This morning on Inside Politics, CNN’s Manu Raju contended that tactics, not ideology or policy preferences is what doomed Boehner as Speaker of the House:
“He’s a pretty conservative guy on issues like abortion and other matters,” Raju said. “The conservatives did not like how he was not going after the president in the more confrontational way that they wanted. That’s what Kevin McCarthy, who’s probably going to be the next speaker, is going to have to deal with. He’s going to have to show the conservatives he’s ready to fight. That’s going to be a big question for him.”
Our Joel Gehrke reports that conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus aren’t willing to back McCarthy yet:
That raises the specter of negotiations in which the rowdy back-benchers could extract policy commitments from McCarthy — or even try to get him to run on a slate with a leadership candidate of their choosing — in exchange for the votes needed to make him speaker.
If McCarthy refuses to play ball with them, the HFC could deny him a majority of votes on the House floor when the speaker’s election arrives. “No one at this point could possibly have it locked up, at least on the floor,” one conservative Republican tells National Review. “The 40 members of the HFC could scuttle almost anything on the floor.”