California’s Kevin McCarthy could step in as House speaker falls

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California now seems likely to step into the vacancy left by the departing House Speaker John Boehner.

Fifteen years younger than Boehner, and seated right below him in House leadership, McCarthy has been the presumptive heir apparent ever since he took the job. With Boehner’s surprise resignation announcement Friday, McCarthy’s move up could now happen sooner than anyone expected. House Republicans will select the new speaker.

“I don’t think anyone would question that the majority leader, the speaker’s ally and friend, is well positioned to become the next speaker,” Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., said in an interview.

Tellingly, even some of the Republican conservatives whose restiveness helped drive Boehner from office have acknowledged that McCarthy is the front-runner as replacement.

“I certainly think he has the inside track,” Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C. said in an e-mail sent before Boehner’s resignation announcement.

Mulvaney helped found the House Freedom Caucus, whose 30-or-so members have constituted the heart of the perpetually brewing conservative unhappiness over Boehner’s leadership. Conservatives have long complained that Boehner, an Ohio Republican, is not confrontational enough with the White House.

For the 50-year-old McCarthy, an amiable Bakersfield, Calif., native now in his fifth House term, the House speakership would mark the culmination of a relentless political rise powered by personal skills, tactical smarts and a powerful ability to raise money.

Like other leaders, and leadership contenders, from both parties, McCarthy deploys money liberally. His leadership political action committee contributed $1.2 million to GOP candidates during the 2014 election cycle and so far has contributed an additional $510,000 this year. This is second only to Boehner.

As a top recruiter of GOP candidates and a regular visitor to other members’ congressional districts, McCarthy has also established a deep network among the Republican lawmakers who will select their next leader. Since his first House election in 2006, he’s made a habit of poring through the Almanac of American Politics to understand his colleagues and their districts.

“I would put him on the list of people who are competent to be speaker,” said Rep. Tom McClintock, a California Republican who stepped down recently from the House Freedom Caucus.

McClintock was speaking before Boehner’s announcement; at a time, both McClintock and Nunes noted, that McCarthy was adamantly not compaigning for the speaker’s job.

That upward loyalty has differed markedly from his predecessor as majority leader, Eric Cantor of Virginia, whose maneuverings in conflict with Boehner became the stuff of Capitol Hill legend.

McCarthy, formerly House whip, stepped easily into the majority leader’s job after an unknown conservative challenger defeated Cantor in a 2014 Republican primary.

But while McCarthy’s career has accelerated as an indirect result of the maneuverings of staunch conservatives, his voting has tended more toward the establishment wing of the Republican Party.

McCarthy, for instance, opposed a farm bill amendment to eliminate the Agriculture Department’s $200 million-a-year Market Access Program, which helps fund overseas ads and marketing for the likes of the California Prune Board and the California Table Grape Commission.

Critics, on both the right and left, call the program corporate welfare.

The 2013 amendment failed overwhelmingly, but it still showcased the ideological purity-versus-political pragmatism conflict that has complicated GOP leadership. Many of the conservative House Freedom Caucus members who have challenged Boehner were likewise on the opposite side from McCarthy in the MAP-cutting amendment fight.

The son of a firefighter, McCarthy at the age of 21 started a small deli business. As he has since described many times, he sold it to fund his education at California State University, Bakersfield.

McCarthy’s early political mentor was Rep. Bill Thomas of Bakersfield, for whom he interned before winning his first elected office as a trustee of the Kern Community College District.

This story was originally published September 25, 2015 at 12:18 PM with the headline "California’s Kevin McCarthy could step in as House speaker falls."