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      GOP Candidates Split Over Kevin McCarthy’s Ouster as House Speaker

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      The ouster of Representative Kevin McCarthy as House speaker on Tuesday exposed sharp divisions among the Republican presidential field, with at least one candidate saying that the power move by right-wing caucus members had been warranted — but others bemoaned the turmoil, and some stayed silent.Several hours before the House voted to vacate the speakership, former President Donald J. Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that he was fed up with the infighting within the G.O.P.“Why is it that Republicans are always fighting among themselves, why aren’t they fighting the Radical Left Democrats who are destroying our Country?” he wrote.But Mr. Trump did not weigh in directly after Mr. McCarthy was removed from his leadership post.His differences with Mr. McCarthy had been simmering in the open, including over a federal government shutdown that was narrowly averted Saturday when the House passed a continuing resolution to fund the government for another 45 days.Mr. Trump publicly egged on far-right House members to dig in, telling them in an Oct. 24 social media post, “UNLESS YOU GET EVERYTHING, SHUT IT DOWN!” He accused Republican leaders of caving to Democrats during negotiations over the debt ceiling in the spring, saying that they should use the shutdown to advance efforts to close the southern border and to pursue retribution against the Justice Department for its “weaponization.”Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, was the only Republican presidential candidate openly welcoming the discord as of Wednesday morning.“My advice to the people who voted to remove him is own it. Admit it,” he said in a video posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, on Tuesday. “There was no better plan of action of who’s going to fill that speaker role. So was the point to sow chaos? Yes, it was. But the real question to ask, to get to the bottom of it, is whether chaos is really such a bad thing?”Mr. Ramaswamy, who had previously argued that a temporary government shutdown would not go far toward dismantling the “administrative state,” said that the status quo in the House was untenable.“Once in a while, a little chaos isn’t such a bad thing,” he said. “Just ask our founding fathers. That’s what this country is founded on, and I’m not going to apologize for it.”Former Vice President Mike Pence, who is now running against his former boss for the party’s nomination, lamented the revolt against Mr. McCarthy. Speaking at Georgetown University on Tuesday, he said that he was disappointed by the outcome.“Well, let me say that chaos is never America’s friend,” Mr. Pence, a former House member, said.But earlier in his remarks, he downplayed the fissure between Republicans in the House over Mr. McCarthy’s status and fiscal differences. He asserted that a few G.O.P. representatives had aligned themselves with Democrats to create chaos in the chamber, saying that on days like this, “I don’t miss being in Congress.”Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida questioned the motivations of Representative Matt Gaetz, a fellow Floridian who is Mr. McCarthy’s top antagonist in the House. During an appearance on Fox News, Mr. DeSantis suggested that Mr. Gaetz’s rebellion had been driven by political fund-raising.“I think when you’re doing things, you need to be doing it because it’s the right thing to do,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It shouldn’t be done with an eye towards trying to generate lists or trying to generate fund-raising.”Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina also criticized Mr. Gaetz on Tuesday, telling Forbes that his overall approach did “a lot of damage.” Of the efforts to oust Mr. McCarthy, he added: “It’s not helpful. It certainly doesn’t help us focus on the issues that everyday voters care about.”And former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey chimed in Wednesday morning, denouncing the hard-right rebels and expressing concern about the electoral implications. In an appearance on CNBC, he said their actions had given voters “more of a concern about our party being a governing party, and that’s bad for all of us running for president right now.”Mr. Christie said the roots of the chaos lay with Mr. Trump, who he said “set this type of politics in motion.” He also blamed Mr. Trump for the party’s disappointing showing in the midterms, which gave Republicans only a narrow House majority and made it possible for a handful of people like Mr. Gaetz to wield such outsize influence.Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and former United Nations ambassador who has been rising in some polls, appeared to keep silent in the hours after Mr. McCarthy was ousted. A spokeswoman for her campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Nicholas Nehamas More

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      Americans Deserve Better From the House of Representatives

