Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy holds a unique vantage point on one of the most transformative eras in American politics. Having led a historic, 15-ballot effort to secure the Speakership in January 2023, McCarthy successfully steered the nation through critical moments, including negotiating a resolution to the debt ceiling crisis and passing bipartisan fiscal deals to prevent a government shutdown.
Now, joining Terms of Engagement hosts Archon Fung and Stephen Richer, McCarthy offers his deep insights into the evolving dynamics of the GOP. From the complexities of the MAGA movement and foreign policy tensions with Iran to the future of American elections, McCarthy shares his firsthand experience leading through some of the most intense political challenges in recent memory and his unique perspective on the future of American democracy.
About our Guest:
Kevin McCarthy, the 55th Speaker of the House, won the post after a historic 15 ballots in January 2023. In Congress, he held nearly every elected leadership position in the House Republican conference and served under three Presidents, during two economic crises, and through consistent political upheaval. After starting a small business at the age of 21 in his hometown of Bakersfield, CA, McCarthy entered politics, serving two terms in the California State Assembly before being elected to the U.S. House, where he served for 17 years before being elected speaker in 2023. He was voted out of the job in a revolt led by hardline GOP members and resigned less than a year later. Now in addition to being a GOP fundraiser and political commentator, McCarthy also serves as Founder and Chairman of ALFA Institute, a policy think tank on issues including artificial intelligence, advanced defense and aerospace technology, energy and critical mineral resources, bioscience, and health. He also serves as Chairman of Watchtower Strategies, a public affairs firm focused on corporate strategic and crisis communications.
The views expressed on this show are those of the hosts alone and do not necessarily represent the positions of the Ash Center or its affiliates.
Voiceover: You're listening to Terms of Engagement, a weekly show from the ASH Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, featuring ASH Center Director Archon Fung and Senior Practice Fellow in American Democracy Stephen Richer. Terms of Engagement is recorded live on Tuesday and available wherever you listen to podcasts on Wednesday. Now let's get to the show.
Archon Fung: Hey, this is Terms of Engagement. Welcome. I'm Archon Fung, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and Director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
Stephen Richer: And I'm Stephen Richer. I'm the former elected Maricopa County recorder, and I'm now a senior fellow at the ASH Center.
Archon Fung: We record this show live, so if you're tuning in now, be sure to put your comments and questions as they occur to you in the chat. If you're on YouTube in particular, and I think it works on LinkedIn as well.
Stephen Richer: Yep. And as always, Archon and I are speaking on behalf of ourselves and only ourselves. We are not speaking on behalf of the Ash Center, on behalf of the Harvard Kennedy School, or on behalf of Harvard University.
Archon Fung: That's great. And we have a real treat today. We're able to bring you in conversation, candid, frank, and on YouTube and live conversation with Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Stephen Richer: So I'm going to introduce our guests, and today we're going to talk about American democracy. We're going to talk about the new Republican Coalition, some of the things that are holding the Republican Coalition together, and some of the things that are dividing the Republican Coalition apart, specifically what the Iran War means for the Republican Coalition.
So our guest today is Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the 55th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. I first met Speaker McCarthy a while back when I was campaigning for then Representative Eric Cantor, who was the majority leader. And he and Speaker McCarthy had done a number of things together as part of the Republican Young Guns Program. And that was a race in which Eric Cantor, the incumbent, lost his reelection, but I got to shake Speaker McCarthy's hand. So if there were any bad vibes that came out of that, or if Speaker McCarthy was ever called a rhino later on, it's probably because he shook my hand and I must have sort of wore off a little bit or must have left my rhino scent, I guess.
Speaker McCarthy is a lifelong Californian. He has a BA and an MBA. He was a member of the California State Assembly from 2002 to 2006. He then served in the United States Congress from January 2007 to December 2023. And then in January of 2023 he became, as mentioned, the 55th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, and he is now a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics. So he is in residence for this week, but even before this week, he was a regular guest at the school and I think he spoke just a few months ago in November 2025. And then he came also in 2024 to speak at the school. So he is no stranger to the school, but we have him here as our first politician on this show. So welcome Speaker McCarthy.
Kevin McCarthy: Hey, thanks for having me.
Stephen Richer: So we really appreciate you being here, and thanks already for the lively chat that's coming in. We mentioned Brittany and Danny and others who have worked with you and had really nice things to say, have said hi, but we want to know what your experience has been like as an IOP fellow and what you're doing as an IOP fellow. So you're an IOP visiting fellow for the spring 2026 semester. What does that entail and how have your interactions with the campus been so far?
Kevin McCarthy: Well, I've got a long history of it. I'm on my second day. I've been back. Graham, Alice, and as you know, who was here and he wrote Destined for War back in 2017. I read that book. He became friends with him for years, got to pick his brain sometimes on some issues. I would come back and I would talk at Harvard and other colleges. I always think that's very important. And he wanted me to do one of those fellowships, but it's long whole semester, but for one week. I will tell you, we go from morning to night, you get a lot of students in. I know some people will think, oh, Harvard students are maybe just to the left. Now you get some very conservative students here too, and it's good to be able to have debate on both sides of the aisle. And I think it's important to have that, and some interesting discussions and these are some of the brightest minds, right? The future leaders. So want to be able to get my words in now and then.
