Republicans Start the New Year With a Gift to Donald Trump

A last-ditch effort by Kevin McCarthy to save his flailing bid to lead the House could be a gift to Donald Trump, whose fate over his role in the January 6 Capitol riot rests in the hands of the incoming GOP majority.

In a series of calls with Republican colleagues over the weekend, McCarthy—the House minority leader and top candidate for House speaker—sought to broker a deal with far-right members of his party who remain on the fence about his taking the job and likely threaten his ability to garner the votes he needs.

According to accounts of the calls detailed by Congress and members of the press, McCarthy offered to change a number of House rules, including one that would allow a sitting speaker of the House to be replaced with just five members' votes, among other concessions to his party's hard-liners.

McCarthy's campaign to become speaker also includes an offer to reinstate a House procedural statute known as the Holman Rule, a more than century-old provision that allowed members to run amendments to spending packages to reduce the salaries of or fire specific federal employees, or even cut specific programs from the budget.

Though the provision has been largely defunct since its abolition from the House rules in 1983, several GOP members on the fence about having McCarthy as speaker—including the House Freedom Caucus—have already suggested they want it reinstated as they prepare to begin scrutiny of several Biden administration agencies it opposes, including the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Newsweek has contacted McCarthy's office for comment.

McCarthy has already indicated he would honor requests by far-right members of his conference, like Georgia's Marjorie Taylor Greene and Colorado's Lauren Boebert, to investigate Biden administration officials like Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for their handling of the immigration crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.

But their list also includes top law enforcement figures like FBI Director Christopher Wray, who is leading an investigation into Trump's illegal removal of classified documents after departing the White House. Some Republican members of the House have even gone so far as to suggest that Congress move to defund the FBI, which they—and Trump—believe is politically motivated to retaliate against the former president over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Measures like that—as well as a suggestion by one of McCarthy's challengers for the speaker post, Arizona Representative Andy Biggs, to defund parts of the Justice Department using the Holman Rule—would have obvious implications for the agency's ongoing investigations into Trump's actions in connection with the January 6 riot. As a result, Democratic-led efforts to see the former president tried for crimes he may have committed during and after his time in office could be jeopardized.

"Republicans could also attempt to defund any investigations into Trump, or even defund probes and prosecutions relating to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack," Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent wrote in an August 2022 column on the Holman Rule's reinstatement. "They could do this without the more improbable act of defunding the whole FBI."

But it's also an open question whether that would actually happen. Any amendments House Republicans run would still need to get approval from the Democratic-controlled Senate, meaning any showdown to defund investigations into Trump could result in long, arduous stalemates in Congress over federal spending packages.

Meanwhile, McCarthy's public attempts at whipping up support for his speakership bid have been largely unsuccessful. While he proposed introducing language in the rules that would make his removal from the post easier, it was soundly rejected by his opponents, for whom a McCarthy speakership is nonnegotiable.

"The times call for radical departure from the status quo—not a continuation of past, and ongoing, Republican failures," a joint January 1 letter signed by nine members of the House Freedom Caucus read.

"For someone with a 14-year presence in senior House Republican leadership, Mr. McCarthy bears squarely the burden to correct the dysfunction he now explicitly admits across that long tenure," the letter said.