

If Kevin McCarthy was Plan A, and a very resistant Paul Ryan is Plan B, House Republicans don’t currently have a viable Plan C to become their next speaker.

The half-dozen or so Republicans seriously looking at running believe they can unite the warring GOP Conference. But most or all of them would face a serious challenge wooing the several dozen hard-line conservatives who don’t have the numbers to get one of their own in the No. 1 spot but have demonstrated that, if they stick together, they can veto other candidates.


Other than Ryan, none of the speaker possibilities, at least right now, appears to have the kind of support across the conference it would take to win 218 votes on the House floor.

“The folks who have called me, I like a lot of them, but I’m still not convinced that any of them would be a better speaker than [Florida Rep.] Daniel Webster,” said South Carolina Rep. Mick Mulvaney, a founding member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, which endorsed Webster.

The race is mostly at a standstill as Republicans await a final decision from Ryan. His office has said repeatedly that the Ways and Means chairman won’t run, but sources close to Ryan told Politico he would consider serving if he was the consensus choice of the party.

As Ryan decides, a cadre of other lawmakers is quietly making calls to fellow Republican colleagues to gauge potential support. At least two dozen names are making the rounds, though only a half-dozen or so are thought to be serious.

One bottom-line calculation is how much support or opposition they would draw from the Freedom Caucus. It’s no secret why: The roughly 40-member group pushed Speaker John Boehner to the door, then made his would-be replacement, current majority leader McCarthy, think better of running.

The caucus earlier this month endorsed Webster, a nod that will apply at least through the party’s nomination process. As of now, the group’s members aren’t bound to vote for Webster during the leadership election on the House floor.

But it’s likely that if Ryan doesn’t run, Freedom Caucus leaders will want members to maximize their influence by voting as a bloc.

There’s no love lost between conservatives and some of the current or would-be candidates: Reps. Jason Chaffetz of Utah and Bill Flores and Pete Sessions of Texas. Others considering a bid are Reps. Mike McCaul, Mike Conaway and Mac Thornberry — also from Texas — as well as Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Mike Pompeo of Kansas (after publication, a spokesman for Thornberry said he wasn't running for speaker).

Chaffetz angered conservatives when he booted Rep. Mark Meadows from his subcommittee chairmanship on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, though Chaffetz later reversed himself. And the Freedom Caucus was created in part because the hard-line members of the Republican Study Committee were livid when Flores took a more conciliatory approach with GOP leadership after he defeated Mulvaney in an election for RSC chairman earlier this year.

The Freedom Caucus wants any candidate for leadership to pledge to make a series of reforms in how the House is run. Its members want seats on the influential Steering and Policy Committee to be distributed more equitably among different factions of the GOP Conference. They want GOP members to have more say in electing chairmen, and a promise to allow more legislation to work its way through committees.

No candidate, Freedom Caucus sources said, would get their support without some sort of pledge to uphold so-called regular order of the House. Essentially, they want to decentralize power from the speaker’s office to the rank and file.

Flores, like others, is asserting he could help bridge the chasm between establishment and conservative members. The Texas Republican has said he’ll enter the race only if Ryan does not.

“It is incumbent on us to select a Speaker who will promote our common vision [and] unify our conference,” Flores wrote in a letter to Republicans this week.

Chaffetz is making a similar pitch, saying he learned his lesson after stripping Meadows of his subcommittee chairmanship when the lawmaker bucked GOP leaders. Chaffetz has vowed to run a more bottom-up operation.

“We all make some mistakes. I would like to think as a leader, I was smart enough and humble enough to listen to my committee members who thought I was too harsh. And it was a good lesson for me, that you’re not going to build unity and move the ball forward by breaking knuckles,” Chaffetz told Glenn Beck recently.

There are some candidates who could gain traction with conservatives. Blackburn, the only woman considering a bid, has been one of the most outspoken Republicans on the GOP’s push to defund Planned Parenthood over a series of leaked videos of executives allegedly discussing fetal tissue sales.

And Pompeo, who like many of the Freedom Caucus members was elected in the 2010 tea party wave, gained traction with conservatives when he led a protest against the Iran nuclear deal.