Stephen Richer: So what types of things have the students been asking you when they're bursting into your office and saying, "Speaker McCarthy, do you have 15 minutes? I really want to ask you about ..." is it how they advance their careers?"
Kevin McCarthy: I just had some office hours this morning. Lots of times when they come in individually, it's talking about their future, things they want to do. Some of them have a real desire to serve one day, how to go about doing that. And we've done a couple different ... I've done quite a few different classes speaking to ... You get a lot of questions. We'll talk about current events, the future. You'll ask politically, what do you think is going to happen in elections? Where do both parties lie in the future? Talk about geopolitics, what's the world look like? There was an interesting article that Graham wrote with Henry Kissinger a number of years ago, and he starts with three numbers, and I'll update it from the numbers. It was 80, 80 and nine. And what it is, 80 years since the world power has been at a great war.
Now, if you take history, that's a very long time. That's longer ... We go back past the Roman Empire of how much peace you've had. 80 years since any country's used a nuclear atomic weapon, and nine countries with that capability. And if we had this discussion years ago after maybe the Cuban missile crisis, trying to project how many countries would have a nuclear weapon in the year 2026, I think the smallest number would've been 40, but it shows what diplomacy and action can take and leadership to keep it. And you're bringing in today the action in Iran, but you're also thinking about if Iran does get a nuclear weapon, there will be 40 countries with it. So it kind of spurs a discussion.
Longtime peace, longer than we've seen historically. You have a development of what are the CRINKs the China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. You haven't seen something like that since the '30s. You've got a Europe that doesn't have a leader. In America, it's only the second time in the history of our country we've had someone be president, lose and come back. You're coming out of COVID, which something like that only happens once a century. And the ramifications are leaders in democracy lose, not because she or he has done something wrong, because it's so life-changing. Authoritarians stay in human nature, they fill a vacuum when leadership leaves. So you're sitting in a world that's kind of unique in a time.
So we talk about what did the current administration doing changing that and what does the world look like in the future? Then what does it look politically for the parties in the future? Those are some of those discussions.
Stephen Richer:
So we're a democracy podcast. So how much do you put the sort of the pox of Americana?
Kevin McCarthy:
Got a democracy podcast living in a Republic. Okay.
Stephen Richer:
But it's a lot-
Archon Fung:
A Democracy/republic podcast. Fair enough.
Stephen Richer:
It's a lot of scholars like Archon who have studied different theories of democracy for a lot of their careers have written a lot on that. So how much do you subscribe to the Democratic peace theory, as long as we're on this topic real quickly, that Pax Americana is actually the result of a growing number of democracies and democracies are less likely to go a war with each other.
Archon Fung:
With one another.
Kevin McCarthy:
I think that's true, but it's a combination, right? A democracy brings you greater freedom. But the one thing we've learned in the last couple of days, you can't force a democracy on somebody. They got to crave it because they don't understand it.
We're unique in the world where I think we're the only country that you can immigrate here and you could become an American. So the flag on the moon is your flag. Martin Luther King was your liberator. Other countries that have democracies, I've watched them though shift and lose some of their freedoms, why they still have a democracy, more in a socialist economic. So I think that becomes a tussle. I worry about these CRINKs and how they want to usurp power upon democracies.
And democracies are a slower government. People will say, do what's the most effective or efficient government, a compassionate dictator because they can make just something just happen. But that doesn't mean you losing freedom, doesn't make it right. Look, we're sitting at 250th anniversary. There's no other place I'd rather be. But the question is, do democracies sustain themselves?
Stephen Richer:
Yeah. So maybe I'll hand it over to Archon, but to get us into the meat of our conversation, you mentioned that you spoke in November with Graham Allison. That video is available at the Institute of Politics' YouTube page. You can watch that. But earlier this week, we have somebody you probably know, Governor Chris Christie at the Institute of Politics. He was here last night and he was speaking about an array of different things, but he also touched on the state of the Republican Party. So Ralph, could you cue that clip from Governor Christie?
Aaron Goldman: You said, "There are no principles left in my party." And I wonder if you can explain that a little bit to us and also just reflect on what does that mean for your party's chances of November?
Chris Christie: Well, I think the two are divisible. So let me do the first one. I think anybody who follows politics right now can tell there are no principles left in my party. And even for people who agree with some of the stuff the president's doing, if you're really honest with yourself, you know it's not based on principle.
Stephen Richer: So that was Governor Christie last night, and we wanted to ask you about the principles of the Republican Party and the new Republican Party. When I was more active, when I grew up in the Republican Party, it was free trade, free markets, life, a strong America. Do those define the Republican Party today, and do you agree with what Governor Christie just said? I don't think you do based off your eyes.
Kevin McCarthy: I don't agree with what Christie said, no. And look, Chris is a friend. I understand him. It comes to, in many places, sometimes people have a personality difference with the President and they take it kind of personal and they take it a little further.
