What comes next in the US House? Grab your popcorn!

I’ve been asked what I think is going to happen in the House now that Kevin McCarthy has pulled out of the running for speaker. The answer is... complicated.

But first… If you haven’t been following the tumult in the U.S. House of Representatives with a bowl of popcorn and an ear-to-ear schadenfreude grin… well, let’s just say you don’t live in our home. Here’s the thirty-second recap: 

In late September current House Speaker John Boehner was facing a likely coup attempt and an imminent government shutdown unless he caved to the demands of ~40 whackjobs to "defund" Planned Parenthood. As a devout Catholic, he had also just fulfilled his lifelong dream of bringing the pope to speak to a joint session of Congress. So, with little warning even to his closest allies, he announced that he would bring a “clean” short-tern funding bill (i.e. one free of partisan non-starters such as the defund language) up for a vote to prevent a government shutdown. Then he would step down as speaker and retire from Congress altogether. Preventing a government shutdown would not only be the bare minimum of good governance, it would be the speaker-equivalent of grabbing two beers and pulling the slide. 

In a tearful press conference we were told he’d been planning to retire at the end of last Congress and leave the reins to then-Majority Leader Eric Cantor, his one-time rival. Cantor's humiliating primary defeat in summer 2014 (to one of the very same whackjobs now tormenting Boehner) and his subsequent retirement from Congress had upended Boehner's plans. But now Boehner was confident that he could leave the ship of state in the hands of current Majority Leader and heir-apparent Kevin McCarthy. Because Boehner just really, really cares about the institution of the House. Or something. 

More likely Boehner just no longer gave a damn. He knows better than any of us that McCarthy wasn't going to be able to control the Whackjob Caucus. By announcing his resignation he managed to win fawning praise from the Republican establishment and the Beltway media for being so "courageous" and "selfless" even as he was abandoning his ship right as it was heading for looming icebergs like "first-ever default" and "credit downgrade" and "economic collapse." But then I've always said Boehner was a savvy politician. 

Kevin McCarthy, it turns out, not so much. At first it appeared that McCarthy would go largely unchallenged for the speakership but a series of "missteps" (like, you know, publicly admitting that the whole $4 million+ longer-running-than-Watergate Benghazi investigation was just a taxpayer-funded hit job on Hillary Clinton) raised questions about whether or not he could win the necessary 218 votes on the House floor. Then came a rush of rumors that he was having an affair with a fellow member of Congress, Renee Ellmers. (Am I the only one who immediately thought of Mr. and Mrs. Mack? I guess not.)

So just minutes before Republicans were set to cast their votes in internal balloting to nominate the next speaker, McCarthy announced he was pulling out of the running. We have a technical term in the House for what happened next: total shit show. The less-insane wing of the party had already been punched in the gut by Boehner's decision to step down. Now they were in full-blown freak out mode. 

Party leaders had no choice. In a time of great confusion and chaos, they looked to the strongest among them to emerge as the leader they need. Sadly for them, that man has been saying, "No way, bruh."

So where does that leave us?

Right now I'd guess that Boehner and his lieutenants are compiling a whip count. If they can go to Paul Ryan with proof positive that he will safely get much more than the 218 Republican votes needed to become speaker, we’ll probably see an announcement that Ryan is running.

It’s like the bag of Halloween candy sitting on top of my refrigerator RIGHT NOW. I know it’s bad for me, I know I’m gonna regret it in the long run, but the temptation grows and grow to eat that delicious, delicious speakership. We already know that Ryan's getting the full court press from his colleagues in the cloakroom-crying crowd.

So here are some possible scenarios:

1- Ryan can’t get to 218 without making the kind of insane promises to the insane wing of his insane party that he knows are insane -- and career killers to boot. Promises like... Defaulting on the national debt, shutting down the government, impeaching the IRS commissioner...

