On Sunday, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney strongly endorsed the idea that House speaker Paul Ryan should step down in order to trigger an election that would force House Democrats to vote for unpopular Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi.

At a conference in Colorado sponsored by THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Fox News host Bret Baier asked Mulvaney what he thought of the idea that Ryan should step down and allow his likely successor, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, to become speaker this year.

"I've talked with Kevin about this privately but not as much publicly,” Mulvaney replied. “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."

As my colleague Haley Byrd reported over the weekend, talk of Ryan stepping down picked up after a vote on the farm bill failed on Friday:



The push for a shortened leadership race began quietly in the days after Ryan announced he would retire. Some members, like close McCarthy ally Tom Graves, asserted that a lame-duck speaker would have diminished power within the GOP conference and on the campaign trail. “We would have more success if there’s no ambiguity as to what the leadership structure might look like,” Graves told Politico.

But Friday appeared to have been a breaking point for the forces eager to see Ryan step down sooner, after GOP leaders were unable to navigate the demands of the hard-line conservative Freedom Caucus, resulting in the embarrassing failure of the Farm Bill. In the aftermath of the bill’s demise on the House floor, a “senior Republican source” lashed out at Ryan in a Politico story about the legislative failure. The “senior Republican source” argued that “this is the problem when you have a lame duck speaker who announces he’s leaving eight months in advance.”

“He can make calls to members to urge them to vote for something, but who will care?” the individual added.

A remarkably similar quote later appeared in The Hill, also attributed to a senior GOP source. "If you have somebody who’s going to be stepping down eight months in advance, a lot of people are not going to care what you have to say,” the source said.



One problem with the plan: Paul Ryan has shown no interest in giving up the job before he retires from Congress. “I’ve talked to a lot of members who think it is in our best interest for me to stay here and run through the tape,” Ryan said at a press conference last month.

Jonathan Swan of Axios reported Sunday that Kevin McCarthy’s “allies tell me they believe opponents are planting stories amping up the Ryan-McCarthy divide to ‘drive a wedge’ between the two men." But Mulvaney is not an enemy of McCarthy—he’s an ally.

McCarthy told TWS's Haley Byrd it was "completely untrue" that he has been entertaining a plan to force a speaker's election before November. "Paul has my total support," McCarthy said in a statement Sunday. "Together we are completely focused on our agenda and traveling the country to take our unified message and action to the voters in November.”

Asked to respond to Mulvaney's remarks, McCarthy spokesman Matt Sparks tells TWS that McCarthy "opposes holding a speaker election" anytime between now and November.

Update: A senior House GOP source tells TWS: "The idea of having a speaker’s vote now in the hopes of forcing vulnerable Democrats to vote for Pelosi is painfully dumb. There are maybe one or two incumbent House Democrats running for re-election that are all that vulnerable. The pickup opportunities we’re seriously contesting are Nolan, Walz, and Shea-Porter, all of whom aren’t running."

Update II: Mulvaney spokeswoman Meghan Burris issued the following statement on Monday: "Mick works on a regular basis with the Speaker and Majority Leader and his comments Sunday morning were purely hypothetical. He is supportive of the Speaker. He is also supportive of any ideas that unite Republicans and divide Democrats, which is what his comments at the conference referenced. He is not ‘working behind the scenes’ for an early Speaker’s race nor getting involved in any leadership races."