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      This article has been updated to include new information about Mr. McCarthy’s decision not to run for speaker again.The U.S. Capitol may be perched on a hill, but it is understandable why so many Americans look down on it.One of the main reasons is that their Congress, which ought to be a global beacon of liberal values, continues to succumb to self-inflicted paralysis. How else can it be that fewer than a dozen lawmakers from the outer fringes of the Republican Party are holding one of the world’s oldest democracies hostage to their wildest whims?On Tuesday a small group of Republicans effectively shut down all business in the House when they voted to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker. Though 210 of 218 House Republicans supported him, he lost his job when just eight members of the caucus voted against him, joining all Democrats who voted.Without a speaker, the House can get nothing done. There will be no votes or even debate about paying for the government’s operations, though the money runs out in six weeks. There will be no discussion of how to help Ukraine or how to deal with the nation’s immigration crisis or any of the other crises facing Washington.Even before he lost his job, Mr. McCarthy and his caucus lurched the nation from debt limit crisis to shutdown crisis to win debating points that might help them in the next elections rather than pass meaningful legislation that addresses the nation’s challenges. We’re now in the middle of yet another pointless fight, this time over the funding of the federal government and the leadership of the House.Republicans in the House showed briefly, on Saturday, that they were willing to do the right thing and compromise to avoid a shutdown. In the upcoming votes to choose a new speaker, they can and should do that again, by showing their commitment to responsible governance. If Democrats can help achieve that, they should. The next candidates for speaker could win Democratic votes by promising a different course, one that brings both parties together for the common good. Any other candidate for the job will also face the same choice.Voters have given Republicans a majority of seats in the House and thus control over selecting the speaker, who sets the agenda in the House. Those voters, in turn, should expect the body to serve the people who elected them.It’s possible that the Republican Party is finally ready to again choose pragmatism over partisanship. Last weekend Mr. McCarthy sought and received the support of hundreds of Democrats to pass a continuing resolution to fund the federal government, a measure that pushed a potential government shutdown 45 days down the road.It’s hard to get excited about a victory in a fight that never needed to happen, especially at the last possible moment. But the saga reflects the reality of D.C. today: Bipartisan compromise has become the sole path to governing in the United States in 2023.Democrats have the White House and a one-seat majority in the Senate, while Republicans control the House of Representatives and appointed a supermajority of conservatives on the Supreme Court. President Biden’s executive authority extends only as far as the courts have allowed, while the only path through the Senate is with enough bipartisan support to skirt the shoals of a filibuster. The government, like the nation, is divided.But political polarization is not the excuse for inaction that so many grandstanding politicos too often take it to be. With a divided Congress, the only way to get any legislation passed is with some support from the center of both parties. A Congress that operated in a more bipartisan manner could move the country beyond its impasses over issues like immigration or the sustainability of the social safety net. A more confident center-right party that doesn’t genuflect to Donald Trump would have an easier time achieving those ambitious acts of self-governance.While that’s a tall order, it is not impossible: Just look at the past few days.Mr. McCarthy did the right thing on Saturday, outmaneuvering the radicals in his own party, led by Representative Matt Gaetz, to keep the federal government open. The next speaker needs to deprive Mr. Gaetz and his ilk of the weapon they’ve been using to force the House leadership into compliance with their demands. Congress represents more than 330 million Americans; Mr. Gaetz and his allies should not be given a heckler’s veto over the business of government.It was a conscious choice by the ousted speaker of the House to give them one. In the face of intransigence from his right flank, the next speaker should drop the anachronistic practice that demands Republicans bring up only legislation backed by a majority of their members. The so-called Hastert rule, named for Dennis Hastert, the disgraced former speaker, appears nowhere in the Constitution and can be used to prevent the House from moving forward with bipartisan legislation.A new speaker should also commit to plain dealing with Democratic colleagues and may need them to prevent another putsch. Mr. McCarthy lost faith among Democrats by failing to keep his word and honor a deal over spending caps that he negotiated with the White House in May. The next speaker might consider that a good starting point for negotiations.Once a new speaker is chosen, the House will have less than 45 days to avert yet another standoff over a shutdown, and members of good will in both parties will again need to show that they are willing and able to compromise; the Democrats could permit more spending on border security, and Republicans should continue the vital flow of aid to Ukraine, among other issues.The House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said Tuesday that his caucus would “remain willing to find common ground on an enlightened path forward,” one that did not leave the public’s business at the mercy of a few extremists. Whichever leader Republicans now choose should agree to a similar path.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Matt Gaetz Is Polarizing, in Both Congress and His Florida District

