Three years after enduring the most grueling Speaker's race in modern congressional history, Kevin McCarthy is naming names. The former Speaker, ousted after less than a year in power, now says the 2023 battle for the gavel exposed a side of Washington that most Americans never see: grown men weeping for committee posts, colleagues filing procedural grenades to dodge ethics scrutiny, and a Republican conference that nearly paralyzed itself while the country watched.
McCarthy, the 55th Speaker of the House and a California Republican who started as a 20-year-old from Bakersfield, sat down with the Daily Mail for a wide-ranging interview. He discussed the power dynamics behind the Capitol's marble walls, took sharp aim at Matt Gaetz, assessed the current Republican leadership under Mike Johnson, and teased a possible return to public life.
The picture he paints is not flattering to the people who held him hostage for 15 rounds of balloting, or to the man who ultimately drove him from the chair.
McCarthy's most vivid recollection centers on Congressman Andy Harris of Maryland. As the speaker battle dragged on, McCarthy said, Harris tried to use his holdout vote as leverage to secure a subcommittee chairmanship on health.
"I still remember Congressman Andy Harris literally crying inside the room because he wanted to leverage his vote that I would give him a subcommittee chairmanship on health."
McCarthy says he refused the deal. "I told you a month ago, when you asked, I would never do that," he recalled telling Harris. The implication is clear: the 15-ballot stalemate was never purely about principle. For at least some holdouts, it was about personal advancement dressed up as ideological conviction.
The broader context of that fight underscores just how damaging the standoff became. As the Washington Free Beacon reported at the time, Republican leaders on the House foreign affairs, armed services, and intelligence committees warned that the prolonged speaker battle put U.S. national security at risk. Members could not be sworn in, committees could not organize, and classified briefings could not proceed. Rep. Mike Gallagher said he and Rep. Don Bacon were unable to attend a classified meeting with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs because members had not yet received clearance.
That is the real cost of internal vanity fights, not just political embarrassment, but actual gaps in national defense oversight while the Biden administration went unchecked.
The 2023 speaker contest was historically brutal. McCarthy lost ballot after ballot as 20 Republican holdouts refused to back him. Fox News reported that by the seventh round, opposition had actually grown from 19 to 21 members, even as McCarthy offered sweeping concessions: more Rules Committee seats for Freedom Caucus members, a vote on congressional term limits, and a lower threshold to force a vote to remove the Speaker.
Democrats, meanwhile, stayed united behind Hakeem Jeffries with 212 votes in every single round. The contrast was impossible to miss. One party held together. The other couldn't get out of its own way.
The concessions kept piling up. Newsmax reported that McCarthy reached a deal with key holdouts that included an agreement between the Congressional Leadership Fund and the Club for Growth to stay out of open primaries. Club for Growth President David McIntosh called it a fulfillment of "a major concern we have pressed for." Yet even that deal wasn't enough to prevent the House from voting 216, 214 to adjourn rather than continue balloting.
The Washington Examiner noted that during the seventh ballot, Matt Gaetz changed his vote from Rep. Byron Donalds to former President Donald Trump, a symbolic gesture that seemed designed more for spectacle than strategy. Twenty conservative Republicans blocking McCarthy from the gavel still said there was no deal, even as McCarthy offered to let a single member trigger a motion to vacate the chair.
That concession, the motion-to-vacate threshold, would prove to be the weapon used against McCarthy himself months later. He handed his opponents the procedural tool they needed to remove him, and they used it.
The internal fractures that defined McCarthy's speakership have not disappeared from the House Republican conference. Recent primary-season dynamics continue to test the GOP's already razor-thin majority.
McCarthy saved his sharpest words for the man who engineered his removal. He told the Daily Mail that Gaetz filed the motion to vacate on the same day he responded to the House Ethics Committee, a timing McCarthy clearly views as something other than coincidence.
"He did the motion to vacate the day he responded to the Ethics Committee."
The implication is that Gaetz used the dramatic procedural move to change the subject from his own ethics troubles. A years-long Department of Justice investigation into sex trafficking allegations had concluded in 2023 without any charges being filed. Gaetz has repeatedly called the accusations a "smear campaign" and part of an organized extortion plot. But the Ethics Committee inquiry lingered, and the political damage from it proved lasting.