Look, I could take the Republican Party back to the 1930s. They were isolationists in the 1930s. So you can say, "The party today is different, or has the party changed during the other years?" President Trump will tell you he's a populist, but he's also principled on certain issues. And it is not so much to say that this was a Republican Party position, but it was President Trump's. He's always believed in a strong border. I would say Republicans have always believed in that. I would say Bill Clinton spoke of that when he was president. Schumer spoke of that. So they have changed, the Democrats, Republicans have not.
We believed in a open and fair trade, we would say. We got really into free trade, and I was a big free trader, but I also was educated. And I don't know if you guys have ever read Adam Grant's book, Think Again. You can have a position based upon the knowledge you have, but what if you're given more knowledge? You're not changing your position, you have a more informed position. We watched and we were big free traders, and we believed if we brought China into the WTO, they would become more like us, more democracy, more freedom. And I will tell you, everybody that believed that realized, well, they were wrong about that. And China never said they would. We just assumed it would happen.
So in the essence of the principle behind free trade was everybody's going to bring down their tariffs. So how is that the Republican Party changing if they've been taken advantage of and said, "Listen, we're no longer going to be taking advantage. We're going to keep our trade low, but when you made the barriers to never allow us to enter your country, that's not fair." And so I don't think it's changing our principles. I think it's applying our principles to a problem to solve it. Changing our principles would be say we're wiping away the concept of trade, and that's not what we're doing.
President Trump is a big believer in a strong defense, funding our military, even making it the highest level. Well, I would say that's a foundation of the Republican Party. We believe in a small government, but a strong defense. We believe in, if you go back to the Reagan, trust but verify. I've watched the president take the Republican Party principles, but learn from them. You don't have to send troops in like in Venezuela, you can make a fundamental difference, focus on our own hemisphere, which we've kind of gotten away from. So I kind of think he's brought us back to some of our foundational parts and showed that that would work.
Economics has always been a driver of the Republican Party. This president is a very big business person and he uses that negotiation, but the knowledge of, "I will make your country richer, it'll also make America richer, and you'll have greater freedoms and you won't need the oppression that you have." So to me, that's a foundation of the Republican Party to show how that works.
So that's why I disagree with the premise of what [inaudible 00:14:41] last night here. It may be something more personal to him. I get that. President Trump, he'll tell you when he ran, he ran as the outsider. I watched something like that in California with Arnold Schwarzenegger the same way, and them giving voices to people who felt they were voiceless, that no one would follow them. And he brought more people into the party, so that's kind of like a Reagan type period where Democrats before didn't feel welcome. Well, Democrats feel welcome, Union workers feel welcome, Hispanic Party, he brought a greater basis in than we've had in the past.
Stephen Richer: If you could boil the Republican Party today down to its core elements, it sounds like you're saying strong border, fair trade-
Archon Fung: Fair trade.
Stephen Richer: And a strong national security, national defense, but I don't want to-
Kevin McCarthy: And economic basis, and that really goes to the core of government shouldn't do everything for you. The private sector is more efficient and more effective. He looked at where he was shrinking government, which is a foundation of being a Republican. Smaller government. You watch deregulation. He actually did that faster than Reagan. That's a core of the Republican Party. Smaller government, more freedoms to fail or succeed. And then I would go to a core of, we just went and achieved something in the last day going to the furthest point of space. Okay?
Stephen Richer: Yep. On the other side of the moon, I think.
Archon Fung: Which is amazing.
Stephen Richer: Right now.
Kevin McCarthy: And he made that decision in his first term, and that's what we're seeing today. Then let's also look to ... Remember, he is also the president that brought us the Abraham Accords. That's fundamental in the Middle East.
Stephen Richer: And you said at your previous address at the Kennedy School that you think that ... Two presidents have won the Nobel Prize, you just think that they're ... And you said that's how it should-
Kevin McCarthy: The numbers, right? The president's wrong. Barack Obama and to Jimmy Carter.
Stephen Richer: And you said-
Kevin McCarthy: Ronald Reagan and Trump earned the Nobel Peace Prize.
Stephen Richer: All right. Archon, taken away. I don't want to hog speak.
Archon Fung: No, no. I want to build off of the principle discussion, but kind of in a more short-term way.
So a bunch of our listeners, and we talked about this on prior shows, are trying to understand the shape of the Republican Party and the American right and where it's going and how to understand it now. Speaker McCarthy, you're in a better position than just about anyone to help illuminate that. And I want to ask you about the war in Iran as a fissure point right now.
One of the few things that I liked about the Vance-Trump ticket more than the Harris-Walls ticket was in 2015 and 16, Trump had won on being against the forever wars. JD Vance in an interview said, "No more stupid wars," and yet here we are. And Ralph, if you could show the president's true social post from last night, I believe, he says, "A whole civilization will die tonight, to be never brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will." And so it feels like, to me anyway, we're in another stupid war despite those campaign promises.
And then turning it back to the American right, how do you read the potential fissure between the strong national defense conservatives like Stephen when he was growing up in the party and a fusion conservative, versus the more recent post-forever war, younger people supporting the Trump coalition who say, "No more stupid wars," and that's why I voted for him. So is that a real fracture? And it certainly feels like a difference of principle, but yeah.