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      In an overwhelmingly Republican district, Mr. Gaetz is admired for shaking up the House, but he also has plenty of critics.He is polarizing in Washington and polarizing at home. And in both places these days, he is getting more attention than anyone might expect, given his lack of seniority and thin legislative record.As Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida orchestrated the ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy on Tuesday, constituents in his overwhelmingly Republican district had plenty of thoughts about their congressman’s actions and suddenly robust national profile.“If we got rid of the speaker of the House, hopefully we get someone in there who doesn’t make backdoor deals with Democrats,” said Sandra Atkinson, the chairwoman of the Republican Party of Okaloosa County, adding that Republicans were proud of him for following through on his word.Critics in his district saw a political moment that was about ego and ambition and little more.“He is following through on using chaos as both a performative art — that phrase is overused but it’s true — and because he’s frustrated he’s not getting his own way,” said Phil Ehr, a Democrat who ran against Mr. Gaetz in 2018 and is now running for the U.S. Senate. “In some ways, he’s acting like a petulant child.”Yet for all of his time spent picking fights — and, his critics say, little time crafting legislation — Mr. Gaetz remains broadly popular in his district, a stretch of the western Florida Panhandle, where he won re-election last year by nearly 36 percentage points. His skirmishes in Washington, and a federal investigation that revealed embarrassing details about this private life, have done little to bruise him.Palafox Pier in Pensacola, Fla., on Tuesday. Mr. Gaetz remains broadly popular in his district, a stretch of the western Florida Panhandle where he won re-election last year.Elijah Baylis for The New York Times“There’s a lot of people who like Matt Gaetz,” said Joel Terry May, 67, a local artist, as he showed off a painting in downtown Pensacola to visitors from New Orleans. “He speaks for the people, and he speaks out.”Mr. May, who grew up in Alabama, remembers a time when former Gov. George C. Wallace visited his school back in the 1960s.“People didn’t like George Wallace nationally, but the people who elected him and represented him did,” he said. “That’s what Gaetz also understands. When you represent somebody, you want them to maintain the feel of the people. People want to see Washington work. They want their representatives to have a pulse on the area.”Mr. Gaetz is widely disliked by his peers in Congress but is grudgingly acknowledged to be smart and crafty, and certainly a master of drawing attention to himself. Mr. Gaetz was re-elected last year while under the cloud of an investigation in a federal sex-trafficking case that ultimately resulted in no criminal charges against him. (A congressional ethics review is pending.) Twice, women have been arrested after throwing their drinks at him.Now, his support for a far-right posture that could shut down the federal government — directly affecting many of the people he represents — is unlikely to dent him, his critics acknowledged.“He is loved by the First Congressional District,” said Mark Lombardo, who unsuccessfully challenged Mr. Gaetz in last year’s Republican primary.Mark Lombardo, who unsuccessfully challenged Mr. Gaetz in last year’s Republican primary. campaigning in Pace, Fla., last year. Gregg Pachkowski/Pensacola News Journal/ USA TODAYMr. Lombardo attributed his loss, among other things, to Mr. Gaetz’s family ties — his father, Don Gaetz, is a wealthy and well-known former president of the Florida Senate who on Monday filed to run for the Senate again after stepping down in 2016 — and his devotion to former President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Gaetz is one of Mr. Trump’s closest allies in Congress and has backed him for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination over Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.“He was Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump,” Mr. Lombardo said of the congressman, “and the First District is all about Trump.”No other congressional district in the country has as many military veterans, a group that could have been badly hurt by a shutdown. Yet even his critics concede that Mr. Gaetz remains popular among them.Barry Goodson, 70, a registered Democrat and retired Army veteran who once helped organize people against a plan backed by Mr. Gaetz to privatize some of Northwest Florida’s sandy-white beaches, said he worries his health care providers at the Department of Veterans Affairs would suffer under a shutdown.