Inside the Club for Growth’s Push for Kevin McCarthy

A deal that helped revive his flailing speakership bid could reshape down-ballot races in 2024.

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Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy takes the gavel after securing the speakership on the 15th ballot on Saturday. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

On January 2 the anti-establishment Club for Growth issued a “key vote alert.” The notice urged Republican representatives to support a candidate for House speaker who would push for “transformational reforms to the House” and “restore the individual rights and powers of the rank-and-file membership.” The implication was clear: Don’t support Kevin McCarthy’s bid for speaker unless he agrees to a bevy of changes to House rules. 

Two days into McCarthy’s protracted battle for the top job in the House, the Club for Growth endorsed his bid. McCarthy had signaled he would consider many of the rules changes and also cut another deal: The Club would support him so long as the McCarthy-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF) stopped spending in open Republican primaries in “safe” congressional districts or financially support any other groups that choose to do so. 

The deal proved pivotal to winning over 20 Republican holdouts, many of whom McCarthy-aligned donors earlier had opposed in GOP primaries. The pledge was also a blatant power play from the Club for Growth, as it could result in more Freedom Caucus-style candidates making it through Republican primaries and into the House—further weakening McCarthy’s hand in future negotiations with his own party. 

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  1. Avatar photo
    Chevesl

    Chip Roy is a fraud. He plays like he’s not one of the nutjobs yet always somehow seems to side with them. Weird.

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  2. Jfan

    I can't keep track of what sides these people are on. I understand "liberal" and "conservative." I even understand RINO usually. But for the last six years Republican politicians have paid less and less attention to issues. When support for the most liberal Republican presidential candidate in history -- Trump -- becomes the test for how conservative a politician is, what exactly are they fighting over?

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      Chevesl

      Exactly. “Conservative” mostly seems to mean “nihilistic.” 1) Burn things down, 2) _______?, 3) ______? This moment in “conservatism” is unrecognizable to me.

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        Jeff Younger

        Seems to me that a number of traditional “conservative” positions - free trade, fiscal responsibility, respect for the Constitution and the rule of law - have taken a real beating since 2016 and the emergence of what I would term the “lunatic fringe” of the Freedom Caucus. If Trump’s a conservative, I’m a duckbilled platypus.

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  3. Stormer93

    Remember when Pat Toomey was president of the Club for Growth? Back in the days when the name of the organization could be taken literally and wasn't just another fringe MAGA group...

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      Jeff Younger

      And I think that’s a problem for a lot of organizations on the right. CPAC used to be a respectable forum for conservatives, while now it seems to be a circus that awards prizes to the craziest nutburger in attendance, judged by the degree they “own the libs” in their CPAC speech. The Trump rot will remain longer than Trump I’m afraid. I just hope it has stopped spreading.

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    Xsearnold

    "That poses a problem for the newly elected speaker now that there’s an emerging split between the anti-establishment groups that make up the MAGA coalition and the Republican groups aligned with McCarthy, who served as House minority leader under former GOP Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan and who has essentially become synonymous with the establishment."

    Sorry, how did McCarthy serve as House MINORITY leader under GOP Speakers?

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      Audrey Fahlberg vertical-nib Author

      Thanks for flagging. Corrected. It happens!

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        Xsearnold

        No problem. Given the person we’re talking about, he’s definitely a “minor” leader regardless of who is in the majority!

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    Portland Isaiah

    Very informative article. Thanks!

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  6. Avatar photo
    George.Skinner

    Those safe red districts are the only place where the MAGA Republicans didn't get the snot beaten out of them in 2022, so I can understand why they're trying to protect themselves from primary challenges. Maintaining control of those strongholds also gives them leverage in the event that centrist Republicans suffer losses in upcoming elections, which is why moderate Democrats were proactively trying to keep progressives from getting nominated in safe D seats in the run-up to 2022. The non-crazy party members are the ones who usually win the competitive races, and then they're the ones who suffer disproportionately for the excesses of the crazies. Why leave the lunatics running the asylum?

    The one twist I can think of is that McCarthy doesn't really have any binding obligation to keep his word. I haven't heard anybody accuse him of being a man of honor, so what happens if he launches a big press to primary the people who gave him a hard time last week? They're going to call for a motion to vacate? How are they going to pass it if Democrats aren't on side? I think the Freedom Party rebels had their point of maximum leverage last week, and the moment has passed. They've got 6, perhaps up to 20 members who can stymie McCarthy. It isn't going to be hard for McCarthy to pick up more votes from Democrats on any of the more important issues like the debt ceiling.

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    Earl King

    As the GOP moves further and further away from Donald Trump the MAGA types will naturally sound more moderate. As long as they don’t talk about Jewish Space Lasers shooting down Santa. Still, any talk of cutting Social Security and Medicare will be problematic.
    This is a number to pay attention to. 40.2% according to Google of recipients depend on SS for their sole income. I have a sister in law who is one of them. The American public will not want those people to be even poorer. For extreme low income workers a special benefit was established to give them a little more money. About $950 a month. Not sure about any of you but who can live on just that? Certainly not in NJ.
    However in my state (NJ), they can get rental assistance, help with energy bills, SNAP payments, Medicaid etc.
    Still, cutting that will give Democrats the talking points they’ll need to paint extreme MAGA types has heartless Grinch’s and frankly they would be right.