Kevin McCarthy: I don't feel it's a fracture yet. And I feel the question is fair to be raised, but I don't feel it's fair to be answered yet, in this way.
Archon Fung: Okay.
Kevin McCarthy: I don't think you can define the Iran conflict right now as a forever war. Now, if we're talking about this in a year from now, that's fair to start defining it. If there are troops on the ground, that's fair to start saying, "Okay, that's different." Because would you complain about what took place in Venezuela?
Archon Fung: A little bit, but for different reasons. Nothing like the forever war concern there at all.
Kevin McCarthy: But I think there's two points there that go to your thought that, okay, these young people got behind Trump because we're against forever war. Had Trump gone in his actions in Venezuela and when they took out Maduro, if he would've removed all the other government and brought in a new government, that would've been he's going against what he said because I think he learned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Had we done some things different there, it wouldn't have been a forever war. It wouldn't have been 20 years. So I still believe he's holding true to his principles about what he says.
Now, some people may take it, and I think that would be wrong around the world, that as president, he would never use the might of America's military. I believe he never said no that he wouldn't, but I don't think he'd ever get as bogged down in some long-term war.
Now, this one has still been short-term when you define it to a war. He hasn't put troops on the ground. There have been some casualties, but not a large list compared to others. I've been to Dover twice with President Trump when bodies have come back. I personally have spent ... Flew in the plane with him there, flew in the helicopter, came back, and I know how it personally affects him. So I don't think he'll ever change from that because I know what it does to him.
And if you've never been ... When I moved from the State House to Congress, one of my first big votes were the surge in Iraq and no one can prepare you for how you make that decision and no one can tell you. It's different than any decision you'll make at a State House because you're literally putting people in harm's way and you know people are going to die and you're going to have to look at their spouse, their parents, their children's face, and you're going to have to tell them, why did you make that decision? So it's not one anyone takes lightly.
But I also understand President Trump and understand he comes into elected office different than people have before. He takes that business sense. In these tweets, what he tries to do beforehand, even in negotiation, he will tell you, "I will do this really bad thing, but it doesn't have to be that way. I want you to negotiate." And to be fair, when he first went into office, he started negotiation with Iran. Literally sent them letters, which people hadn't in the past. And he'll talk to people that ... You look to North Korea, and he'll talk to people normally elected people in America won't. He shows a different way forward, but he also puts a timeline in.
And when Iran didn't follow the first timeline, he dropped bombs, but he didn't continue it. And he said, "Let's go back. I'm clear you can't have a nuclear weapon." He has tried everything before he utilized the military, which would go to the core of what those young people believed he said and he's been carrying out.
Stephen Richer: How serious do you think this threat is? Do you think this happens tonight?
Kevin McCarthy: I wouldn't hope that it doesn't, that they come to the table, and this president has shown he will stop and go to the table with it. And look, we're not privy to what has gone on to negotiations.
Stephen Richer: Correct.
Archon Fung: Definitely.
Kevin McCarthy: And what the president is kind of famous for is knowing when to push the envelope to get that negotiation, the art of the deal type thing. And I'm hopeful that's what this is transpiring. It's also in a time ... The threat of bombing is very powerful. But once you've taken everything out, that threat is not as powerful anymore. We did not go and take out infrastructure, so you can rebuild. Once you start there, you're going down a different path. And I think him being very clear, explaining it to everybody ahead of time may help people get to the negotiation point they need to.
Stephen Richer: For our listeners who might not follow you as much, Speaker McCarthy's on Fox a lot, so I suspect you will have to continue defending in part the president's foreign policy. Because there are a lot of people who say ... I hear you. I hear you that there's temporal constraints, but that's still not my understanding of what the new MAGA doctrine is and that I thought we were going to focus on Americans and Americans right now are paying above $5 a gallon at the gas pump. So I know that you're going to continue to face that. I'll watch with interest to see how you handle that-
Kevin McCarthy: But let me first push back this. Okay. Yes, I'm on Fox, but I'm on NBC. I'm on CBS-
Stephen Richer: Oh, sorry.
Kevin McCarthy: Fox doesn't pay me. And because I go on Fox doesn't mean I have to defend any policy of the president. Nobody pays me to be on TV, so what I tell you is what I believe. And so it's not based upon anything else and not based upon something else. I personally believe there probably wouldn't be another president that can take an action against Iran. Why? Because Iran would be in a situation where they would have a nuclear weapon. It's like North Korea. And then our hands are tied.
So there's a time and a place, that we're living in a world that looks like the 1930s. Now, history can judge that there are times you have to take an action so the world is safer in the long term. I can make that argument. That's looking out for America. How this ends will be how people can judge it. I always think when you go into a campaign like this, you have to be very clear in the rationale why you're going, because that helps you get out of it, because you achieve the mission. He's been clear ahead of time, even in the State of the Union, that they cannot have a nuclear weapon. If this ends and we have extracted the uranium, that to me is a success. If we had slowed their ability to develop a nuclear weapon, to me, that is successful. If we didn't have thousands of Americans, you did it strategically. I think it was extraordinary. An F-15 pilot went down and we were able to extract them.
