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As I write this Thursday morning, there is no telling how all of the drama in the U.S. House of Representatives will play out. But western Pennsylvania’s own Mike Kelly already has proven to be one of the more interesting members of the supporting cast.
The House has been in limbo since early this month, when a clutch of GOP hardliners joined with Democrats to remove Kevin McCarthy as speaker. Since then, Republicans have failed repeatedly to find a replacement, first with GOP majority leader Steve Scalise and then with Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan.
Kelly is the only Pennsylvania Republican to have voted against Jordan after the two times he’s been nominated (so far!), first by backing Scalise and then by choosing former speaker John Boehner, the famously weepy merlot connoisseur who left the House amid an earlier wave of intraparty fratricides.
Kelly was also out of the gate quickly with a resolution that would give Patrick McHenry — who has been presiding as a fill-in over votes for a permanent speaker — additional ability to move other legislation while the GOP grapples with a permanent fix.
Those moves have brought some unaccustomed national attention to Kelly, who is not generally known as a political maverick. Indeed, he stressed that his vote for Scalise — whose bid for the speaker’s gavel was torpedoed by a small number of Republican dissenters — was actually an act of loyalty to the party.
“Steve Scalise received the most votes among House Republicans when we voted internally last week, and I believe he deserves a full vote on the House floor before we proceed to another candidate,” Kelly said in a statement. At stake in the matter, he said, was “the integrity of the House Republican Conference."
That sound you just heard was every Democrat who read this scoffing, “Oh, now you’ve found an election you want to protect from Jim Jordan?” Jordan, after all, was an active abettor of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential race.
To be sure, even if Kelly sticks by his guns here, he’s not likely to become some sort of moderate squish. This is still the guy who proposed a nationwide law sharply limiting abortion access, after all. And Kelly said his vote was not a criticism of Jordan, who Kelly praised for doing “a great job of investigating the Biden Crime Family” as Judiciary Committee chair.
But Democrats, like some Republicans, have shown at least some interest in talking about expanding McHenry’s role as speaker pro tem. Kelly’s Democratic Congressional neighbor from outside Pittsburgh, Chris Deluzio, seemed willing to consider the approach.
Deluzio previously told me that the best hope for a functioning House is a bipartisan coalition, in which a handful of more moderate Republicans join Democrats to find a consensus choice for speaker. But he acknowledged that wouldn’t be easy.
“I just don’t think any person can overcome the dysfunction in the Republican conference at the moment. It’s their civil war that we are all living through,” he told me a few days ago. Still, he said, “I will do what I can to make this country succeed.”
Kelly’s vote for Boehner was a nod to a man who endorsed the proposal to temporarily expand McHenry’s powers. But already some GOP hardliners are panning the proposal. And there is something elegiac about Kelly’s voting for Boehner, who bitterly opposed the outrage-industrial complex that drove him out of power nearly a decade ago. Especially because it still seems to be driving the party.
As Kelly himself told The Hill about this month’s leadership dispute, “I’m 75 years old. I’ve watched my entire life how things work. This is what tears teams apart.”
He may well be right, but part of his team’s problem is that the cheerleaders in conservative media and many of the folks in the stands seem as interested in burning down the field as anything else. Boehner once criticized Jordan for being primarily interested in “tearing things apart [while] never putting anything together” … but that doesn’t seem to hurt Jordan’s standing with many in the base.
Right-wing commentator Dana Loesch called Kelly a “moron” after his Boehner vote, for example. Local conservative activists are circulating emails calling it “a clown vote,” while national GOP activist Scott Presler, who has been spearheading efforts to increase Republican registration and turnout in western Pennsylvania, warned Kelly that voters “are irate that you didn’t vote for Jim Jordan. … You still have time to fix this.”
As a recent Politico story — and a number of other accounts from the Capitol — observed, “There is no longer a cohesive Republican Party. There’s a pre-Trump GOP and a post-Trump GOP.”
Kelly was among Trump’s earliest supporters in Congress, so arguably he bears some responsibility for the resulting dysfunction. But it also makes his decision not to back Jordan — who Trump endorsed for speaker — all the more notable. Compare it to that of fellow Republican legislator Guy Reschenthaler, who quickly backed Jordan. (And raised some eyebrows by touting Jordan’s history with Ohio State University’s wrestling program, where Jordan has been accused of turning a blind eye to the sexual abuse of athletes.)
But Kelly had a political career before Trump, too. He was first elected to Congress in the 2010 Tea Party wave. Since then, he’s never been much of a conservative media celebrity. Also, unlike Reschenthaler, who is seeking to become the GOP’s whip, he also isn’t a contender for leadership. He’s nothing if not a team player.
So maybe it makes sense for someone like him to try pointing a way out of the Republican impasse, at least for now. But while everyone’s attention is focused on who the party’s leading man in the House will be, perhaps what’s really at stake for Republicans is whether anyone can play a conciliatory role in today’s GOP.
