House GOP has 72 hours to pick speaker or face disaster: Advisers

Key GOP advisers are pressing House Republicans to choose a new speaker and fast or face a political and public relations disaster that could upend expectations of a winning 2024 election.

Following the ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) by a tiny and angry minority led by Republican rebel Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), what’s left of the House GOP Caucus leadership was flooded with calls for unity and a swift election of a replacement.

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“They’ve got 72 hours,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican adviser and former spokesman to the last House speaker elected during a crisis, Illinois Rep. Dennis Hastert.

“If they are lost in the mix, if they’re lost in negotiations over internal conference matters for weeks, they will hemorrhage. They’re going to be just shelled in the media. So they have to figure this out. They have to have a new speaker I’d say within 72 hours,” he said.

Political historian Craig Shirley agreed and added that Gaetz and his band of eight haven’t clearly identified why they wanted to oust McCarthy.

“Gaetz is already getting pummeled. He has not laid the groundwork and has not thought this out. Nobody knows why he did it. Was it spending? Was it personal? Was it to get even with McCarthy?” he said.

Shirley added, “This move by Matt Gaetz makes Custer’s last stand look like a sound military maneuver.”

While the ouster pleased the party’s far right, both Bonjean and Shirley, who has written several biographies of former President Ronald Reagan and one of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, decried the timing and said the party needs to rally around a new choice so that it can focus on President Joe Biden and the 2024 election.

“There is a season for politics, for everything,” Shirley said. “This is not the season for Republicans to communicate to the world their division. With Biden at 35% approval and the border out of control in the economy bad — the stock market lost another 450 points today — they should be hanging this on Biden,” he said, adding, “We should be hanging Biden in effigy over what he’s doing to the economy, what he’s doing to this country. Instead, we’re squabbling among ourselves.”

Added Bonjean, the co-founder of ROKK Solutions, a bipartisan communications firm in Washington, the ouster makes the House GOP look unfocused.

“It’s embarrassing because House Republicans do not look like they have their act together when it comes to leading a majority,” he said.

What’s more, he added, the solution isn’t “Speaker” Gaetz, though he said that the lawmaker is currently the “illegitimate speaker” and most powerful member of the Republican House caucus. “Right now, he is the one in control. He’s shown the House Republican majority that he is in control. They have to figure out a way to take that control away from him,” Bonjean said.

To build unity and land a quality speaker, he said that the House is going to have to kill the procedural move that allowed for the removal of McCarthy.

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“The next House Republican that is put forward to be speaker of the House will need to have reassurances from the conference that they’re not going to be ousted on a whim. So they’re going to have to get rid of that ‘motion to vacate’ in order to actually attract quality leadership. And the challenge is that those eight members of Congress that voted against McCarthy aren’t going to want to change the rules because it put them in a real powerful position,” Bonjean said.

“So that’s where the rubber meets the road. How can you attract to leadership talent to take Republicans forward if you have a guillotine over them?” Bonjean said.