Archon Fung: There's no doubt that was extraordinary.
Stephen Richer: The story from over the weekend was amazing. So Archon, what are other fractures or the internal GOP dynamics that you've been-
Archon Fung: Yeah. I wanted to ask one more question about the war and kind of bring it back to this being a democracy/republic podcast is, do you think this war has democratic/republic authorization? Because I think war is the most serious thing a country can do.
Kevin McCarthy: True.
Archon Fung: And I think there's kind of at least three levels of what makes a democracy legitimately at war. One is, has the institutional question been satisfied? And there I want to hear your views about, why hasn't Congress authorized this war? And then second is public opinion. What do the opinion polls say? Public opinion doesn't like the war. And then third goes more to your thoughts about the nuclear justification is, I don't feel like as Americans we've been offered a set of arguments for why we're at war. Some of the early discussion was about regime change, then it was a little bit about nuclear, but my understanding is the intelligence estimates don't think that Iran is very close to a nuclear weapon. And so what exactly is the justification? It seems to me this war fails democratically on all three levels, but I'd especially be interested in your views about the congressional level.
Kevin McCarthy: Okay. Those are fair and that's a good discussion to have. And having been a member that's been a member of the Gang of Eight ... So for your listeners to understand what the Gang of Eight is. The Gang of Eight is made up of the leaders of the parties and the chair and the ranking members of the Intel committee. And we're provided more intel than others and knowledge and worked very closely with the agencies and everything else. Okay. We have jurisdiction and oversight and authorization of all these agencies you talk of.
Tell me how many times when you quoted, "Well, the intel report on Iran is that they're not as far as long." Well, were they right before nine eleven? Were they right even recently on Deep Seek? So don't rely on that. And then look at what Iran just sent their ballistic missile, how far they sent it. That was further than people thought. Look at the numbers that they keep sending. I think they're further advanced than the intel was giving you. So I would debunk that in a debate and an argument.
You can't sit here and to have a honest discussion and not play in what has Iran done with the resources they were provided? They funded proxies. So how did the Houthis have the missiles, the crews disrupt commerce and trade? The invasion of Israel, October 7th. Why did that take place? Because was Saudi Arabia being reported that they're close to joining the Abraham Accords for peace? The atrocities of the number of people who were killed proportionately greater than 9/11 in America. Nothing would have happened had Iran not funded that.
Stephen Richer: You can build a convincing case, as you have, against Iran. Why those three things that Archon mentioned ... Why isn't it easy to go to Congress if you can point that out?
Kevin McCarthy: Okay. Okay. Then let's put this ... First, let's take your first question. Constitutionality, does the president, it's not Trump, does the president have the right to take this action? The answer is yes, they do. Now, to carry on this action and putting more on the ground, the person who is president would have to go to Congress to get authority. Financially, to carry it on, they would have to do that too.
We lived under the War Act for 20 years, what we did, and we kept it based upon what happened on 9/11, and people would say we stretched it. We did. We had a number of these debates in my office with Republicans and Democrats in the room, with Democratic presidency in thinking about how would we recraft it? And I will tell you, inside that room, there are people who are hawks and who are doves, and there was a consensus that they wanted to take currently what they had using away because they thought that authority had gone too far. But the fear is we couldn't decide on a new one, so they didn't. But the president, did they go and call the eight members? They did. One didn't call back. So I don't think anybody questions the authority.
It goes back to your first question when you start describing it as a war, and you get longevity here and actions take further. The president has the authority to do this, and everything that he's done right now. I don't think that's a question. So the first part of your question, it's not going against the Constitution.
There are going to be people on both sides in the Republican Party that don't want to do anything. That's fair. And that's fine. That's a debate people should have. But I do think the world, to be fair to have these discussions, you can't look at Iran in a simple little place. Think about what they recently had done. In the first Trump administration, he cut money off for them. And remember, there were sanctions based upon Congress that they can't sell their oil. And they were only selling maybe 400,000 barrels or something. But when the Biden administration came in, even though it was still on, they were selling much more and they were getting all this more money. And what were they doing with the money? They were supplying their proxies that go cause the other. Then they made a different mistake, I believe. And it's under the Biden administration. They, for the first time, instead of having their proxies shoot, they shot ballistic missiles from Iran into Israel. America helped, others helped, Jordan, other countries helped, knocked those down. Okay.
And remember, this is after they attacked Israel because they were afraid the Abraham accords were going to expand. And you also have to look at this. Which country has had the most missiles sent at them during this bombing? UAE.
Stephen Richer: Israel.
Kevin McCarthy: No, UAE.
Stephen Richer: Oh, okay. Which is-
Kevin McCarthy:
UAE was in favor of the Abraham Accords from the very beginning.
