We ousted John Boehner on principle. This revolt against Kevin McCarthy feels personal.

I am probably more familiar than most in Washington with attempts to replace the speaker of the U.S. House.

In 2013, as a member of the House, I withheld support for former Speaker John Boehner as part of a failed attempt to deny him the speaker’s gavel. Just over two years later in 2015, I was called to his office, along with a handful of colleagues, to discuss a pending motion to remove him from his post. Later that day, he announced his resignation.

Today, there is a group in the House that is apparently intent on denying Kevin McCarthy the speaker’s gavel. In doing so, they invite the inevitable comparison to our efforts to dethrone Boehner.

There were a lot of reasons behind our efforts to remove Boehner almost a decade ago. Indeed, each person involved probably had a variety of motivations for doing so. But there was also a common thread — something that unified an otherwise diverse group of social conservatives and libertarians, long-term Congressional veterans and rookies, and debt- and defense-hawks. We were aggressively opposed to Boehner’s efforts to marginalize the new, more grassroots conservative wing of the party.

But this revolt feels different. Very different. This one doesn’t seem like it is based on any principle or policy.

It feels personal.

On one level, I suppose that is unobjectionable. After all, the speaker vote is different than voting on legislation. The members are voting for (or against) the person they want to lead them in the next Congress.

To some extent, though, that vote has already taken place: the Republicans voted amongst themselves for their nominee, and McCarthy won by an overwhelming margin, 188-31.

More importantly, perhaps, when we were voting on Boehner, we knew we were also, effectively, voting on legislation. We were voting on which bills would be offered, and which would be ignored. And we fully expected that by voting for Boehner, we were voting against conservative principles.

The objectors simply cannot make the same case here. Conservatives should have every confidence that they will be heard, and respected, in the upcoming session of the House. Consider:

Boehner kept conservatives off of key committees. He kept them out of leadership positions. He even went so far as to interfere with the election of the chairman of the Republican Study Committee, placing his hand-picked choice at the head of the one group in Congress that conservatives could call their own — an effort that directly led to the creation of the Freedom Caucus.

McCarthy has done none of that. Indeed, all indications are that he has gone out of his way to include the conservative wing of the party in the operation of the House. Jim Jordan, a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, stands to be the Chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee. That would have been beyond conservatives’ wildest dreams under Boehner.

Key conservatives now sit on the Ways and Means, Appropriations, and Financial Services Committees. And McCarthy is promising robust investigations into the COVID response (led by Dr. Anthony Fauci), the Biden family’s overseas ties, and the politicization of federal agencies. These are things for which conservatives are rightfully clamoring.

There is also an ugly downside to the effort to replace McCarthy: one possible outcome is that someone will be elected who is openly hostile to conservatives. Indeed, there is already talk in Washington about centrist Republicans joining forces with Democrats to elect a true moderate. Liz Cheney’s name has even come up. It would truly be a travesty if the net result of the new GOP majority in the House is the election of someone closer philosophically to Nancy Pelosi than to Newt Gingrich, who, by the way, has endorsed McCarthy.

Some of the rebels will tell you that they are withholding support for McCarthy in expectation that a “true conservative” leader will be elected instead. Some of the extreme fringe are even clamoring for a “paradigm-changing” leader. Those contentions are simply absurd.

The time for new, paradigm-shifting conservative leadership was a decade ago, when the GOP had 242 seats and a majority of nearly 50 votes in the House. Today, the GOP controls 222 seats, and that margin is 10. People who are calling for dramatic conservative victories simply do not know how to count.

No, this revolt doesn’t seem principled. It doesn’t seem well-reasoned. It seems personal. For whatever reason, the members opposing McCarthy simply don’t like him. If they prevent him from being speaker, I suppose they can satisfy themselves that they got what they wanted. But, in doing so, they may well harm not only the Republican Party, but the country. And that is simply inexcusable.

This story was originally published December 19, 2022 at 2:55 PM with the headline "We ousted John Boehner on principle. This revolt against Kevin McCarthy feels personal.."