At the end of each week, House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer does everything he can to goad Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy into a debate on the House floor.
McCarthy never takes the bait.
{mosads}It’s an obvious stylistic difference between McCarthy, the affable California Republican, and his close friend and predecessor, Eric Cantor, the combative Virginian who seemed to relish publicly sparring with Hoyer when Cantor was serving as the House’s No. 2 GOP leader.
But McCarthy’s and Cantor’s different approaches to one of the House’s revered traditions — the weekly floor colloquy — also highlight how the political needs of the GOP have shifted since the party took control of both chambers last fall.
Cantor’s tenure came during a period of intense partisan gridlock. While Republicans held the House, Democrats controlled both the Senate and White House, leaving both parties as interested in scoring political points as in making efforts to move legislation.
With the GOP now in charge of the House and Senate, McCarthy and the leadership team are under enormous pressure to show voters Republicans can cut bipartisan deals and govern in Washington, especially as the party tries to win back the White House in 2016.
“This is a new Congress with a new direction,” McCarthy told reporters last week, rattling off some recent bipartisan accomplishments.
He has little political incentive to lock horns each week with Hoyer, a gifted politician and skilled debater from Maryland who is more prone to making deals across the aisle than Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the liberal Democratic leader from San Francisco.
In fact, Republicans might need to lean on Hoyer to bring over dozens of Democratic votes so the House can pass a trade bill backed by President Obama that Pelosi opposes.
But at times, McCarthy’s refusal to engage in front of the C-SPAN cameras has been frustrating for Hoyer.
Hoyer let his feelings slip too close to the microphone in February, after he and McCarthy discussed the schedule for avoiding a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security.
After McCarthy closed the brief floor colloquy, Hoyer muttered, “You coward.”
Hoyer privately apologized to McCarthy twice and then delivered a public apology in a floor speech the next morning.
The two leaders have moved on from that episode. Both sides now characterize their relationship as positive and “one of mutual respect.” The two men had lunch together last summer, shortly after Republicans promoted McCarthy from whip to majority leader — a move precipitated by Cantor’s surprise loss to a Tea Party challenger in June.
Their deputies are close as well. McCarthy’s and Hoyer’s chiefs of staff, Tim Berry and Alexis Covey-Brandt, are in constant communication to coordinate which bills are coming to the floor, as are their communications directors, aides said.
McCarthy’s difficulty with words has invited ridicule — a Washington Post columnist devoted an entire column to it last year. But his aides say that’s not the reason why McCarthy often demurs from debating Hoyer.
The weekly colloquy had traditionally been an opportunity for the minority to ask the majority questions about the upcoming floor schedule and the timing of votes. And McCarthy has tried to return to its roots, focusing on which bills will hit the floor the following week, even as email and the Internet have largely eliminated the need for such a ritual.
McCarthy has turned to other outlets to get his party’s message out. This month, he brought back “pen and pad” briefings with reporters, a longstanding tradition that Cantor had ended in 2011 when he was leader. McCarthy plans to hold his second such briefing in his office on Tuesday.
The colloquy “is something … that has become a relic of the past where people rode back home to their districts on horseback,” one GOP leadership aide said, “but it’s a part of the institution.”
Despite the persistent prodding from Hoyer, McCarthy has always remained cordial during their colloquies. That wasn’t the case when Cantor ran the show.
In one memorable exchange, Cantor and Hoyer traded blame moments after the farm bill melted down on the House floor in the summer of 2013.
Cantor accused the Democratic minority of having been “a disappointing player.” A fired-up Hoyer shot back that Cantor had “pushed my button” and that the GOP seemed to believe “the American people … can be fooled.”
But the two played nice during their final colloquy after Cantor’s defeat.
“I know that these colloquies have, at times, become heated and long,” Cantor said, as Hoyer laughed.
Nowadays, Hoyer typically argues a point and poses a question to McCarthy over the course of around two minutes at a time. McCarthy tends to limit his responses to 30 seconds or less.
By contrast, Cantor and Hoyer generally logged even speaking times during their weekly debates.
During the first colloquy between McCarthy and Hoyer in July 2014, the Maryland Democrat called on the House to consider legislation to renew unemployment insurance. House Republicans had long refused to bring it to the floor after it expired at the end of 2013.
Rather than ruling out any possibility that Republicans would be open to extending unemployment insurance, McCarthy said only that it wouldn’t be on the floor the following week.
“I thank him for his input. As I said earlier, in next week’s schedule, I do not anticipate that coming up, but as we look towards the rest of July, I will keep all members posted,” McCarthy said.
Hoyer appeared amused by the indication that it could ever be on the upcoming House floor schedule.
“I appreciate you not only keeping us posted, but focusing on that to see whether we might do that,” Hoyer said with a grin.