Stephen Richer: No, it is not-
Kevin McCarthy: So Iran is trying to influence and take away peace. So you can't keep this in a vacuum. You've got to think about all of this. And now they have solidified the other countries in the Middle East because of the leadership of what ... Iran isn't bringing peace. I don't want to say this about the Iranian people. I want to say about who's running the regime. If that regime changed, the world would be different. And the world-
Stephen Richer: But Regime has changed at least …
Kevin McCarthy: Okay. So I do believe this president and others has gotten more intel than we have, even though I've been on the Gang of Eight for a long time. And history will judge is his judgment correct in this. But I do know had the past allowed Iran to continue to sell their oil, and who was that benefiting? That was benefiting China. They were getting a discount. These proxies were getting funded. We watched it made the world unsafe. So if I want to go back to, I want to focus on American safety, I'm going to have to go other places in the world to keep America safe. So there's justification for this, but you can debate it, and I think it's healthy that we do debate it.
Archon Fung: Yeah, I agree.
Stephen Richer: So I want to throw out to our listeners, I want to throw a question from their questions. This comes from Erica and from George. You previously described the Republican Caucus when you first entered as one of the most elite country clubs of only older white men, business professionals, or something like that. And now the Republican caucus looks different. And certainly the Trump Coalition in 2024 looked different than past Republican coalitions. Erica and George and others say, is that changing? And what is the Republican Party thinking about in terms of millennial and racial minorities?
Kevin McCarthy: This is great. I have used this quote, but not in that nature. Let me explain.
Stephen Richer: Oh, sorry.
Kevin McCarthy: What I've said is ... I became leader in 2018. We had just lost the majority. And I go to the State of the Union and both sides stand up. And I look over at the Democrats and look, honest and fair, they came from every walk of life. There were young people, there were people of color, there were women, they were all ... It looked like America to me. I found them. Good credit. Well done.
Then we stood up. And what happened is we had lost a lot of women. We looked ... I described it as like a most restricted conflict, a bunch of white males. And in my mind, I'm sitting there, I'm either going to be the leader of a declining party or I'm going to take what I believe this party to be, the party of Lincoln and others, and I'm going to open this place up. So Pelosi became speaker, I became leader. And in those four years, we took the majority by five seats. I'm very proud of this. I won five more seats in California and I didn't redraw the lines to do it. And she was speaker at that time and she got beat in California by five seats. In doing so, we happened to elect the most Republican women and we elected about the most minority Republicans that we had and we were growing in that instance. I think that's heaven.
Trump introduced that basis. He brought more Hispanics into the party. If you look from the youth, he brought more young people in, and you could go by gender there, but they said the youth is more conservative than it was during Ronald Reagan time when I was there.
Stephen Richer: I think that's true. Yeah.
Kevin McCarthy: And people can argue, "Oh, he's done so ... " And he's made the party the working class party. So there was a time that Republicans could only believe they could win when it was a low turnout because we are higher educated individuals, right? Well, now even the pollsters get it wrong. We do better on large turnout. So we're more of the party of everyone and the Democrats have become the elitist. That's a flip, and Trump gets some credit for that.
And if you really look at this MAGA movement, I believe it started with Ross Perot. And Trump, when he started to run, you had all these 16 other people running and some have won it before and others, and he focused on the people who believed they weren't heard, and he got them to reengage in the matter. So that's what I talk about in that nature of what it is.
Now, I'm concerned that in the last class for the freshmen Republicans in Congress, I think there was more freshmen named Mike than women. I think there are four Black Republicans currently serving in Congress today. In the next Congress, there could be zero. I don't want to go backwards. And I focused a great deal on opportunities and to win the majority, we had to compete in places we normally didn't compete. Normally, Republicans could never win on the border of Texas. Republicans were the first individual to have a Mexican-born woman elected to Congress. I'm proud of that thing.
Archon Fung: So speaker McCarthy, I really agree on, as a political scientist, the shift that you identified. The Democrats, the base is definitely becoming, capturing the elitism that the Republican Party used to be. It's a super interesting issue and we talk about it on this show. Whether or not I agree that the last few years, especially the 2024 election, the Republicans, you guys did manage to create quite an impressive multicultural, multiracial, working class kind of coalition. And an interesting question is, do these policy moves squander that political opportunity? The time will tell. But I did want to move it to a different ... And I think our readers, I would be disappointed if we didn't get to questions about the health and future of American democracy.
Kevin McCarthy: Oh, sure.
Archon Fung: And so-
Kevin McCarthy: Let me make one more point on that. I want to give credit where credit is due. The Democrats get some credit for helping us. They had gone so far left under Biden with a wide open border. The wild spending with inflation that you hadn't seen since Carter, that opened the door for the first time for these coalitions to actually look at Republicans. So from a Republican, we haven't locked anybody in yet. We just have people walking through an open house.
Stephen Richer: You're not the Democrats.
Kevin McCarthy: Yeah. We've got to lock them in. Yeah. We got to help them stay.
Stephen Richer: Yeah. Archon, please ... Well, I was going to say, we have a lot of people on here who worry about the next few years. We have a lot of people who think that President Trump is an existential threat to our system of governance, and I believe Archon has as well, a measure of sympathy for a lot of those comments. What do you say to somebody who says, "I see 2021 and I'm worried that the president's going to do something after 2026, and I'm worried just generally about the state of our democracy."
