How A Leopard Ate Kevin McCarthy's Face (2024)

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“I never thought the leopard would eat my face,” sobbed Kevin McCarthy (R, CA-20) of the Leopards Eating Faces Party last night.

It was nine months almost to the day after the fifteen ballots it took to elevate McCarthy to his cherished dream of becoming Speaker of the House. It took one motion by one extremist, and only eight Republicans voting with Democrats on that motion, to make McCarthy the first Speaker of the House to have his face eaten by a leopard. That leopard’s name is Matt Gaetz (R, FL-01).

Metaphorically, of course. The leopard in question was Matt Gaetz, and it was no surprise. Back in January 2023, when Gaetz grudgingly allowed McCarthy’s speakership to be pushed over the line by voting “present,” releasing his allies to vote present as well, he explicitly reserved the right, under the House rules package, to eat Kevin McCarthy’s face.

Why did Gaetz ultimately relent last January? Not because he had come to a meeting of minds with McCarthy but because,as he told CNN at the time, "I ran out of things I could even imagine to ask for."

That can happen to anyone, right? Of course, to this day we still do not know what most of those things were since McCarthy agreed to keep the deal secret. But one thing we did know: that the rules package McCarthy would bring to the floor as Speaker would lower the threshold of votes need to bring a “motion to vacate the chair” from a majority of House Republicans, to five, and then, to one.

This was a fatal error. By accepting that deal, McCarthy put his speakership in the hands of Gaetz and his allies, who are the most extreme members of the Freedom Caucus, which is in turn Congress’s most extreme Republican alliance. How extreme? These are the people who expelled Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA-14) for calling Lauren Boebert (CO-3) “a little bitch,” which is, of all the terrible things MTG has said and done, a moment of sparkling truth.

What McCarthy also did was create the opportunity for yet another departure from the rule of order in the party of Trump, a political organization that functions (when it functions) through acts of aggression intended to bully the majority into submission. Then, they claim that these actions are restoring the world of the Founding Fathers.

They know so little history. When it was originally written in 1801, the motion to vacate was written to be not used. Let me explain.

First, let’s look at what a motion to vacate is: one, small item in a much larger House Rules document. It is always a sign of irreconcilable differences among those in the party in power (or corruption so extensive that the party can no longer stomach it), and it has never been used by Democrats. A somewhat arcane and little used item that has been available to lawmakers for 222 years, it was originally conceived of by Thomas Jefferson and included in part of the first rules package ever introduced in the House.A Manual of Parliamentary Practice for the Use of the Senate of the United States(1801), otherwise known as “Jefferson’s Manual.” Like much of American law and political custom, it drew on English legal precedents reshaped by American views of what did, and did not, prevent tyranny.

Section IX of the Manual addressed the question of leadership in both bodies, the legal precedents that framed leadership roles, and the parts of the Constitution where those laws were now grounded. Previous to the Manual, these questions seem to have been more or less decided on the fly, principally by the first two vice presidents: John Adams, and Jefferson himself. This caused chaos and acrimony, both of which posed dangers to a new nation under an even newer Constitution. Although both Adams and Jefferson believed themselves to be pretty good masters of parliamentary procedure, each were mercilessly and routinely attacked.

Both men were shaken by how little their authority and knowledge mattered as they navigated the thicket of competing interests in the Senate. “In 1797, Jefferson had approached his single vice-presidential duty of presiding over the Senate with feelings of inadequacy,” aSenate webpagedevoted to the Manual explains, leaving to the imagination how horrible things needed to get to make Thomas Jefferson feel inadequate. “John Adams, who had held the job since the Senate’s founding in 1789, knew a great deal about Senate procedure and—of equal importance—about British parliamentary operations. Yet, despite Adams’ knowledge, senators routinely criticized him for his arbitrary and inconsistent parliamentary rulings.”

Now imagine how hard it was for Jefferson to feel that way. Adams, at least, was used to being sneered at, but the Man from Monticello was not. So, Jefferson did what he did best: created a founding document that could be used for time immemorial.

Jefferson’s Manual, much like the Constitution and everything Jefferson ever wrote, was principle-driven, regularizing a framework for operations that could be adapted to new circ*mstances and to both houses of Congress. The man was sometimes wrong, but never in doubt, right? The Manual worked well enough as guidance that during the 24th Congress (1837), the House of Representatives adopted it as the basis of its rules as well. For our purposes, what matters most is section 315: “A Speaker may be removed at the will of the House, and a Speakerpro temporeappointed.”

As Jefferson adds in an important footnote to this simple sentence that is causing so much havoc today:

The House has never removed a Speaker; but it had on several occasions removed or suspended other officers, such as Clerk and Doorkeeper (I, 287–290, 292; II, 1417), who are officers classed by the Constitution in the phrase ‘‘the House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers.’’ A resolution for the removal of an officer is presented as a matter of privilege (I, 284–286; VI, 35), and a resolution declaring the Office of Speaker vacant presents a question of constitutional privilege (VI, 35).