“I still can’t understand why Gaetz hates negotiating rather than working out something for the people in the district,” he said.“A chaos agent is not good for public policy,” said Samantha Herring, a Democratic national committeewoman in Walton County. “It’s not good for getting highway funds, education and veterans affairs.”And Mr. McCarthy’s ouster left even some fans of Mr. Gaetz with questions about exactly what had been accomplished.“That just makes me support him even more,” said Tim Hudson, 26, a lifelong Pensacola resident, upon learning on Tuesday about the congressman’s successful ouster of Mr. McCarthy.Elijah Baylis for The New York TimesJohn Roberts, chairman of the Escambia County Republican Party, said that Republicans, even those typically sympathetic to Mr. Gaetz’s views on other policies like immigration and the national debt, generally supported keeping Mr. McCarthy as speaker.“It’s not like we’re mad at Matt Gaetz; he’s still a good congressman,” he said. “But I think this was probably the wrong move.”But as the House smoldered and shook, other backers of Mr. Gaetz said they were all in.Tim Hudson, 26, a lifelong Pensacola resident, has voted for Mr. Gaetz. Upon learning on Tuesday about the congressman’s successful ouster of Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Hudson offered only more praise.“That just makes me support him even more,” Mr. Hudson said.He added that the ouster of Mr. McCarthy “speaks to how the world really is right now. We’re tired. We’re fed up. We want to see people start getting things done.”Susan C. Beachy More

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      How Trump Is Complicating McCarthy’s Attempts to Avoid a Shutdown

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      The former president has been publicly pushing a shutdown, but his views are shaped by his own handling of the 2018 shutdown.When a group of House Republicans thwarted Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s attempt at averting a government shutdown, he fumed that he was being stymied by lawmakers who wanted to “burn the whole place down.”But he spared any public ire for the most powerful member of his party who has been encouraging a shutdown: former President Donald J. Trump.“I’d shut down the government if they can’t make an appropriate deal, absolutely,” Mr. Trump said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”On his social media website, Truth Social, Mr. Trump went further, suggesting on Sunday that Republicans should dig in because President Biden, in Mr. Trump’s view, will take the blame.“The Republicans lost big on Debt Ceiling, got NOTHING, and now are worried that they will be blamed for the Budget Shutdown,” he wrote. “Wrong!!! Whoever is President will be blamed, in this case, Crooked (as Hell!) Joe Biden!”Mr. Trump’s view of how shutdowns work was shaped by his own experience as president, when the longest government shutdown in history took place from December 2018 to January 2019. He incurred the public blame for it, as he publicly embraced the idea of a shutdown while holding contentious talks about a budget agreement with two Democratic leaders, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and the House speaker at the time, Nancy Pelosi of California.“I’ll be the one to shut it down,” Mr. Trump told the leaders in a contentious Oval Office meeting in December 2018 shortly before the shutdown. “I will take the mantle. And I will shut it down for border security.”There is no reason to believe that Mr. Biden would be granted outsize blame, if any at all, for a shutdown that a group of Republican holdouts in Congress are encouraging. Mr. McCarthy has privately noted what Mr. Trump said publicly at the time in 2018, according to a person with knowledge of Mr. McCarthy’s comments.In an earlier post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump suggested he believed the shutdown could “defund” the federal investigations he’s facing, although people have told him that such a belief was not likely to become reality, according to a person briefed on the conversation.Mr. Trump’s eagerness to push for chaos has only gone so far, however: The former president has not been calling lawmakers to try to push a shutdown.Yet Mr. McCarthy, whom Mr. Trump supported at the last minute when he ran for speaker, is facing an existential threat to his leadership, with his Republican critics looking to force him from his role amid the calamity of a likely shutdown.Aides to Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Trump declined to comment.People close to both men maintain that the looming government shutdown was not a strain on their relationship, nor was it a sign of a bigger rift. Nonetheless, a person close to Mr. Trump acknowledged that his support for a shutdown was providing encouragement to Mr. McCarthy’s adversaries.Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, a leading supporter of a shutdown, said in an interview that one of Mr. Trump’s posts on social media endorsing a shutdown may have had an influence on some members of Congress.“I think there might have been a few people on the fence who were persuaded by that statement,” Mr. Gaetz said. “I view that as consequential.”Yet Mr. Trump is not being faulted, at least overtly, for his stance. In Congress, some Republicans dismissed the notion that Mr. Trump could do something to push Mr. Gaetz and his allies in the other direction, away from a shutdown.