When Rep.-elect John James (R-Mich.) rose Thursday to nominate Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to be the next Speaker of the House, it announced the long-delayed arrival on the national political scene of a rising GOP figure.
James won election to the House of Representatives in November 2022. It was his first election victory, having lost a 2020 Senate race to incumbent Democratic Sen. Gary Peters and another Senate race in 2018 to incumbent Sen. Debbie Stabenow.
But James impressed political observers in both of his losing campaigns as a dynamic, articulate Black Republican at a time when such leaders were a rarity in the GOP. His 2022 victory against Democrat Carl Marlinga, a former county prosecutor, was close, but it was enough to send the West Point graduate to Congress for the first time.
It wasn’t long after James began his speech for McCarthy that the applause began. After noting that he is only five generations beyond ancestors who were slaves, James described his family.
“My family has gone from slave to right here since 1856. My father and mother were born in the 1940s and 1950s, in the Jim Crow South, and my dad lived directly across the street from a school he couldn’t go to because he was black,” James said.
“He started a business one truck, one trailer, no excuses, with the help of his wife, and now his son stands here on the precipice of taking back the majority for the American people and taking this nation in the right direction,” he said.
Acknowledging his status as a freshman, James drew sustained applause when he then reminded his new House colleagues that “I’ve heard I’m a freshman. I’ve only been here for a couple of days, but I’ve heard a lot of DC politicians tell me about how broken DC is. I don’t need DC politicians to tell me how broken DC is. The American people have already told us how broken DC is by giving Republicans the majority so we can fix this mess.”
James pledged that the new Republican majority in the House “will end the growth of government, and we will stop 87,000 new IRS agents from picking through your pocketbooks. We will secure our energy independence. We will ban the sale of petroleum from our strategic reserves to China [and] we will establish a bipartisan select committee specifically to keep our eye on the ball and China.”
Shortly after James spoke, Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) rose to nominate Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) for Speaker. But before doing so, Bishop looked at James and said “I want to begin by saying how much I have anticipated the gentleman from Michigan’s arrival in this House—not in the Senate, not in the old staid unchanging Senate—but in the House, where we make change.”
Other House members made memorable points during nomination speeches for McCarthy or Donalds. Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) pointed to conservative dissatisfaction with previous speakers and promised that McCarthy will be different.
“I’m proud to stand before my country and say that Kevin McCarthy is different ... He’s not [former Speaker] Paul Ryan [R-Wis]. He’s not going to tell you about you must get a term limits bill and then you vote.
“He’s not Mitch McConnell. He fought against the $1.7 trillion wasteful spending package that was sent to us on New Year’s Eve eve. He’s not [former Speaker] John Boehner [R-Ohio]. He didn’t throw all of you that disagreed with him out on your cans and say ‘I don’t want to hear from you. I don’t want to listen to you.’
“McCarthy welcomes everybody because he’s different, and if we give him the chance to be our speaker, we will all be different. He will be different. This Congress will be different and our country will be different.”
During the interim between the seventh and eighth Speaker votes, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), a steady McCarthy backer, said one of the difficult issues complicating the negotiations between McCarthy and his opponents is the dissidents’ demands for guaranteed seats on congressional committees.
“I think one thing that I’m not on board with is the idea that, you know, you have to guarantee them X number of slots on the appropriations committee or the rules committee. Because I just think that that’s such a bizarre precedent where every faction—whether it’s the moderates, or the whatever caucus—is going to demand what we want for our seats. Then you’ve subverted the steering committee process.”
Gallagher was referring to the steering committees that both parties maintain in the House and Senate that decide in consultation with the leadership which members serve on which committees.