Kevin McCarthy: Okay. So the first thing I see, I love the poem Kipling, right? Kipling's poem. We don't lose our head. And I find a lot of people like this are just emotional. One of my principles in life is I never make a decision out of emotion.
So I first want to dwell down. I want to understand why do you feel this way? And I first want to know, what is democracy, your definition? So is a greater democracy, "I'm going to change the election in California and I'm going to mail everybody a ballot, an absentee ballot." We were having this discussion with some Harvard students last night, right? And the one sitting two doors down from me goes, "You know, I'm from California and I get all these ballots at my house with all these other names on it," because they don't go clean up the rolls. There's more people on the rolls in LA than are old enough to vote. So that's not a greater democracy. You're creating something for a greater fraud in democracy that brings greater doubt, that brings less participation.
So I think it's fair to have these discussions, but I want to have them in a manner that we define what we're talking about, that we don't bring a motion into it, and we do it on merit. I like the absentee ballot, but I don't think that's for everybody. I don't think it's more democracy by letting people register to vote on the day of the election. I think that's open for fraud. I think a greater belief in democracy is file at least a month before the election. Because as a candidate, I want to know who can vote. If I can file just as the day and I can determine where it is, I open ourselves up that if elections are decided by 1000 people, I just move everybody to one place-
Archon Fung: I mean, I think all three of us have lots of ways in which we'd like to see the ways that the elections are organized and run change. I think gerrymandering is a huge problem. I don't much like the electoral college, but those things are not going to change soon. But a kind of red line is, okay, the rules are what they are, and we work hard to have that debate, like you're saying, we work hard to get the changes that we want, but three months, six months before the election, the rules are set. And if you lose under that set of rules, you don't get to be upset about it and try to overturn the apple cart. Can we agree on that? Yeah.
Kevin McCarthy: That's a foundation that we have raising our children. There's rules, and if you break the rules, you get punished and there's punishments known ahead of time. But there's also, because we have states in charge, are they uniformed in carrying out the rules?
So if ... You were with Maricopa, right? So would another county in Arizona, but I just know of some in Pennsylvania, if they let me correct my ballot that I didn't do something right, but another doesn't, is that fair? You got to have those discussions. So I'd rather set the rules down.
And what has happened, what happens in these elections is when elections are not close, people just assume everything was fine, nobody challenged anything. But then when they get close and people start to challenge, they're saying, "Well, you're not abiding by the rules." Well, no, what has gone on hasn't been fair and the structure didn't take behavior. I lost by 30 points, so why did I go back in and argue you didn't carry these rules out uniformly in the others? That's where we got to keep our head and have, okay, that's fair that you can question an election.
And look, I've had people question the election that I win. That person has a right to question it. Okay? That's not un-American.
Stephen Richer: Correct.
Kevin McCarthy: But also, as we are not a perfect nation, we strive to be a more perfect nation, we should be able to look at these and improve, but abide by the rules.
Stephen Richer: So aren't the courts the appropriate remedy? Of course, we can make legislative policy changes, as Archon mentioned, and I could get into a long discussion about Los Angeles-
Kevin McCarthy: We all have our list.
Stephen Richer: Aren't the courts where you seek redress for any error or wrongdoing or grievance?
Kevin McCarthy: Okay. There's a timing though, and you'd understand this better than others and probably even your listeners. So only because I'm an elected official and before I'm involved in politics and I follow it, there's a timing when the courts are, but there's also a timing to correct when the election is as well. So let's say somebody mails an absentee ballot. If you're going to question ... Because California had different rules, right? Only certain people could turn in your absentee ballot. You have to sign it. And before the people that have turned it in here, if they're out of the jury, that absentee ballot's not good. You got to check the signature. Does my signature match within? Okay. But once you open that absentee ballot, you take those ballots out and you put them in the pool to pick. You now don't have control over how somebody voted there.
So to challenge those is not going to court. To challenge those is going down to the clerk, and they'll let Republicans and Democrats in at the same time, and you should have a structure for that, and you should set that up before.
Stephen Richer: I agree.
Kevin McCarthy: Because what they do is those first votes that come in are absentee ballots that came in ahead of time, they checked all them, and those are the first votes once the election's done, that goes up. And that's why it changes up ... Now, all these others that come in that day of, what if people were collecting those that weren't allowed to collect those? And what if they didn't sign up above? Well, that's your time to challenge that.
Well, now they've changed the law in California and anybody, you can actually go in and harvest ballots. And Republicans lost a lot of races in 2018 because we really didn't believe in that, but okay, that's where the rules have changed. And we came in and we won seats and we harvest ballots because the Democrats won it. Who sued us? Well, the Secretary of State, who's now the US Senator, said what Republicans were doing is illegal. And we said, "Well, what do you mean it's illegal? You wrote the law. You told us this." "Well, we didn't think you should be able to harvest at churches or gun shops." Well, why didn't you think that? He never said that.
