MADISON, Wis. — When new legislators are sworn into the new Congress on Tuesday, they will also have to pick a new speaker to lead them since Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives.
That vote however, poses an issue for the frontrunner — current Republican leader U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California — who is short just a few key votes that would give him the needed majority.
“McCarthy has a very slim margin of error here,” said UW-La Crosse political scientist Anthony Chergosky.
He chalks part of that slim margin up to just the issue of math. Republicans took back the House, but underperformed across the country this November.
“House Republicans thought they would add 20 to 30 members, they did not even get close to that and that left them with a majority but a very narrow majority,” Chergosky said.
Even if Republicans had a larger majority, the factions within the party could still have been a problem for McCarthy.
“You have some Republicans who say, ‘look, let’s just do what it takes to keep the lights on,’” Chergosky said. “You have other Republicans who say, ‘no, no, no, let’s play hardball with Joe Biden.’”
Trying to pull together disparate factions reminded Chergosky of another recent Republican speaker, Wisconsin’s own Paul Ryan.
“I think Kevin McCarthy is experiencing exactly what Paul Ryan faced when he was the Speaker of the House,” he said. “Having watched Paul Ryan’s struggle to unify the Republican Party, as the Speaker of the House, I am not surprised that Kevin McCarthy is facing these difficulties because the Republican Party has not really changed since Paul Ryan was speaker.”
Chergosky said though that the dissent among the Republican ranks may be unwelcome chaos for the party.
“We are in a situation that we haven’t been in for decades, we don’t know how this speaker vote is going to turn out,” he said. “There is genuine uncertainty surrounding the speaker’s vote tomorrow.”
Where do Wisconsin Republicans stand?
So far all of Wisconsin’s House Republicans have indicated in some way that they want to see McCarthy take the speaker’s gavel.
Tuesday’s swearing in includes freshman legislator Derrick Van Orden, who replaced retiring Ron Kind in Wisconsin’s western 3rd Congressional District and flipped the seat for Republicans for the first time in decades.
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