    In order to prevent SS and Medicare from being a campaign cudgel my recommendation is put SS and Medicare in the hands of a Commission in stead of Congress. Allowing them to set a national sales tax rate that pays for both programs. This would relieve employers and employees from funding. Relieve Congress of looking like feckless idiots. I am not talking about making some efficiencies. Medical costs go up every single year and rationing would be very difficult. We already have rationing. New Medications are often excluded. New surgical procedures and tests are withheld...Generally, the medicine you get approved is older and proven. Not new and expensive. I digress.
    MAGA election deniers died in the last election. the Club for Growth is looking for extremists of the type we see with climate activists on the Democrat side. I am sympathetic but politics is not practiced in a vacuum. Cutting these two popular programs will lead to sold GOP loses. Inflation is brutal on those who only have SS. Concurrently replacing the mandatory SS payments with a mandatory savings plan would make better sense. In this way you could craft SS for future recipients as what is was intended. Supplemental income. Not sole income.

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    1. Libertyforallusa2

      It isn't the MAGA side that wants to reform entitlements. Donald Trump explicitly ran on not touching any entitlements.

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        Earl King

        Somehow you have to get people to talk and figure out the fix to SS. SS is not an optimal program in that it is dependent on people working now to pay for the people who are benefiting from it. It was dependent in the past in that you have more workers putting in to the program than taking out. Hell my 98 year old mother is still getting benefits. I started last July. People living longer, we are curing disease and the number of workers to recipients has falling dramatically.

        You have only two choices. Well three actually. 1) Do nothing, continue with bigger deficits, borrow the money and pay benefits with borrowed money. 2) Cut benefits 3) Reform it. Higher taxes, adjust the age, means test it, remove the SS cap blah blah blah.
        In reforming it, I have suggested that we remove SS from Congress. (They are too broken). Fund it a good chunk of it with a national sales tax of 1% or 2%. I am hoping that then it will free up some of current SS taxes to be invested in workers IRA or Roth. You obviously start this with considerably younger workers. Over a 40 to 50 year work life, markets go up. Canada has its national pension fund in a fund that is invested. Other countries have sovereign funds. There is no gettin around it. SS either has to raise more money or cut benefits.

        Think about the future....robotics are coming. We are going to have a big problem with people working consistently over their work life. The government is going to have to support people. Right now the Governor of CA is eliminating gas powered vehicles in 2035. A blink away. What are you going to do with the entire industry in CA that supports gas powered vehicles? Mechanics, parts manufacturers, oil and gas workers, gas stations....Millions of workers that will have to find new jobs. We'll have shortages of those workers as the transition will take time. Dislocation, early retirements. It is going to be a mess. Buggy manufacturers went out of business as did stables and saddle makers. Some probably adjusted other probably didn’t but it was a real small workforce.

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    2. Emma

      Millennials can't afford higher taxes to fund these programs we will never see and pay our loans. The solution can't be to tax us to death while labeling us as lazy and entitled.

      Tax the babyboomers. They created this financial mess.

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        Earl King

        Americans addiction to Federal Programs they want tax is the issue. Boomers, Gen X’ers, the Greatest Generation......everybody causes it with their stupid inane tribal politics. Oh have the millionaires and billionaires pay for it....Or if you suggest cuts to the growth of programs one side says you are throwing granny off a cliff. Killing women and children.
        End the stupid tribal politics and things will be done.

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    3. MathewA

      The cut to SS should be raising the retirement age and indexing it to life expectancy. Combine that with raising the payroll tax rate and you get most of the way there I think,

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        Earl King

        That discounts the type of work some people do. Someone doing construction will likely not make it to retirement age. Farm laborer, trying bending over and picking strawberries for a few years...I guarantee you’ll be crippled. I don’t think people want to raise the actual rate. It is inflationary, hard on businesses. Until you have been a small business owner it is hard to understand how much payroll taxes cost business. Sometimes you can pass along those costs, sometimes not. Depends on the business and price sensitivity. We pay in roughly between the person and the business roughly 2/3r'ds of the benefit we receive. Medicare is way worse, only about 1/3r’d. Some have said just remove the cap. All that does is raise the benefit unless you’re going to do that a cap the benefit. Something I think people would fight.
        We have spent years arguing over tax cuts suggesting the rich can pay for everything. Not really. Until this country becomes afraid of our debt our feckless politicians will not do the hard work.

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  8. DavidWG

    CLF should be known as the Non-Aggression PAC.

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    Barry Alexander

    "Club for Growth?" More like "Club to Elect Democrats."

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  10. Emma

    All that money wasted on a group of baboons....

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