“I think it certainly helps with some of these folks when they hear from the former president, like during the speaker negotiations or the debt ceiling,” said Representative Mike Lawler of New York, a Republican member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus. But he said it was Mr. Gaetz who was “creating a crisis.”A person close to Mr. Trump maintained that the former president did not view the situation in terms of helping Mr. McCarthy, nor did he view the speaker as being especially imperiled. Mr. Trump “doesn’t think Kevin needs rescuing,” the person said. In Mr. Trump’s view, the person said, a government shutdown isn’t a terrible thing so long as it’s not consequential.And there has been another issue at play: Mr. Trump’s bid for the White House.The person close to Mr. Trump insisted the former president had not been frustrated with Mr. McCarthy over his lack of an endorsement in the Republican presidential primary. Yet others who have spoken with Mr. Trump throughout the year said he had raised Mr. McCarthy’s lack of a formal endorsement several times.Mr. McCarthy has all but endorsed Mr. Trump in recent weeks — taking public shots at his chief rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, and talking up Mr. Trump — but he has delayed making it official.Earlier this year, Mr. McCarthy’s reasoning, according to three people with direct knowledge of his thinking, was that he was eventually going to endorse Mr. Trump but needed to hold off for fund-raising purposes. He has said that major donors who are essential to funding House Republican campaigns would cut off funds if he endorsed Mr. Trump and that he needed to raise as much money as possible from donors who do not like the former president before making the decision official, the people with knowledge of his thinking said.Another person in contact with Mr. McCarthy, while not disputing that he expressed those sentiments about fund-raising, said that he was one of the most prolific fund-raisers in the Republican Party, and that he expected to raise money regardless of Mr. Trump.Mr. Trump has also had an eye on expunging his impeachments. He asked Mr. McCarthy and his allies what they’re going to do to clear his impeachments — though it remains unclear whether they have any power to do so. Despite the lack of formal support, Mr. McCarthy has made sure to tend to the relationship with Mr. Trump since he said in a television interview earlier this year that he was uncertain the former president was the strongest nominee in the general election. That comment enraged Mr. Trump, who told his aides he wanted it fixed.More recently, Mr. McCarthy has struck a different note, saying: “President Trump is beating Biden right now in the polls. He’s stronger than he has ever been in this process.” More

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      Tensions Flare on House Floor as Rogers Confronts Gaetz

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      Even by the heated standards of the tensions that flared among House Republicans during their four-day push to elect a speaker, what happened on the House floor around 11 p.m. on Friday stood out.Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, had declined yet again to vote for Representative Kevin McCarthy of California on a 14th ballot, helping sink McCarthy’s chances at speaker that round.With Republican lawmakers growing irritable after days of fruitless voting, a heated argument broke out between several of them. But Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama, a McCarthy ally who is in line to become the next chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, took it to another level when he stepped toward Mr. Gaetz and had to be restrained.The dramatic moment was captured on C-SPAN’s video cameras, which, lacking the typical restraints placed upon them in a House with a speaker, were free to show whatever moments from the floor its operators deemed newsworthy.Mr. Gaetz had emerged as the most outspoken critic of Mr. McCarthy, lambasting him in increasingly vitriolic and personal terms. He had mocked how Mr. McCarthy has “sold shares of himself” for power and called the Californian the “Lebron James of special interest fund-raising.”At the same time, Mr. Gaetz had reportedly sought a subcommittee chairmanship in the House Armed Services Committee.An Associated Press photographer captured the chaotic moment when Representative Richard Hudson, Republican of North Carolina, pulled Mr. Rogers back from confronting Mr. Gaetz.Neither Mr. Gaetz nor a spokeswoman for Mr. Rogers immediately responded to requests for comment.Mr. McCarthy would be elected speaker on the 15th ballot.Mr. McCarthy downplayed the heated conversations that took place after the 14th ballot. “Oh nothing,” he told reporters who asked what happened. “I mean, we ended up with a tie, and he was able to get the others to be able to go present.” More

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      Many Republicans Against McCarthy Sought to Overturn 2020 Election

