How a small group of Republicans nicknamed the 'Never Kevins' nearly scuttled Kevin McCarthy's career and caused days of chaos

Kevin McCarthy spent years tying himself into political knots to win over the right-wing fringe of the Republican Party.

The only prize he wanted in return was the speaker's gavel.

After 15 ballots, four chaotic days and an argument that nearly turned into a brawl, the 57-year-old has finally achieved a long-held dream. 

However, being the speaker of the US House of Representatives may swiftly turn into a nightmare. 

A small faction of five men dubbed the "Never Kevins" grew to 20 opposing their party leader in his bid to be the third-most-powerful politician in America. 

Given the Republicans' razor-thin majority of 222 seats to the Democrats' 213, McCarthy could only afford to lose four of his colleagues' votes. 

A long list of concessions did nothing to help him avoid a once-in-a-century humiliation on the first day of the new Congress when the speaker vote went to multiple ballots for the first time since 1923. 

And as the stalemate rolled into its fourth day, the United States was without a key branch of its government and the House was unable to swear in members.

Even former president Donald Trump, who has repeatedly endorsed McCarthy, seems powerless to sway some of his most devoted supporters to end it. 

"Let's stop with the campaign smears and tactics to get people to turn against us," Colorado's Lauren Boebert said on the House floor this week. 

"Even having my favourite president call us and tell us we need to knock this off." 

Florida congressman Matt Gaetz was the first to cast a vote for Trump himself, sending murmurs across the chamber. 

McCarthy remained publicly defiant, projecting confidence as the House adjourned after 13 failed votes. 

"We'll come back tonight," he told reporters.

"I believe at that time we'll have the votes to finish this once and for all.

"It just reminds me of what my father always told me: 'It's not how you start, it's how you finish."

However, when they returned for a 14th ballot, this sorry saga held one more humiliation for him. 

After the House gathered for the 14th ballot, McCarthy ended up with 216 votes, leaving him just one vote shy of the speaker's chair. 

In extraordinary scenes, he stalked over to the holdouts, Gaetz and Boebert, and engaged in a furtive conversation that quickly appeared to turn into an argument. 

McCarthy's ally, Mike Rogers, stormed into the fray and appeared to be on the brink of violence until a colleague wrapped a hand around his face and dragged him away. 

After another quick conversation with Gaetz, McCarthy urged everyone to stick around for one more ballot. 

It took 15 attempts, but the gavel is now in McCarthy's hand.

But his grip is likely to be severely weakened by group of conservative hardliners who appear willing to plunge the House into chaos at any moment.

The 'Never Kevins' determined to burn down the House 

Kevin McCarthy faced an uphill battle for the speakership before the voting began at midday Tuesday, local time.

After the vaunted "red wave" failed to materialise in the recent midterm elections, he needed 218 votes in the House to nab the coveted gavel. 

That meant winning over at least one of five "Never Kevins", a group of hard-right elected members — Andy Biggs, Matt Gaetz, Bob Good, Matt Rosendale and Ralph Norman — who vowed to vote as a bloc ahead of the speaker election and issued a list of demands. 

Each had also either explicitly threatened to vote against McCarthy or expressed doubts about his leadership, despite negotiating with him for months.

Over the weekend, they had a last-minute victory when McCarthy agreed to change the House rules to make it easier to eject the speaker, allowing a process known as the "motion to vacate" at the behest of five Republicans instead of a majority. 

It wasn't enough. 

A whopping 19 Republicans opposed McCarthy in the first and second ballots, only to be joined in the third ballot by Florida's Byron Donalds, who voted for himself after being nominated by his colleagues as a possible alternative. 

Nearly half of the 20 original holdouts are from just three states — Arizona, Florida and Texas — and five are newly elected. 

According to FiveThirtyEight, they're also more conservative than 98 per cent of the previous Congress and scorn the Republican Party establishment. 

At least a dozen of the group denied Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

And most belong to the Freedom Caucus, a faction formed in 2015 to push House GOP leadership further right and shift power away from the top of the party to the rank-and-file. 

Eight years later, several of its members seem to have seized on a chance to do just that, leveraging their new-found clout to exert an outsized influence over the 118th Congress. 

As Politico put it: "For many of them, their brand is chaos. 

"They're not in it for the horse-trading. 

"There are no institutionalists here — the group is largely composed of bomb-throwers and lightning-rod lawmakers who revel in their outlier status, whether it's back in their home states or in Washington." 

Among the most outspoken is Lauren Boebert, who toppled a Republican incumbent to win her seat. 

She has called to lower the threshold to oust the speaker to a single vote — something McCarthy has since agreed to.

"I've said from the beginning that my hard line was a … single-member motion to vacate — you cannot demand more responsibility and less accountability," she said. 

"If you go to the American people and ask them if Congress is doing a good job, if they liked the way things are run in Washington DC, you're probably going to get a big 'hell no'. 

"We want to change the way things are done here." 

Kevin McCarthy's rise within the Republican Party 

Kevin McCarthy has long been a high-profile figure within the Republican Party, most recently serving as House minority leader. 

