OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
A former rival to Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) sang the newly elected House Speaker’s praises on Friday after he finally managed to secure the job after a historic 15 rounds of voting. Rep. Daniel Webster (R-Fla.), who ran against McCarthy for the GOP leadership position in 2015 predicted the California Republican will do just fine under several rule changes he agreed to.
“Kevin will do great with these rules changes,” Webster told Newsmax’s John Gizzi. “He’s agreed to all the things I ran on in the speaker’s race in ’15.”
Gizzi added:
Webster recalled how he ran against then-Majority Leader McCarthy following the surprise resignation of then-Speaker John Boehner in the fall of 2015 (having received 12 votes against Boehner for speaker in January, leading to Webster’s removal from the powerful Rules Committee).
Chief among the planks in the Floridian’s platform was what he called “flipping the process.”
“I’d make it principle-based, where ideas are good because of what they say rather than because they are pushed by a committee chairman or a member’s seniority or the party of the sponsors. Rank-and-file members would be successful,” Webster said.
Regarding McCarthy’s agreeing to make it easier for members to propose a “motion to vacate” the chair, setting the stage for the immediate election of a new Speaker, the Florida Republican noted: “It’s fantastic. Speakers will come and speakers will go, but this will always be there to keep them following the will of the members. If your motivation is power, I suppose you won’t like it. If your motivation is governance, you will.”
Webster was also pleased that McCarthy agreed to limit bills to a single issue. “In my presentation before the [Republican] Conference [in the 2015 race], I called for a ‘germaneness rule’ — namely, that any amendments to a bill stick to the subject of the bill and nothing else,” he added.
He also said that he wasn’t worried about the optics of the drawn-out process to elect a new speaker.
“That’s what happened to me in 1996, when Republicans won the House in Florida for the first time since Reconstruction,” he explained. “And I made agreements with other Republicans and got elected speaker by [a vote of] 61-59 over [Democrat] Buzz Ritchie.
“Our low approval ratings were flipped right-side up. And just as [the GOP-controlled House] is now dealing with a Democratic president, our Republican legislature then was dealing with a Democratic governor [the late Lawton Chiles] and we beat him every time and overrode every veto,” Webster told Gizzi. “And I made friends with a number of my Democratic colleagues who were opposing me on every vote, such as [present Florida Democratic Reps.] Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Lois Frankel.”
McCarthy finally managed to become Speaker for the newly elected Republican House majority following some late-night drama involving Matt Gaetz after the GOP lawmaker from Florida voted “present,” initially denying McCarthy’s victory by a single vote.
“It took a loss by a razor-thin margin in a late-night Round 14, a heated exchange with one of his sternest opponents, and a near-adjournment of the House till Monday to break a logjam unseen since before the Civil War,” the Associated Press reported after the 15th round of balloting.
“The final tally that put him over the top: 216 for McCarthy, 212 for Democrat leader Hakeem Jeffries and 6 simply ‘present,’” the outlet reported.
A video clip of a frustrated McCarthy confronting Gaetz after his first “present” went viral online late Friday:
🚨 BREAKING: Matt Gaetz votes present, leaving Kevin McCarthy one vote short of being confirmed as Speaker.
McCarthy is NOT happy 😂pic.twitter.com/dWcDjTQAVo
— Patriot Alerts (@alerts___) January 7, 2023
The newswire noted further:
All day Friday, McCarthy had been inching ever closer to taking up the gavel as he won over multiple diehard conservative critics and resistors. McCarthy, who flipped 15 colleagues to supporters in dramatic votes on Friday afternoon, returned to the chamber at 10 p.m. ET with hopes high that he’d woo enough additional hardliners to put him over the top.
But then came a surprising loss, with him snagging 216 votes, just one shy of the 217 needed to get a House majority afterh two colleagues, Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz, merely voted “present.”
What followed was some extraordinary drama, as McCarthy and Gaetz appeared to exchange sharp words on the House floor. A vote to adjourn till Monday was quickly introduced, but was then walked back as supporters did a U-turn and rescinded votes.
