WASHINGTON (AP) — When Rep. Kevin McCarthy emerged from a messy 15-ballot election and ascended to House speaker, he was emboldened rather than chastened by the fight, declaring that his father taught him early on in life: “It’s not how you start; it’s how you finish.”
But as the embattled Republican leader from California rounds the first 100 days at the helm of a slim House Republican majority, it is proving hard to shake off the spectacle of the unsteady launch that has become a defining backbeat to McCarthy’s speakership.
So far, McCarthy has logged surprise successes in the new Congress: The Republican House has passed dozens of bills, many of them bipartisan, including politically potent efforts targeting crime and the COVID-19 pandemic that left President Joe Biden almost no choice but to sign the bills into law.
McCarthy has opened the Capitol more fully to visitors, relishing the onlookers who stop to snap selfies during his impromptu hallway news conferences. He hosted his first foreign leader, President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan, with a diplomatic flourish, leading a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers standing up to China.
On Monday, McCarthy will deliver a speech at the New York Stock Exchange, another sign of his rising influence.
And yet.
It’s 100 days into the new Congress, and McCarthy’s speakership is what one senior congressional Democratic aide compared to the spotlight on the theater stage, with the audience waiting for the play to begin and then suddenly, the realization there is no script.
McCarthy is performing the role as speaker — second in line to the presidency — but the Republican leader allied with Donald Trump remains stubbornly limited in action because of his uneasy grip on the gavel. Any single lawmaker is able to call for a vote to oust the speaker from office.
As such, McCarthy has been unable to steer House Republicans to start delivering on broader pursuits — the GOP promises for border security or budget cuts to prevent a debt ceiling crisis, for starters. How he handles them will be the defining challenge that makes or breaks his next 100 days.
“This is where McCarthy finds himself,” said Jeffery A. Jenkins, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California who has written about House speakers.
“The power of any single speakership is endogenous,” he said. “This Congress, McCarthy will always have little wiggle room. He will have to walk a tightrope.”
In many ways, it was…