House Speaker John Boehner’s decision to resign makes a Californian with fans in Silicon Valley the odds-on favorite to take his leadership post.
House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, has shown boundless ambition and enjoyed a meteoric rise since his election to the Assembly in 2002 and to the House in 2006. Now 50, he could be a few weeks away from becoming the most powerful lawmaker in the land and second in the line of succession to the Oval Office behind Vice President Joe Biden.
Serving only his fifth term, McCarthy would be the least experienced speaker in more than a century. It’s a “House of Cards” rise worthy of Frank Underwood, a role for which McCarthy famously helped actor Kevin Spacey prepare.
Though representing a solidly Republican, largely agricultural district hundreds of miles away, McCarthy has talked often about Silicon Valley’s huge potential as an economic driver and political force. And he has earned a reputation for being curious about new technology and responsive to the tech sector’s needs.
Carl Guardino, president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, calls him a longtime friend and an established political partner. As he often does, Guardino next week will shepherd a flock of local CEOs to Washington, D.C., to have lunch with McCarthy and other GOP House members.
If McCarthy becomes speaker, it would be “a significant positive step for Silicon Valley,” Guardino said Friday, adding that McCarthy’s positions on patent reform, tax policy, cybersecurity and immigration reform for highly skilled workers “are all close to, if not in alignment with, what’s best for America’s innovation economy.”
“What’s core with Kevin is that he will not always agree with us, but he always seeks us out to hear us,” Guardino said. “It’s not that he takes our calls — he dials our numbers.”
Boehner often struggled to keep the fractious Republican caucus together as tea party conservatives urged more militant tactics than the relatively moderate GOP wing with which Boehner had affinity.
Bridging that divide will also be a challenge for McCarthy, although he has worked hard to build bonds with the tea party wing without actually joining it.
House conservatives have held internal talks about a new leadership coalition with McCarthy as speaker and more conservative members occupying lower rungs on the leadership ladder, the Hill newspaper reported earlier this month.
McCarthy already sounds ready. His statement on Boehner’s Friday announcement praised the Ohioan’s character and statesmanship before proclaiming that “now is the time for our conference to focus on healing and unifying to face the challenges ahead and always do what is best for the American people.”
That’s easier said than done, political experts say.
“He’s going to face the same problems that Boehner faced,” said Bruce Cain, director of Stanford University’s Bill Lane Center for the American West. “This is an election year, and Republicans went into this cycle with the resolve that they didn’t want congressional actions to get in the way of electing a Republican president.”
McCarthy will have to balance that desire with placating those in his caucus who demand ideological purity even if it means shutting down the government to achieve their ends, Cain said.
“Holding the whole budget ransom has never worked before,” Cain said. “McCarthy is not really an ideologue; he’s more of a pragmatist. … But sinking the chances of a Republican president and then getting blamed for it is not the way to hold onto power.”
McCarthy was being sworn in as a freshman backbencher in the minority party when Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, was taking the speaker’s gavel in January 2007; now he might be about to take the gavel, and she still leads House Democrats.
Eric Schickler, a congressional expert who chairs UC Berkeley’s Political Science Department, said that shows that most of the past decade’s political turnover has occurred in the GOP while Democratic leadership has remained static. But California could benefit from the new situation.
It won’t make a difference on huge, polarizing issues, and McCarthy is conservative enough that it won’t mean a lot of new spending for the Golden State. But for less partisan issues — like patent reform and cybersecurity, perhaps — “if it doesn’t map onto the partisan divide, that’s where having a friend both in the speaker’s office and the minority leader’s office can help,” Schickler said.
McCarthy’s relationship with Silicon Valley hasn’t been all wine and roses. When the Federal Communications Commission adopted a policy in February favoring net neutrality — keeping Internet service providers from favoring some content over others — it was cheered by many in the tech sector. But McCarthy blasted it as “government overreach” that takes the Internet “back in time to the era of landlines.”
McCarthy was siding with the telecommunications sector, which has wielded considerable money and power in Washington for a long time. Internet companies, however, say their business models rely on unfettered data flow.
On this and other issues, the GOP must replace its tin ear with some cutting-edge voice-recognition software, said Derek Khanna, a conservative tech-policy consultant and a fellow with Yale Law School’s Information Society Project.
“The GOP has major problems on technology and innovation which require a major rethink within the party — new ideas, new blood and new approaches,” he said. “It’s a big challenge for the party but also a big opportunity for McCarthy, as he could be a conduit to opening Silicon Valley to Washington, and Washington to Silicon Valley.”
KEVIN MCCARTHY
Party: Republican
Age: 50
Hometown: Bakersfield
Experience: House majority leader, 2014-present; House majority whip, 2011-2014; Congressman, 2007-present; Assemblyman, 2002-06 (minority leader, 2004-06); chairman of the Young Republican National Federation, 1999-2001
Education: Bachelor’s degree in marketing (1989) and MBA from Cal State Bakersfield (1994)
Family: Married, two children
Random facts: He won $5,000 in the lottery and used it to open a deli at age 19. His middle name is Owen. He helped actor Kevin Spacey prepare for his “House of Cards” role, and they’ve remained friends.