House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) is denying that he has had conversations about trying to force out Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) with President Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney.
The Weekly Standard on Monday quoted Mulvaney as saying he had talked with McCarthy about the possibility of holding a Speaker’s vote before the midterm elections.
“I’ve talked with Kevin about this privately but not as much publicly,” Mulvaney said. “Wouldn’t it be great to force a Democrat running in a tight race to have to put up or shut up about voting for Nancy Pelosi eight weeks before an election? That’s a really, really good vote for us to force if we can figure out how to do it.”
McCarthy, now Ryan’s deputy, said he talks to Mulvaney frequently but pushed back on the remark.
“Mulvaney and I are longtime friends. We go to dinner when we’re back here on the early nights,” he said.
“The only thing Mulvaney has ever talked about was, ‘Are you going to run for Speaker if we keep the majority?’ Nothing different than that whatsoever. … I don’t understand The Weekly Standard, I thought I was very clear on that — that is not true. I don’t know what somebody is trying to create here, but not true,” McCarthy said.
The California Republican added he’s never discussed any sort of plan to oust Ryan with any other White House official.
“No way did we ever have any conversation about Paul leaving,” he said, adding he still thinks Ryan is a viable Speaker through the end of his term.
Rumors of a push for Ryan to step down have intensified following the failure of the farm bill Friday — a top priority for the Wisconsin Republican due to its language on welfare reform — and the growing push from moderates to force floor votes on immigration. Some question whether Ryan, as a lame-duck Speaker, is losing control of the conference.
But McCarthy said his conversations with Mulvaney — a former member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus — have often centered on divisions in the Democratic Party.
“The only thing we talk about — not about a Speaker race, we talk about how divided the Democrats are. People don’t realize, you know, we were laughing one day, saying we’re divided, here we are passing all those big pieces of legislation,” he continued. “If you sit with Democrats, they’re totally divided.”