He has proudly talked up what has been referred to as his "origin story" — a $US5,000 lottery win, at the age of 21, which he parlayed into starting a deli business.

McCarthy began his political career as a staffer for Californian congressman Bill Thomas, before winning a seat in the state legislature. 

In 2006, he made his first successful bid for Congress where he pitched himself as part of a "new generation for conservative leaders", forming a trio with colleagues Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor. 

They called themselves the "Young Guns" and published a book with the same name just ahead of the 2010 midterms in which Republicans retook the House. 

"These Young Guns of the House GOP — Cantor [the leader], Ryan [the thinker], and McCarthy [the strategist] — are ready to take their belief in the principles that have made America great and translate it into solutions that will make the future even better," a blurb for the book promised. 

McCarthy was soon elected majority whip, a role in which he was famously shadowed by Kevin Spacey as the actor prepared for his leading role in the political drama House of Cards. 

The congressman was wary at first — as the world came to know, Spacey's character Frank Underwood was a morally corrupt figure, ruthless in his pursuit of power. 

"When he [Spacey] first wanted to talk to me, I didn't want to talk to him because I knew how it was going to be portrayed, it was going to be Hollywood," McCarthy told Business Insider in 2013. 

"But then I found out that he was supposed to be a Democrat and I had no problem." 

How McCarthy became 'my Kevin', then came unstuck

Kevin McCarthy's continued rise in the Republican Party during the Tea Party era — when the fringe group of right-wing populists entered the GOP mainstream — shaped the politician he became. 

He had the reputation of being an affable deal-maker, who critics say has weak ideology of his own beyond being conservative and seeking power. 

But he recognised, or at least sought to capitalise on, the rightward shift within his party before many of his colleagues. 

While not the first to announce support for Donald Trump, McCarthy did so earlier than most establishment Republicans. 

In May 2015, when he was House majority leader, McCarthy backed his party's presumptive presidential nominee while others, including Ryan, then the House speaker, were still hedging their bets.

On the eve of the 2016 election, when Trump was outed bragging about sexually assaulting women on the now-infamous Access Hollywood tape, McCarthy stuck by him. 

And his loyalty seemed to pay off when the real estate mogul became president. 

In the early days of the Trump administration, the pair reportedly spoke multiple times a day, with McCarthy earning himself the moniker "my Kevin" and, in 2018, the party leadership. 

He stayed close to Trump, courting some of the president's most extreme supporters, including Marjorie Taylor Greene — a MAGA Republican known for espousing racist views and conspiracy theories — who has emerged as one of McCarthy's surprising allies in his fight for the speakership. 

McCarthy has frequently gone to great lengths to secure the allegiance of his party's most extreme members, including by refusing to denounce the president's false claims of election fraud following 2020 election. 

There was only one brief rupture in their relationship: on January 6. 

As Trump's supporters stormed the Capitol, breaking McCarthy's office windows in the process, the then-House minority leader pled with his boss to call them off. 

"Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are," he replied, according to multiple sources.

In private, a furious McCarthy promised to call for Trump's resignation. 

"I've had it with this guy," he told fellow Republican leaders in a recording from a closed-door meeting, which was published by the New York Times.

In a speech to the House, he then argued Trump bore responsibility for the attack.

"He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding," McCarthy said.

But he voted against the then-president's impeachment, before travelling to Florida for a chummy photo-op at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort.

Trump has continued to support McCarthy's bid to become House speaker. 

"Some really good conversations took place last night, and it's now time for all of our GREAT Republican House Members to VOTE FOR KEVIN, CLOSE THE DEAL, TAKE THE VICTORY," Trump said on his social media platform, Truth Social.

But the former president's waning influence is arguably why McCarthy's fallen short of the sizeable House majority he hoped would deliver him his lifelong ambition. 

And whether Trump, a man who loves to win, will maintain the same enthusiasm for his Kevin amid compounding losses on the floor is far from assured. 

The cost of reaching consensus 

House Republicans are now split into two main camps — the "Never Kevins" and the "Only Kevins" — as backroom in-fighting escalates into open warfare. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene took aim at Lauren Boebert, with whom she is usually ideologically matched, arguing her stubbornness amounts to "obstruction rather than progress". 

"I think the American people no matter who you vote are sick and tired of drama and this is nothing but drama," she told CNN.

"I'm not sure how Lauren Boebert on one hand can demand so much out of Kevin McCarthy but then demand nothing out of someone else to be speaker." 

Byron Donalds, the surprising candidate around whom many of the holdouts have coalesced, could not win the majority.

And no consensus candidate, such as Steve Scalise, was willing to step forward unless McCarthy surrendered. 

Despite winning, his power will likely be diminished. 

"The last two Republican speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan, had exactly the same problems because of the exact same reasons," said Charles Stewart, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"The far right of the party, which is less interested in policymaking and more interested in making a name for themselves as opposing the federal government, keep nipping at the heels of the speaker."

He argues what was once considered one of the most coveted jobs in Washington is becoming a poisoned chalice.

"We've now seen two speakers say 'enough of this' and dozens of really good leaders saying, 'I don't want to run for that position because it's nothing but headaches'."