Former GOP Congressman Says McCarthy Opponents Seeking to Break ‘Same Old, Same Old’ Pattern in Washington

U.S. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) listens to floor proceedings in the House Chamber during the fourth day of elections for Speaker of the House at the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2023 in Washington. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

If the election of Rep. Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker finally does come to pass after thirteen unsuccessful nominations, it will help usher in a new period of “business as usual” in Washington, rendering the Republican Party largely incapable of taking action on the issues of greatest concern to voters, a former GOP lawmaker has told The Epoch Times.

When McCarthy’s nomination came to a vote for the thirteenth time on Friday—which now stands as the longest contest in 164 years—the California Republican gained one additional crossover vote from the holdouts who have opposed him. But even with a new total of 14 crossover votes, he still fell short of the 218 needed.

Ted Yoho, who represented Florida’s 3rd District in the U.S. Congress from 2013 to 2021, believes that while McCarthy has a number of admirable personal traits, he does not command sufficient trust and respect among conservative members of the party to serve as an effective speaker who can advance an agenda on border security, crime, taxes, inflation, and other issues.

Congressman Ted Yoho speaks at an event assessing the results oof the Taiwan elections at the Heritage Foundation in Washington on Jan. 13, 2020. Lynn Lin/Epoch Times

“I like Kevin as a person, but I don’t think he’s the right person. You have to look at the trust factor. If you talk to people privately, they say, ‘I don’t trust Kevin,’” Yoho said, adding that certain of his former constituents in Florida have expressed concerns about what they see as McCarthy’s willingness to campaign against primary candidates who have contributed money to the National Republican Congressional Committee.

“McCarthy came along in 2007, he’s never really done anything outside of politics, and he’s always pushing to be in a leadership role,” Yoho added.

In Yoho’s view the current impasse—in which McCarthy has been nominated but failed thirteen times to win the minimum number of votes—is the continuation of a long-running political battle in which the staunchly conservative Freedom Caucus has undergone demonization by the media and among Democrats in Washington, who view the faction as a coterie of extremists undeserving of increased political sway. Yoho was himself a member of the Freedom Caucus.

McCarthy’s belated agreement to allow an expanded presence of members of the Freedom Caucus on the House Rules Committee was one of the concessions that skeptics of his appointment as speaker had demanded during negotiations that have stretched over nearly the entire week.

The fact that GOP lawmakers have had to wrangle and negotiate and seek to wring concessions out of McCarthy to keep the door open to a beefed-up representation on a House committee is a troubling sign, Yoho believes.

Echoes of a Past Battle

To Yoho, the situation is reminiscent of the start of the 113^th Congress in January 2013, when Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) narrowly won reelection as House speaker over the objections of Yoho and others who did not view him as an effective leader on issues that were of paramount importance then and are still in the headlines today.

“I’d call the current situation a mess that has brewed over a decade or more. The media are focusing on the crisis that’s going on now, and we need to look beyond that. I was in Congress for eight years, and I ran against John Boehner, in my second Congress, for the same reasons. There was no leadership there,” said Yoho.

For all his admirable personal qualities, McCarthy’s willingness to oppose conservative candidates, and to compromise with Democrats, suggest that he is not the ideal candidate to lead the GOP at a time when certain issues have reached crisis point and nothing less than strong decisive action is called for, Yoho believes. Some of the social and political issues are a good deal worse than during the contentious hearings over Boehner’s reelection in 2013, he said.

“Back then, we had something of a semblance of border security. Fast forward to today, and you’ve got open borders, and not just in the southwest, but here in Florida, where we recently had over 3,000 migrants who came in from Cuba, Haiti, and elsewhere, and got picked up,” he said.

Supply chains are still strained nearly three years after the onset of the global pandemic, and U.S. dependence on China for rare earth minerals has barely been addressed, Yoho said. Yet another area that has grown markedly worse since 2013 is the U.S. national debt, which stands at nearly $31.5 trillion and may soon escalate to $33 trillion or higher in the absence of bold political action on Capitol Hill, Yoho argued.

Those in Congress who oppose McCarthy are not being obstreperous for its own sake or trying to get attention, he insisted. Rather, they have the interests of their constituents at heart and are tired of the anemic, comprising approach that the GOP has adopted for so long.

“I guarantee you that for the majority of these people, it’s not for the press, it’s not for the publicity, it’s what their constituents want. They’re standing up for the principles this country was founded on,” he said.

“A lot of the Republicans up there [on the Hill] are not willing to do that, because they don’t want to lose a committee assignment. But if you don’t break the ‘same -old, same-old’ mold, you’ll get the same stuff, and our country can’t tolerate that,” Yoho continued.

The Epoch Times has reached out to McCarthy’s office for comment.