How to Haggle your Way to the Speakership

Winning majorities. Keeping majorities. Choosing leaders. These are among the core tasks of political parties in Congress – and, for House Republicans, they have been increasingly hard to do. Such is the theme of John Leganski’s short and compelling new book, Glory, Grief, and the Gavel: An Inside Guide to Running for Speaker of the House.

A one-time top aide to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Leganski begins his story as a McCarthy intern, explaining how he rose in the ranks of the congressman’s leadership office. While itself an interesting story, the heart of the book is a narrative of how the California congressman fought to get elected Speaker in January 2023 over the resistance of roughly two dozen members of his party. McCarthy was ultimately successful, but only after fifteen ballots were cast, more than in any Speaker election since the 19^th century.

The book is full of details about that battle, as well as fascinating descriptions of what it’s like to work for a party leader in Congress.1 Leganski also provides what I found to be valuable insights into the nature of House GOP politics and the process of getting elected leader of the Conference. These include:

• Leadership positions are less secure than they once were. Leganski often refers to what he calls “the curse” – the inability of majority party leaders to keep their jobs or move up the leadership ladder. This has been true of congressional leadership more generally since the late 1980s, for a variety of reasons.2 But as Leganski makes clear, the current House GOP suffers from the “curse” in part because it has many members who, whether because of temperament, hope for strategic gain, or a desire for public attention, are willing to make their party’s leaders much more vulnerable.

• Opposition to leadership candidates can be more than just ideological. McCarthy opponents were not merely conservative. The House Freedom Caucus (HFC), which made up the bulk of Republicans who opposed his bid for speaker, was, according to Leganski, more like a third party whose commitment to the GOP was thin. The Caucus was an “emotionally fragile” collection of “nerds,” he writes, and McCarthy believed that HFC members who withheld their votes for him “just wan[ed] to fight” for the sake of doing so. Needless to say, getting the support of such lawmakers in a bid for leadership can be quite hard.

  Furthermore, the ringleader of the resistance was not even from the Caucus, nor the most conservative Republican in the House. It was Matt Gaetz (R-FL), to whom Leganski attributes most of the blame for McCarthy’s struggle to be elected Speaker. Though Gaetz was unique in many ways, other lawmakers face some of the same incentives to be difficult that he did.3

• There are some tried and true methods of running for a leadership position. Doug Harris and I have written about some of these, but I did not know before reading Glory, Grief, and the Gavel that the GOP has a “closely guarded playbook” that offers candidates helpful advice, like shore up your commitments quickly and count votes very carefully. Confirming what Doug and I (and others) have written, Leganski argues that winning a leadership race means focusing “almost exclusively” on “member-to-member connection(s)” rather than the “outside game” of endorsements and media interviews.

• …but leadership candidates may try other tactics too. For example, both opponents and proponents of McCarthy sometimes did play an “outside game” and use media appearances to make their case. McCarthy also worked hard to score the endorsement of groups and individuals like the Club for Growth, Tucker Carlson, and especially Donald Trump, whom he thought could persuade Republicans who were on the fence. In addition, Leganski cites several examples where speeches to other lawmakers – the value of which political scientists tend to discount – swayed votes for Speaker.4

• Charisma and deal-making matter. Leganski identifies two strengths that McCarthy had as a candidate for speaker: he was persuasive in one-on-one interactions, and he was able to win over some opponents by giving them leadership posts (what Tip O’Neill biographer John Farrell called the “politics of inclusion”). McCarthy’s team was also savvy about finding opponents whom they could work with, such as Chip Roy (R-TX) and Byron Donalds (R-FL), to circumvent intractable adversaries like Gaetz.

• …but one should be careful about the deals made to win election. For instance, McCarthy gave some opponents seats on the powerful agenda-setting Rules Committee, reasoning – correctly, I think – that those lawmakers would give the speaker an early indication of party divisions over bills before they came to the House floor. But it also led to a major increase in the number of conservative amendments to bills, using up floor time on measures that usually failed and that probably gave Republicans few electoral benefits.

  McCarthy’s biggest mistake, in retrospect, was to change the House rules so that the so-called “motion to vacate” could be brought to the floor by a single member. Matt Gaetz used that motion to end McCarthy’s speakership after just ten months, and the fact that it was Gaetz who pushed harder than anyone for the rule change was, in retrospect, a huge tell. (To be fair, I was one of those who did not think that making it easier to force a motion to vacate was as big a deal as giving up seats on the Rules Committee.)

These are just a sample of the many insights provided by Leganski’s lively and readable book. I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to better understand why the House GOP can be an unruly, occasionally dysfunctional party that struggles to choose and keep its leaders.

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