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      WASHINGTON — They helped lead the efforts to keep former President Donald J. Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election. They refused to certify that President Biden was the rightful winner. They spread lies that helped ignite a mob of Trump supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. On Friday, the two-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack, many of the same hard-right lawmakers who served as top lieutenants to Mr. Trump during the buildup to the assault spent the day blocking the bid of Representative Kevin McCarthy of California to be speaker and extracting major concessions from him. While some had received subpoenas in the Jan. 6 investigations and were later referred to the House Ethics Committee, their power showed they were far from outcasts and had paid little price for their actions. Among the ringleaders in both the effort to block Mr. McCarthy and the push to overturn the 2020 election were Representative Scott Perry, the leader of the far-right Freedom Caucus, and Representatives Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar of Arizona. (On Friday, Mr. Gosar and Mr. Perry swung behind Mr. McCarthy after he caved to their demands to dilute the power of the post he is seeking and to give their faction more sway in the House.)Other hard-right holdouts who for days have refused to vote for Mr. McCarthy were Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Andy Harris of Maryland. All three met with Mr. Trump or White House officials as they discussed how to fight the election results, according to evidence gathered by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.(Mr. Harris flipped his vote to support Mr. McCarthy on Friday afternoon, but Ms. Boebert and Mr. Gaetz remained against him.) Democrats made sure to single out the group.“This January 6th anniversary should serve as a wake-up call to the G.O.P. to reject M.A.G.A. radicalism — which keeps leading to G.O.P. failures,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, wrote on Twitter. “But the pandemonium wrought by House Republicans this week is one more example of how M.A.G.A. radicalism is making it impossible for them to govern.” No one in the hard-right group attended what was billed as a bipartisan ceremony on Capitol Hill to mark the anniversary. Only one Republican of any stripe turned up: Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, a former F.B.I. agent who is the co-chairman of the centrist Problem Solvers Caucus. The ceremony opened with a moment of silence for House members on the steps of the Capitol to honor the Capitol Police officers who died in the year after the attack.“We stand here with our democracy intact because of those officers,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top Democrat in the House, as tears welled up in some House members’ eyes. Witnesses who testified before the House investigative committee, including police officers who defended the Capitol, were honored at the White House, including Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, and Harry Dunn, Caroline Edwards, Aquilino Gonell, and Eugene Goodman of the U.S. Capitol Police. Mr. Perry, who was one of the main architects behind a plan to install Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, as the acting attorney general after he appeared sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s false allegations of widespread voter fraud, said Friday that he fought Mr. McCarthy’s nomination for speaker until he could extract concessions from him to give the House Freedom Caucus and rank-and-file Republicans more influence over leadership. “This place is broken,” Mr. Perry said. “We weren’t going to move from that position until the change is made.” Mr. Biggs, who was still holding out against Mr. McCarthy on Friday afternoon, was involved in a range of organizational efforts in 2020, including meetings aimed at attracting protesters to Washington on Jan. 6, according to the House Jan. 6 committee. Mr. Gosar, who voted against Mr. McCarthy on multiple ballots but changed his vote to support him on Friday, spread numerous lies about the 2020 election and spoke at “Stop the Steal” rallies arranged by Ali Alexander, a prominent organizer. The House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack has referred Mr. Perry and Mr. Biggs to the Ethics Committee for refusing to comply with its subpoenas. Not every Republican involved in blocking Mr. McCarthy’s ascension was among those who voted against certifying Mr. Biden’s victory.Representative Chip Roy of Texas started out as an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Trump’s claims of a stolen election but gradually grew alarmed about the push to invalidate the results and ultimately opposed Mr. Trump’s bid to get Congress to overturn them on Jan. 6, 2021.Mr. Roy, an initial holdout against Mr. McCarthy, led negotiations to try to bring about a deal that would make Mr. McCarthy the speaker in exchange for changes to House rules.“We believe that there ought to be fundamental changes about and limits on spending after the massive bloated omnibus spending bill in December,” Mr. Roy said, referring to the $1.7 trillion government funding package passed by Congress last month. “And so we’ve talked about those. We’ve put a lot of those things in place.” More

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      Does It Matter That Investigators Are Closing In on Trump?

