Sunday marks the end of the year, and with it the last day of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s truncated final term in the House. The California Republican gave his farewell speech on Dec. 14, right before Congress fled town for the holidays. “There’s so much we had been able to accomplish in a short amount of time,” McCarthy told a mostly empty House chamber, bleakly echoing the oddly upbeat tone he took in a Wall Street Journal op-ed announcing his departure.
McCarthy was right, in a sense. The first year of the 118th Congress was a time of major, history-making moments. Just not the sort that you generally want to see next to your name in the history books. If anything, it was easy to become numb to the string of unprecedented moments of chaos that we saw from this Republican majority. When you sit back and catalog the House GOP’s 2023 though, it feels impossible that they packed so much drama into one calendar year and yet produced so little of substance.
The first year of the 118th Congress was a time of major, history-making moments.
We saw the first speaker election to stretch past the first ballot since 1923, as McCarthy struggled to win the full support of his caucus. Over the course of four days, it would become the longest race for the speaker’s gavel since 1856 — a record that would fall just a few months later. (Somehow that’s entirely par for the course: Even McCarthy’s dubious distinction managed to get upstaged.) McCarthy won on the 15th ballot after offering major concessions to the farthest right wing of the GOP caucus. That neither side bothered to put the details of that deal into writing would haunt and bedevil him for the rest of his time atop the House.
We saw Republican leadership under McCarthy fail to govern in ways that would be unthinkable when Democrats hold the gavel. One small example: It’s up to the majority to provide the votes to get a bill to the floor for debate under what’s known as a “special rule.” For the first time in two decades, one of those rules failed to pass when far-right conservatives revolted against McCarthy’s deal with the White House to raise the debt ceiling. Then we promptly saw it happen again just two months later in September, as those same members of the chaos caucus tanked the GOP’s own defense spending bill — twice.
We saw the first successful motion to vacate the chair when McCarthy was removed from power in September. As part of the deal that he’d cut to become speaker, the threshold for bringing such a motion to the floor was dropped to allow any one member to make a run at the king. After months of threats, it was finally Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., who pulled the trigger on the motion, ostensibly because McCarthy had depended on Democratic votes to avoid a federal government shutdown. Democrats were in no mood to save McCarthy after he reneged on his own deal on spending for the next year, which left him unable to muster enough support to avoid becoming the latest GOP speaker to succumb to the caucus’ intermittent cannibalism.








