SPOKANE, Wash. – In an era of heightened partisanship, former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy became the first ever removed by a whole House vote in the middle of a term.
He joins a rarified air of those who lost the Speakership in stunning fashion; a list headlined by the late Tom Foley, a Spokane-area Representative who remains the only Speaker of the House from Washington state. Assuming the role in 1989 towards the end of his 30-year tenure, Foley lost his district in 1994 to a Republican challenger. The seat hasn’t been held by a Democrat since.
Known for bipartisanship and compromise, some say Foley’s tenure served as a stark contrast to his successor, Newt Gingrich.
“(House Minority Leader Bob Michel and Foley) met every week… and they would go over what things they could agree to and what things they would have an argument about. Then they would set the terms for the debate around the argument,” Cornell W. Clayton, director of the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy and Public Service at Washington State University, said. “(Gingrich’s) mission was to do away with bipartisanship, which he thought had kept the Republicans in the minority for so long.”
While the McCarthy move may be unprecedented, the ousting follows a trend of House party leaders being successfully challenged by the outward edges of the political spectrum.
“When the parties polarize… those who are left in the middle are stranded,” Clayton said. “If you look at what’s happened over the past twenty years – it begins with Newt Gingrich, who himself (was) deposed as Speaker by a very conservative faction of his own party back in 1999. The next (Republican) speaker was John Boehner, who was ousted by the Tea Party faction of the Republican party in 2015.”
On the other end of the spectrum, Former Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley, who was seen as a serious candidate for Speaker, lost the primary race for his seat to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018.
Clayton attributes this shift towards polarized parties started with a cultural shift in the 1960s, accelerated after Foley left in the mid-1990s.
“We were a deeply divided country in the 1960s and the Baby Boomers grew up in that period. I think they came to see politics in much more moralistic terms than the Greatest Generation (and) the Silent Generation did, who were much more pragmatic in the way they thought about politics,” Clayton said. “(Gingrich) started to talk about the parties in moralistic terms. He told his members, ‘Whenever you refer to the Republican party, talk about patriotism, truth and morality. Whenever you talk about the other party, talk about them as they can’t be trusted, they’re unpatriotic and they don’t love our country.’”
Even in today’s age of hyper-partisanship, Clayton believes Foley would’ve been taken aback today.
“Over 200 Republicans voted to retain him as the Speaker and it took only eight to oust (McCarthy) from the Speakership,” Clayton said. “I think that would’ve amazed Tom Foley and I think he would’ve found that very disheartening. That you can have that kind of a radical faction exercise such power.”