Stephen Richer: I obviously don't know the details of what Senator Padilla said in that instance. Do you think though that as you characterize ... That is wrong and that is problematic what Senator Padilla said there?
Kevin McCarthy: Well, he was Secretary of State at the time and I believe it was wrong, and we went to court and we won because what-
Stephen Richer: If he kept talking about it, would you have said, "Hey, now this is beyond the pale, dude." Yeah.
Kevin McCarthy: No, what I think, but he's talking from a position as he's the secretary of state. Okay. You're the secretary of a state and we put ballot boxes in that were approved by you in a location that you said is legal and now you're saying that's illegal. Well, we went to court to prove its right. My case is you can question it, but if you're talking from the secretary-of-state position and trying to declare it's illegal, I wouldn't have a problem with that because you're wrong.
Stephen Richer: Okay. I know we're running up on time. Work on any last democracy …
Archon Fung: Yeah, just I wanted to give Speaker McCarthy a chance to address people going forward. I guess ... I completely agree that there needs to be opportunity to challenge. I largely agree with Stephen that that opportunity occurs in court most often, and I hope we can agree that what's over the line, an inappropriate challenge is a violent act on the steps of the Capitol, or DOJ and FBI seizing voting machines and ballots as happened in Fulton County and machines in Maricopa County. Those are other ways to challenge if you don't like the results of the election, but I think [inaudible 00:49:42] are inappropriate.
Kevin McCarthy: I think courts are the right way. I was pointing out though, there's a time during an election that if you don't go in and challenge it in the clerk, you're not going to be successful. Because once those ballots go into the pool of ballots, you don't know which ballots those were. So you can't ... Okay, this person wasn't able to vote because this person's dead and someone stole it. Well, how did they vote? I don't know. So there.
I would push back on you on the DOJ and others, what are they doing with the vote? If they're securing these ballots, why is that wrong? How does the DOJ investigate if they don't have the ballots?
Archon Fung: I think that other people need to be involved, and Americans need to have faith that they're investigating in good faith, which a lot of Americans don't now have.
Stephen Richer: So there, I don't know. Archon and I will have to discuss this one. I actually have no issue with the process. If the FBI has probable cause, it goes to a magistrate judge, it gets the warrant. Now, do I think that's how they should be allocating resources? Do I think that the affidavit establishing probable cause was ethically written? No. Do I think it's a good use of time? No. But for me, at least there was a knowledge of process.
January 6th, that wasn't process. And that's sort of what I object to on just multitude more levels.
Kevin McCarthy: I hear that.
Archon Fung: I will agree. Agree.
Kevin McCarthy: We've had close elections for quite a while, the Bush/Gore and others. I don't want to get it where the country doesn't believe the outcome of elections. So questioning is one way to do it. Creating rules and laws that everybody knows and understands, and clear, and there's a process for how you can go about it. And I don't want to demean anybody who questions an election. You have the right to, but I want to make it sure where everybody trusts them at the end of the day.
Stephen Richer: Okay. So I do want to be respectful. Speaker McCarthy does have a hard out because this is only his second day, but he made time for us-
Kevin McCarthy: They work me every 45 minute-
Stephen Richer: Every minute. We got to squeeze it all out, squeeze it all. But for those of you who are not on campus, the IOP does livestream its events and Speaker McCarthy will be doing a forum on Wednesday, so tomorrow night, I believe at 7:30 PM Eastern Time. And you can watch on that. I dare say they'll touch on a number of the topics that we touched on today, but hopefully even be able to do some more. Speaker McCarthy, if you get bored over the next week and want to continue talking some democracy topics-
Archon Fung: We're here.
Stephen Richer: Just go knock on Archon's door and we'll have you back. But we really appreciate our listeners and we really appreciate your time Speaker McCarthy, and we really appreciate the production team. We'll be back same time next Tuesday, 12:15 Eastern Time. And we're going to be talking about the politics of birthright citizenship. Not the law, but is birthright citizenship good policy?
Archon Fung: Yeah.
Stephen Richer: Archon, final thoughts?
Archon Fung: Great. Speaker McCarthy, I just want to give you a huge thanks in the comments. A lot of people think this is the best show ever. One thing we've been working on a lot at Harvard and still need to get a lot, lot better is how to have really frank conversations across very different political perspectives. And I really, really thank you for giving us the opportunity to practice some of that muscle. So I really appreciate it.
Kevin McCarthy: And the number one thing where you have to start, I respect the person's opinion. It could be different than mine. I respect your opinion, but I want to have an honest debate about it. And what it will do, you might open my eyes to something I don't know. And I don't mind being challenged because it only makes me reaffirm my beliefs in what I believe.
Stephen Richer: Very good. Well, hire Harvard Kennedy School students and have a great week.
Archon Fung: Have a great week, speaker.
Stephen Richer: All right. Thank you.
Kevin McCarthy: Bye bye.
Stephen Richer: All right. Bye-bye. All right. And thank you all. We'll see you next Tuesday.
Voiceover: Thank you for listening to Terms of Engagement. Email us your questions, suggestions, or thoughts for future episodes. You can find an email address in the show notes below. See you next time.