­thy way—­over the past two decades, the California Republican who used to flip used cars in the small city of Bakersfield had worked his way to the pinnacle of politics by smiling, glad-­handing, raising heaps of money, and recruiting candidates constantly, all with a single-­minded goal of one day becoming Speaker of the House. McCar­thy was not shy about how much he wanted it, which gave his members great power over him.

Before Trump, McCar­thy had been a more stock Chamber of Commerce Republican character in Washington. He was once hailed as the new fresh face of the GOP, alongside Reps. Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor. (The trio even wrote a book together in 2010, billing themselves as “the Young Guns,” despite Cantor’s being forty-­seven years old.) But ever since the 2016 campaign, McCar­thy had worked hard to ingratiate himself with Trump and the hard right of his party, often shrugging off their worst behavior by saying that they accurately represented the voters who had sent them to Washington. “If you think Marjorie Taylor Greene is crazy,” he would tell skeptical donors, “just go to her district and have a look at the voters who elected her.”

McCar­thy often described his job of party leader as that of a thermostat: controlling the temperature. But the truth was he often acted more like a thermometer: simply measuring the political temperature and then adjusting himself to be comfortable in it.

Following and tolerating was a weak way to lead, and it explained the position McCar­thy found himself in when Congress convened at the beginning of 2023 and he decided to take his shot. Since the disappointing midterm elections, when Republicans won control of the House with just 4 seats, McCar­thy and his closest allies had been convinced he would not have the votes to win the speakership on the first round of voting. That, in and of itself, was historically embarrassing—­since 1923, no Speaker had needed more than one ballot to be elected. McCar­thy, an optimist by nature, was deeply uncertain he would ever have the votes.

The drawn-­out, once-­in-­a-­century floor fight that followed acted as a civics lesson, as dysfunctional government situations often do. The American people learned how the process of electing a Speaker actually works: Bizarrely, House members just keep voting, over and over, until someone emerges with the outright majority. The process is low-­tech and transparent: Reporters sit in the chamber to witness it, the House clerk marks down the vote with pencil and paper, and it’s all carried live on ­C-­SPAN. And this time, the whole world was watching: During his later international travels, McCar­thy would be told by the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-­Sisi, and by Pope Francis’s chief assistant that they had been glued to the television for all fifteen rounds.

For a good vote counter, there should be few surprises. Holdouts would have been identified and negotiated with beforehand, deals cut, and one would’ve known exactly how every member of one’s caucus planned to vote before any votes were recorded on the House clerk’s tally sheet.

The job of House Speaker is, after president, the hardest job in electoral politics. In the modern-­day Congress, where both parties have governed with narrow margins, the job is fundamentally about math: How do you get to 218, the number of votes needed for a bill to pass with all members present? That task needs constant, careful calibration to appeal to all the various flanks of the party and an encyclopedic knowledge of members’ districts, their committees, their priorities, and their vulnerabilities. It requires the Speaker to already know what those members want so they can start negotiations with them on the smallest minutiae. Former Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi would often refer to each bill as a kaleidoscope: You rotate it to reveal a new combination of members that will get you to 218. And with every bill, it will be a different coalition.

Lawmakers who have served in leadership often talk about how important it is to understand that “no” doesn’t always mean no and “yes” doesn’t always mean yes. They learn how to read the difference between a “hell, no” and a “convince-­me-­otherwise no.” Perhaps more important, they know when an assurance that “you have my vote” is wobbly. They know when to call a vote to lock in the wobbly ones and when to pull a vote from the floor because the support is not there. “You must act without hesitation,” Pelosi wrote in her book about the job of Speaker. “The minute you hesitate, your options are diminished.”

Add to the difficulties of the Speaker’s job the reality that the House is massive and fast-­paced, and a stray comment in the hallway from a member can have massive downstream consequences. The most successful leaders move quickly and decisively—­call the play, build consensus, count the votes, and go to the floor.

McCar­thy had counted the votes, and they weren’t there—­but he went to the floor anyway.

That January, the American people also learned that you don’t have to be a member of the House to be nominated for Speaker. (In one of the fifteen rounds, Gaetz nominated Donald Trump.) They also learned that you don’t even have to know you are being nominated for Speaker to be nominated for Speaker—­which is how Gaetz came up with the cruel ploy of bringing up Renee Ellmers at a moment when McCar­thy looked like he was going to flop again.

Gaetz, a political nepo baby from Florida—­his father is the former Florida state Senate president and political power broker Don Gaetz—­arrived in Congress in 2017 as an unknown on the national stage. But he was a good fit for the political moment in which he landed: A sound-­bite machine and a natural on television, he fed on conflict and, more quickly than any other Republican in office, took to Trump’s brand of scorched-­earth politics. By 2023, Gaetz was a bona fide MAGA celebrity, viewed by many of his colleagues in Washington as cunning and immoral—­“a textbook sociopath,” a colleague of his said—­and the Speaker’s race was going to be his Super Bowl.

The too-­slim majority meant that, for months, McCar­thy had been anticipating making major concessions to the hard-­right faction of his party and to people like Gaetz, who had the ability to deprive him of the speakership. A group of twenty far-­right Republicans, who branded themselves with the rather disappointingly straightforward name “the Twenty,” were staunchly anti-­McCar­thy and recognized that he needed them far more than they needed him. And they weren’t shy about making the dynamic clear to him.