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      Gail Collins: Bret, which do you think is more of a threat to Trump’s political future, the classified document drama at Mar-a-Lago or the legal challenge to his businesses in New York?Bret Stephens: Gail, I suspect the most serious threats to Trump’s future, political or otherwise, are Big Macs and KFC buckets. Otherwise, I fear the various efforts to put the 45th president out of business or in prison make it considerably more likely that he’ll wind up in the White House as the 47th president. How about you?Gail: Sigh. You’re probably right but I’m still sorta hoping New York’s attorney general can hit him in the pocketbook. He’s super vulnerable when it comes to his shady finances — I’m even surprised he can find lawyers who have confidence they’ll keep being paid.Bret: No doubt the Trump Organization was run with the kind of fierce moral and financial rectitude you’d expect if Elizabeth Holmes had been put in charge of Enron. But the essential currency of Trumpism is drama, and what the New York and U.S. attorneys general have done is inject a whole lot more of it into Trump’s accounts.Gail: I don’t think the news that Letitia James accused him of fudging his financial statements will upset the base — they’ve always known this is a guy who responded to the World Trade Center terror attack by bragging that his tower was now the highest building in Lower Manhattan.Bret: A graceless building, by the way, far surpassed by the Chrysler Building, for those who care about architectural rivalries.Gail: Maybe I need to stop obsessing about this and take a look at the rest of the public world. Anything got your attention in particular?Bret: Am I allowed a rant?Gail: Bret, rants are … what we do.Bret: The investigation of Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, which looks like it’s about to fall apart, is an F.B.I. disgrace for the ages. It should force heads to roll. And Congress needs to appoint a Church-style committee or commission to reform the bureau. After the Ted Stevens fiasco, James Comey’s disastrous interventions with Hillary Clinton’s emails, and the bureau misrepresenting facts to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court as part of its investigation of Trump and Russia, something dramatic has to change to save the F.B.I. from continuing to lose public trust.Gail: Are you upset by the investigation or the fact that the investigation is failing?Bret: I’m upset by a longstanding pattern of incompetence tinged by what feels like political bias. I don’t like Gaetz’s politics or persona any more than you do. But what we seem to have here is a high-profile politician being convicted in the court of public opinion of some of the most heinous behavior imaginable — trafficking a minor for sex — until the Justice Department realizes two years late that its case has fallen apart. We have a presumption of innocence in this country because we tend to err the most when we assume the worst about the people we like the least.Gail: Nothing nobler than ranting about a basic moral principle on behalf of a deeply unattractive victim.Bret: He’s the yang to Lauren Boebert’s yin. But no American deserves to be smeared this way.Gail: While we’re on the general subject of crime let’s talk bail reform. Specifically, New York’s new system, under which a judge basically lets out arrestees not accused of violent felonies. New info suggests this may be increasing crime. But I’m sticking with my support for the concept. Suspects who haven’t yet been tried shouldn’t get different treatment based on their ability to come up with bail.Your turn …Bret: New York’s bail reform laws are egregious because we’re now the only state that forbids judges from considering the potential danger of a given suspect. It leads to crazy outcomes, like the guy who tried to stab Representative Lee Zeldin at a campaign stop in July and was released hours later.Another problem is that too many cities effectively decriminalized misdemeanors like shoplifting and have given up prosecuting a lot of felonies, which tends to encourage an anything-goes mentality among the criminally minded. We really need a new approach to crime, of the kind that Joe Biden and Bill Clinton pushed back in the early 1990s, when the Democrats finally determined to be a law-and-order party again.Gail: Biden’s generally held to a middle course that doesn’t drive anybody totally crazy. That’s why he got elected, after all. How would you say he’s doing these days?Bret: I’m giving him full marks on supporting Ukraine. And I know Democrats have this whole “Dark Brandon” thing given Biden’s legislative victories, along with the chance that Democrats might hold the Senate thanks to bad Republican