The Taliban 20’s Kevin Calculus

Happy Thursday, and welcome back to your regularly scheduled email about Washingtonian inside baseball (albeit with a healthy dosage of the word “defenestrated”). As of now, there’s a healthy chance the United States will not default on its debts—something that, for reasons I’ll get into, the MAGA wing of the G.O.P. is rather grumpy about. But are the so-called Taliban 20 grumpy enough to deploy the motion-to-vacate bomb on Kevin McCarthy, or will the Speaker live to see another day?

The Taliban 20’s McCarthy Red Line

Sure, the right-wing House insurgency was pissed that their Speaker backed off some of his promises and (quelle horreur!) cut a deal with the Democrats to save the economy. But they decided not to defenestrate him. At least not yet.

TINA NYUGEN

Back in January, when he was forced to dole out gifts and dangle committee assignments to the 21 Republicans blocking his path to the House Speakership, Kevin McCarthy looked as if he had traded real power for a lofty title. McCarthy, after all, eventually won the gavel, but only after handing his opponents a giant red detonation trigger known as the Motion to Vacate clause—a procedural move that would allow any aggrieved conference member to initiate a vote of no confidence. As I reported at the time, and in the months since, McCarthy had essentially made himself a hostage of the far-right—the Taliban 20, as the insurgent group was called—a potentially untenable situation that seemed doomed to unravel as soon as McCarthy faced a real test, such as negotiating a deal to raise the debt ceiling.

And yet, surprisingly, over the past week or so, McCarthy succinctly neutered his opposition, winning over former enemies and passing a remarkably moderate, down-the-middle spending bill with an overwhelming majority of both Republicans and Democrats. Jim Jordan, the McCarthy rival who was supported by the 20 for the speakership, whipped support for the bill. Thomas Massie, a libertarian debt-clock obsessive who could have spiked the deal, waved it through committee. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the most far-right members of the caucus, has become an unlikely ally: “Republicans have huge wins in this fight,” she tweeted on Wednesday, celebrating the package.

The Taliban 20 have also backed down. On Thursday morning, I’m told, key members held a conference call to discuss their next moves—including the possibility of striking back at McCarthy with a vote of no confidence. Shortly afterward, however, Rep. Matt Gaetz, the group’s informal leader, told the media that the motion to vacate was the furthest thing from their minds. Behind the scenes, too, members and their outside allies came to the conclusion that this was not the time for a coup.

The Wet Rag

But McCarthy’s compromises still infuriated certain members of the 20. In the days leading up to last night’s vote, members like Chip Roy claimed they even amounted to a breach of trust in the undocumented power-sharing agreement brokered in January. “McCarthy gave away the farm. He had the negotiating skills of a wet rag,” a G.O.P. aide close to the 20, fumed to me. “He had the whole conference behind him including almost all of the House Freedom Caucus and blew it.”

Elsewhere, several members of the 20—Dan Bishop, Chip Roy, and Ken Buck—took to the airwaves, decrying McCarthy’s capitulation to the Democrats, telling reporters that McCarthy had violated the terms of their understanding by passing a bill with more Democrats than Republicans. “There is a big reassessment of the coalition for power in the House,” Buck said Wednesday night.

Yet there’s a difference between populist caterwauling and hard politics—a distinction that both McCarthy, and the more enlightened members of the 20, firmly grasp. McCarthy’s victory is also, of course, a testament to the old-fashioned power of favor-trading. Jordan, who co-founded the House Freedom Caucus, transformed from a potential enemy into an ally after McCarthy made him chair of the Oversight Committee. Greene likewise recognized early on the benefits of being inside the tent, forging a tight-knit relationship with McCarthy long before he took the gavel. McCarthy also gambled by placing Massie, a Reason magazine-type libertarian who supported his speakership, but who might have resisted the debt ceiling deal, on the Rules Committee. It paid off: Massie was ultimately the decisive vote in allowing the bill to move forward without any fuss, defying fellow conservatives and Taliban 20 members Chip Roy and Ralph Norman.

Of course, the 20 will continue to fume that the debt-ceiling agreement is not ideologically pure enough. But using the motion-to-vacate nuclear option to kick McCarthy from speakership, at this point, would be received as little more than a MAGA temper tantrum, rather than a principled stand. “They’re not going to do it just to do it,” a Republican consultant familiar with the 20’s thinking told me. “They’re either going to have to get something from McCarthy, or [an ouster’s] going to be more planned out.”

MAGA Smoke Signals

Sure, McCarthy looks safe for now, but the motion-to-vacate bomb is still tied around his chest, if anyone wants to detonate it. But first, the G.O.P. consultant explained, there would have to be signals from the Conservative Partnership Institute that they’d want a regime change. The secretive, MAGA-oriented think tank run by former Heritage president Jim DeMint had been crucial in delaying McCarthy’s initial election as speaker—indeed, the C.P.I. headquarters near Capitol Hill served as a veritable war room for the 20—and would likely be the hub for any future opposition. Anger from the Club for Growth, too, would indicate trouble. “If there’s something coming out of Heritage, it’s literally just coincidence and bandwagoning, because nothing’s gonna happen if it’s not coming out of C.P.I. and the Club for Growth folks in that area,” the consultant said.

Second, the full 20 would have to publicly coalesce in opposition to whatever McCarthy was proposing, without any defections, and get other people outside their group to sign on. At the moment, Gaetz has publicly thrown his attention elsewhere, telling reporters on Thursday “I’d rather direct Congress’s ire at Christopher Wray than Kevin McCarthy right now.” Byron Donalds, too, told Politico that talks of a no-confidence report over this move were premature, while Lauren Boebert said she was afraid the “terrible” debt bill might “weaken us in the appropriations process,” adding that “I know that there’s a lot of members that are upset and a lot of violations from all the agreements that were made.”

As with the speakership battle, where it only became clear afterward how many promises McCarthy had made privately to secure the vote, the debt ceiling drama might have a long tail. Sources I spoke to were adamant that McCarthy now has to give his critics some new shiny bauble to placate them—though even they don’t know what that bauble is quite yet. “[The 20] act in good faith. They’re at least going to sit down with him and go through stuff,” the consultant close to the 20 told me. “I don’t think it’s gonna get called for the floor today or tomorrow, you know, but he could be in trouble next week if he doesn't get this stuff wrapped up.”