Ryan refuses to run, and with no one else able to win 218 votes on the House floor, John Boehner ends up staying on through the rest of the Congress. This one is my favorite because it has such a nice thematic tie-in with every single other action taken by the Freedom Caucus crowd. Long ago I made my famed Boehner flow chart for predicting exactly what would happen in any given scenario:

At every turn along the way, the Hell No Caucus's refusal to accept anything less than perfect purity has meant that Boehner's choices have been either: march boldly off a cliff or put a Democratic package on the floor and let it pass with mostly Democratic votes. What if this is just one more round of the same? The Freedom Caucus hates Boehner. The Freedom Caucus wants to oust Boehner. The Freedom Caucus ensures that no one can get 218 votes to become the next speaker. Boehner stays on through the end of the Congress, but is now completely freed from having to give them even the pretense of lip service. The Freedom Caucus once again proves to be a Democratic Manchurian operation secretly funded by George Soros.

Hat tip to my friend Daniel for spelling out this scenario. I had all the pieces in my hands but couldn't see the simple beauty of the full picture.

2- Ryan's personal popularity and his (whatever passes for) gravitas in the Republican party -- not to mention his nominal distance from the current crop of 'tainted' Republican leaders -- let him peel off just enough Freedom Caucusers to become speaker. My husband notes this could be a make-or-break moment in Ryan's career. There's every reason to expect it to break him... as it did previous conservative stalwarts and Young Guns and rising stars. Once again Jonathan Chait has the best line of the week [emphasis mine]:

Conservatives in the Freedom Caucus suffer from a similar but different problem: They do not seem capable of comprehending a world in which they exert less than total power. This failure to compute leads to bursts of angry behavior that is ineffectual by design. No scalp will satisfy, not when any new head starts to look like another scalp. No Freedom Caucus member who finds himself in the party leadership can be anything but a sellout, since betrayal is the only explanation for the failure of the right-wing agenda.

For years Republicans have been ginning up outrage and votes among their base by warning that Democrats were minions of the anti-Christ and that liberalism was kin to Nazism. For years they've been promising that same base everything under the sun once they gained power -- and then taking show votes to demonstrate that they're seriously for-reals taking action this time.

But now we have to give credit where credit is due: Sen. Ted Cruz and his jolly band of House members in the Hell No Caucus might be unhinged from reality when they think they can bend the president and the Senate to their will by shutting down the government or defaulting on the debt, but they know a show vote when they see one and they're not afraid of calling bullshit on leadership. Every Republican speaker in modern history including Boehner has played the same game, marrying insane rhetoric for the base with sane(ish) action in practice.

But now the jig is up. The next speaker no longer has that leeway. There are too many true believers in Congress. Hell, Kevin McCarthy recruited half of them himself as part of the 2010 Republican wave. That means that congressional Republicans are going to either have to be 1- honest about what can really be accomplished or 2- go for broke in the most literal sense possible by defaulting on the national debt this November.

3- The third Paul Ryan scenario is that this 'makes' him after all. Given how much the corporatists in the Obama Administration and key business allies (Chuck - cough - Schumer) among Senate Democrats want to enact a major tax freebie to multinational corporations who've been sheltering trillions of dollars in profits overseas, it's possible that Ryan could push through the corporate tax reform deal he's been fantasizing about for years. As chairman of the House's tax writing committee he's already been in direct talks with Sen. Schumer and the Obama Administration. Perhaps he'll score his major victory as speaker, then decamp to the private sector until awaiting his triumphal return as Treasury secretary in a Republican administration.

And who knows? Perhaps scenarios four, five, and six will reveal themselves over the next few days. Speaker Jeb Hensarling, perhaps? There's a degree of plausibility in that. He's just crazy enough on certain issues (Ex-Im anyone?) to be considered acceptable to the Freedom Caucus, and he just got slapped down on a discharge petition so maybe members of the less-insane wing will want to play nice. Who knows? Get your popcorn ready. Hell, if we default next month, it might be all anyone has to eat for awhile.