If you can remove the Doorkeeper, why not the Speaker? I ask you. And Jefferson is noting in as direct a way as any 18th-century person might have that removing the Speaker is unknown and probably unwise territory. Subtext? It should probably never happenexcept when absolutely necessary. On the other hand (also Jefferson), any office could become a location for corruption, emoluments, and tyranny. So, having a mechanism for vacating the Speaker was necessary and responsible. Knowing how to vacate the Speaker’s chair, and that it could be done, pretty much guaranteed that the Speaker would stay in his lane and not try to seize absolute power.

This was pretty much the state of play for the next 80 years. In part, this was because the House was such a mess before, during, and after the Civil War that tossing Speakers like used Kleenexes was the least of that contentious body’s problems. When you have Congressmen trying to thrash each other, shouting, throwing furniture, and waving deadly weapons when they don’t get their way, deposing the Speaker can get lost in the shuffle (see: Joanne Freeman,The Field of Blood:Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2018.) Even after the Civil War, when the most ill-tempered former slavers were forced to remain home because they had tried to overthrow the government, Congress remained a gnarly place to work. Speakers lasted one or two years, and sometimes stepped down after a matter of months. Republican Theodore Pomeroy (NY-24) lasted from March 3 to March 4, 1969.

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So, being Speaker of the House was not such a coveted job until 1880, when Congress developed the modern committee system, and the Speaker automatically became chair of (you guessed it) the House Standing Committee on Rules (est. 1849.) Every two years, after all the newbies were sworn in, that Committee would present and pass a rules package that contained some version of Jefferson’s Manual, adapted to the needs and desires of the time and the party in power. Most importantly,the rulesdetermined how legislation got to the floor, what happened to it after it did, and when the rules themselves could be suspended to do something the rules didn’t allow. The rules package also attended to social niceties, likekeeping female and Black journalists off the floor of the House until the 1970s.

But by creating the rules under which his own behavior and decision-making were governed by, allowed the Speaker to push his party’s program forward and fend off enemies in his own caucus without endangering his leadership. This may be why such a resolution has only been used once. That was in 1910, and aimed at Speaker Joseph Cannon of Illinois: in an unusual process, he lost the chairmanship of the Rules committee, but remained Speaker for another year; in 1962, a House office building was named after him. Ta-da!

“In a similar fashion,”Eden Villalovas wrote atThe Washington Examineryesterday, “Republicans threatened to oust their House speaker in 1997, Newt Gingrich, but decided against filing the resolution. Former North Carolina Republican Mark Meadows filed a motion to vacate against then-Speaker John Boehner in 2015, but Boehner resigned as speaker within a few months, and the resolution never came to vote.”

Well, this time it did. And this is how McCarthy, having sacrificed every safety net cultivated by every previous Speaker over the years to become the leader of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party woke up yesterday to find Matt Gaetz eating his face.

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Short takes:

• That indicted Trump consigliere Rudolph Giuliani drinks is no secret. Now we hear that prosecutor Jack Smith will ask why, after the 2020 election, former president Donald Trump never questioned the advice and counsel of someone who was drunk when giving it. Rumors that the 79-year-old former New York City mayor is in a spiral have also been rampant. But as Matt Flegenheimer andMaggie Habermanwrite inThe New York Times, intoxication hasn’t changed his personality as much as it has intensified it. Chief among these is a kind of needy narcissism that drew him to Trump’s side. “In interviews with friends, associates and former aides, the consensus was that, more than wholly transforming Mr. Giuliani, his drinking had accelerated a change in his existing alchemy, amplifying qualities that had long burbled within him: conspiracism, gullibility, a weakness for grandeur,” Flegenheimer and Haberman write in this not-to-be-missed story. (October 4, 2023)

• TheNo Labels coalitionisn’t a political party, except when it isn’t: it’s more like a brand crossed with a big wad of cash controlled by skeevy, old, male, white politicians who claim to speak for “the common sense majority.” But pay attention.As Judd Legum reportsatPopular Information, the candidate these so-called nonpartisan centrists may run will eat away at Joe Biden’s potential support to his right. Currently they are on the ballot in 11 states, including Arizona, a crucial state for the Democrats. But where you get your money matters, and it looks like a big chunk of that $70 million campaign chest comes from the far right. “Is No Labels a thinly disguised effort by Wall Street and Trump supporters to deny Biden a second term?” Legum asks. Donors include Peter Thiel, Harlan Crow, and Home Depot founder Ken Langone, as well as private equity firms Bain Capital, Centaurus Advisors, Oaktree Capital Management, Trian Fund Management, and Apollo Global Management. (October 3, 2023)

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