Everyone knows that Kevin McCarthy is the most lobbyist-friendly Speaker of the House in contemporary history. He doesn’t represent Kern County as much as he represents K Street. He has always relied on a small army of shady lobbyists for advice and fundraising. Reporting for Time on McCarthy’s difficult ascension to the Speaker’s office in January, Philip Elliott wrote that “Special interests had already invested tens of millions in McCarthy’s ambitions over the years.” They gave his SuperPAC almost $260 million this cycle alone to retake the House— far more than they ever gave Paul Ryan. K Street has always seen McCarthy as “their guy, a reliable stand-in for corporate interests and Main Street alike. Regulations out, free markets in.” This week in fact, the House will vote on the REINS Act— to further cut down on the kinds of federal regulations that protect consumers, the environment, workers, etc from avaricious and recalcitrant corporate greed. Despite Trump’s extreme right turn towards Trumpism to shore up his right flank, K Street is more than satisfied with him as a Speaker.
John Stipicevic, a lobbyist at the CGCN Group and former deputy chief of staff for floor and member services for McCarthy, said “He has an open door to businesses and industries which align with cutting regulations.” Aside from Stipicevic, McCarthy’s K Street team includes Ben Howard, a lobbyist at the Duberstein Group who formerly served as McCarthy’s floor director; Will Dunham, a lobbyist at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck and McCarthy’s former deputy chief of staff for policy; Nick Bouknight, a lobbyist at Capitol Counsel who was formerly executive director of McCarthy’s political operation; Steve Pinkos , former McCarthy policy director who now lobbies fro Intel; Tim Berry, McCarthy’s former chief of staff, who went to work as chief lobbyist for JPMorgan Chase; and Jeff Miller, a crooked lobbyist for Fox and Apple and one of McCarthy’s most trusted consiglieris and money-raisers (as well as Miller crony Stephen Ruppel, formerly McCarthy’s 2022 political director, now at Miller’s firm, representing Big PhRMA. In a new poll, over three-quarters of K Street lobbyists agreed that McCarthy has been even more effective than they had initially expected.
He’s counting on K Street to be a strong counterbalance in his favor against the nihilist and neo-fascist wings of his own conference. The far right has never loved him and now they’re plotting how to get even for what they see as a betrayal. Leigh Ann Caldwell, Theodoric Meyer and Tobi Raji reported that though there hasn’t been be an immediate effort to oust him as Speaker— at least not yet— for the deal with Biden to raise the debt limit that is loathed on the far right fringe, “he is feeling pressure from his right flank. On Sunday, Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) said on CNN’s State of the Union that McCarthy ‘has a credibility problem’ with the House Freedom Caucus… Chip Roy (R-TX) told Fox News’ Guy Benson last week that he will meet with McCarthy this week to ‘review’ the agreement he made with conservatives in January as he scraped to secure their votes so he could become speaker. [He told Benson that “There’s going to need to be a bit of a reckoning and a kind of review of how we’re organizing ourselves in order to get things done. They basically just cut the deal and then told us. And we had to react, because now we’re being asked to respond and vote on a deal that was cut, not with our approval. And I was happy to give him a lot of rope. You know, go out there, do what you can. But you got to kind of come back.”] Freedom Caucus members say McCarthy broke several promises he made five months ago.” Though McCarthy denies most of these claims, the Freedom Caucus says they allowed him to become Speaker based on:
Budget baseline: “He promised when he was running for speaker that we would use the 2022 baseline numbers as the appropriation numbers for this year, and then went back on that promise with this particular legislation, where he promised and signed into law the 2023 numbers,” Buck said on Sunday.
Not allowing a bill to pass with the support of more Democrats than Republicans: “We were told they’d never put a bill on the floor that would take more Democrats than Rs to pass it. We were told that,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), a Freedom Caucus member, said last week.
Not taking up a bill without unanimity among Republicans on the House Rules Committee: “A reminder that during Speaker negotiations to build the coalition, that it was explicit both that nothing would pass Rules Committee without AT LEAST 7 GOP votes— AND that the Committee would not allow reporting out rules without unanimous Republican votes. #DebtCeiling,” Roy tweeted last week.
Caldwell, Meyer and Raji reported that “Neither McCarthy nor the Freedom Caucus released a list of the deals they struck back in January, so it’s hard to tell who's telling the truth. Meanwhile, Buck had quite the dig against McCarthy on CNN for relying on Democrats to pass the rule on the House floor, a vote usually carried by the majority, setting up last week’s passage of the debt limit bill. ‘Nancy Pelosi, in her years and years of being speaker, never once asked Republicans to vote for the rule, the— a procedural mechanism that puts the bill on the floor. Kevin McCarthy, in his first five months, had to ask the Democrats and received 52 votes from the Democrats to actually have the bill heard. That's really unheard of and shows weakness,’ Buck said. Russ Vought, who served as budget director in the Trump administration and now consults Freedom Caucus members on budget matters, told us Thursday that the conservative faction might force McCarthy to gain Democratic support for future rules.”
Last week, Buck— who is also the head of the Colorado Republican Party— said that “The discussion about the motion to vacate is going to happen in the next week or two. The people in our [districts], outside the Beltway right now, are saying, ‘$4 trillion is too much, you’ve got to get a new Speaker.’”
Defending McCarthy on the far right: Marjorie Traitor Greene, as usual, who is violently against dumping McCarthy since he has allowed her to imagine that she controls him: “It’d be a really dumb move. I live in reality, not conservative fantasyland.” Wow! And here I thought she was the queen of conservative fantasyland!