candidates. But I still don’t see things going well. Food prices keep going up-up-up and we’re heading for a bad-bad-bad recession.You?Gail: Going for Not At All Bad. Otherwise known as N.A.A.B.Bret: I’m approaching the point of T.O.T.W.I. T.: The Only Thing Worse Is Trump.Gail: You’re way off.Biden may not have mobilized Congress the way we hoped, but he’s gotten quite a bit done — from funding the ever-popular infrastructure programs to reducing health care costs for the working and middle classes to finally, finally giving the Internal Revenue Service some funds to do its work more efficiently.But he lost you after infrastructure, right?Bret: He’s governed so much further to the left than I would have liked. Change of subject: What governor’s races are you following?Gail: It’s always a lot harder to focus on other states’ governors than the senators but I gotta admit this year I’m hooked on …Well, let’s start with one we’re going to disagree about. I’m guessing there’s no way you could be rooting for Beto O’Rourke in Texas, right?Bret: Ah, no, except as a performance artist. When are Texas Democrats going to nominate a centrist who stands a modest chance of winning a statewide race?What about the New York race? I don’t suppose you could have warm feelings for Lee Zeldin, could you?Gail: Well, to get Zeldin as their gubernatorial nominee, New York Republicans passed up a bid by Rudy’s son Andrew Giuliani, so I’d definitely put Zeldin in the Could Be Worse category.Bret: Hochul’s main achievement to date has been to get taxpayers to put up $850 million for a new Bills stadium in Buffalo. That makes her perfect for Albany, which I don’t mean as a compliment.Gail: Yeah, her Buffalo obsession is pretty irritating. But about Texas — Abbott is one of those Make Everything Worse Republicans, who most recently made the headlines by shipping busloads of migrants to northern cities. A move that did nothing to solve anything, but did help expose what a jerk he is.Really, nothing Beto has ever done is that awful.Bret: That’s because Beto has never done anything.One Democrat I am excited about is Maryland’s Wes Moore, whom I know slightly and impresses me greatly. His book, “The Other Wes Moore,” will soon be required reading the way Barack Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” used to be. And, just to be clear, that’s me saying that Moore could one day be president.Who else?Gail: Your bipartisanship is making me feel guilty. But about the governors — one other guy who fills me with rancor is my ongoing obsession, Ron DeSantis of Florida, who’s terrible in all the ways Abbott is terrible but much worse since he’s already a serious presidential candidate.Bret: And an effective governor who knows how to drive liberals crazy and whose state is attracting thousands of exiles from New York, California and other poorly governed, highly taxed blue states.Gail: Sorry but having empty space to develop and few social services to support doesn’t make you effective, just well positioned.But go on ….Bret: Speaking of DeSantis, how do you think he’d fare in a theoretical matchup against California’s Gavin Newsom?Gail: Oh boy, that’s pretty theoretical. DeSantis worries me because his policies are terrible — cruel and terrible. But he’s an obsessive campaigner with a smart pitch.Have to admit I don’t have much of a feel for Newsom — in general it’s hard to be a national candidate if you’re running as a Democrat from a state that’s very liberal. Liberal for good and historic reasons, but hard to sell to folks in Kansas or North Carolina.Here’s another Republican governor I’ve been mulling — what about Brian Kemp in Georgia?Bret: I’m generally not a fan of Southern Republicans. But Kemp did stand his ground against three election deniers: David Perdue in 2022, Donald Trump in 2020 and Stacey Abrams in 2018.Gail: Kemp is one of those Republicans — like Mike Pence and Liz Cheney — who I admire for their principled stands while realizing I would never vote for them. His abortion position, for instance, is appalling. So he goes in my Honorable But Wrong list.We’re cruising toward the final stage of the Senate campaigns, too, Bret. Let me leave you with the thought that Arizona is looking great for my side and Ohio maybe conceivably possible.Bret: And who’da thunk I’d be rooting for Democrats in both races?Gail: Wow. To be continued.Bret: In the meantime, Gail, I recommend reading Richard Sandomir’s beautiful obituary for two Jewish sisters who survived the Holocaust and passed away a few weeks ago in Alabama, 11 days apart. It’s a nice reminder of how much we all have to live for — and to wish all of our readers, Jewish or otherwise, a good and sweet new year.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More