When President Trump tapped Gaetz in late 2024 to serve as U.S. Attorney General, the ethics controversy reached a fever pitch. Senate opposition and what the Daily Mail described as an "ethics firestorm" made confirmation impossible. Gaetz withdrew his nomination just days later.
McCarthy did not hide his satisfaction at that outcome.
"I think they saved America a great deal by Gaetz not being able to get anywhere."
Gaetz, asked for comment, fired back: "Innocence makes prosecution very challenging. Kevin obsesses about me. It is pathetic." The exchange captures a feud that has not cooled with time, and probably won't.
The episode also illustrates a recurring pattern in House Republican politics, where floor-level revolts by small numbers of members can upend leadership plans and derail the conference's broader agenda.
Asked about Speaker Mike Johnson, McCarthy was supportive but measured. He said Johnson is "working hard", a phrase that reads more like encouragement than a ringing endorsement. He also noted that Republicans "kept all their leadership" after the last cycle, which he seemed to view as a missed opportunity.
"If you're the speaker historically in the house as Republicans, if you lose the majority, we do something new and go with new leadership."
McCarthy said the Republican conference has a "very big bench" of members capable of handling "the job from all aspects." He named Jim Jordan, Tom Emmer, August Pfluger, French Hill, Bruce Westerman, and Jason Smith as examples. That's a long list, and listing it publicly sends a signal that McCarthy sees no shortage of alternatives if the current leadership stumbles.
The thin margins that define today's House GOP make every leadership question a high-stakes affair. Fights over legislative strategy, from ICE funding to DHS measures, routinely expose the same factional tensions that nearly destroyed McCarthy's speakership.
McCarthy may be out of Congress, but he has not retreated to the sidelines. He appears on Fox News, CBS, and ABC several times a week as a political commentator. He teaches at USC and Harvard. He serves on the boards of the CIA and the LA Olympics. He launched the ALFA Institute, focused on technology and defense, and started a public affairs firm called Watchtower.
He also raised $31 million for Republicans last cycle, a figure that keeps him relevant in a party where fundraising ability is the ultimate currency. More recently, he dropped $100,000 into Virginia to try to stop Democrats from redrawing political maps. That effort failed, but the willingness to spend his own political capital on redistricting fights signals a man who still thinks in terms of long-term power.
Redistricting battles have produced their own share of dramatic moments on Capitol Hill, including floor disruptions that tested the limits of House decorum.
McCarthy said President Trump called him "night before last," a detail he offered without elaboration but one that suggests the relationship remains active. On 2028, McCarthy was direct: "JD Vance has the best chance to do it, if that's what he wants to do." He added that he would be "extremely proud" to see Marco Rubio as president one day.
And when the subject of his own future came up, McCarthy left the door ajar. "I'm still young enough," he said.
The 15-ballot speaker fight of 2023 was not just a political spectacle. As Just The News reported, it exposed a deep divide between establishment Republicans and Freedom Caucus, aligned rebels over spending, procedure, and the basic question of who runs the House. The holdouts forced sweeping rules changes that shifted power from leadership to rank-and-file members, changes that looked like reform on paper but in practice created a conference where any single member could hold the Speaker hostage.
McCarthy quipped after finally winning the gavel: "That was easy, huh?" It wasn't. And the instability he endured didn't end with his victory. It ended with his removal.
What McCarthy's account reveals, the tears, the leverage plays, the suspiciously timed procedural moves, is a Republican conference that too often lets personal ambition masquerade as principle. The holdouts who demanded concessions got what they wanted. Then they used those concessions to remove the man who gave them. The party paid the price in lost oversight, lost momentum, and lost credibility.
McCarthy's willingness to name names now, years later, may be self-serving. But the facts he describes, the crying, the deal-making, the motion to vacate filed on the same day as an ethics response, speak for themselves.
Washington always tells you who its heroes are. It rarely tells you what they were doing in the back room when the cameras were off. McCarthy just did.