On Tuesday afternoon, former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy recounted a partisan “fight” from the beginning of his time in the California State Assembly, for which his Republican allies were ill-prepared and outnumbered. 

So, he drew on his late-night practices on the assembly’s rules with his colleagues, experience in the state chambers, and finally drafted a script for the Republican speaker to read from and retort to the Democratic speaker’s points, which led to a Republican victory.

“I’ll tell you a little secret: once you know the rules and the other side doesn’t, you can say something that’s not true. You say it’s a rule, and they’re dumb enough to believe you,” McCarthy said.

The Dornsife Center for the Political Future hosted former Republican Louisiana representative Garrett Graves and McCarthy, now a political consultant, for a fireside chat and Q&A in Taper Hall. The event kicked off with CPF Director Bob Shrum introducing their mission: finding common ground to solve political problems. 

McCarthy says Trump deserved Peace Prize for Abraham Accords 

When asked about the War in Iran, McCarthy said the roughly 80 years since the end of World War 2 is a “long time” without a great war or the offensive use of a nuclear weapon. He said Iran cannot be allowed to become a nuclear power, and that President Donald Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for the Abraham Accords, which are a peace agreement between Israel and several West Asian states, such as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. 

Iran has said multiple times that it was not pursuing nuclear capabilities and experts interviewed by the Scientific American concurred, while Trump has continued to suggest that they were developing a nuclear bomb.

“It is right, what is happening to Iran right now,” McCarthy said. “The ultimate goal, I think, coming out of here — you’ll think this is odd — would be peace in the Middle East, because they could no longer be the bully.”

McCarthy also touched on the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which has caused oil prices to soar globally. 

“The Strait is difficult,” McCarthy said, “and exiting is difficult, and I don’t think America will support troops on the ground. But the other thing is: do you realize what we did in Venezuela that is unbelievable? Okay, I sit on the board of the CIA … every other world leader’s thinking, ‘Oh my God, they can do it to me.’”

McCarthy built a ‘good relationship’ with Biden

In McCarthy’s early days in Congress, he said he chose committees that offered him the ability to network and earn influence rather than more popular committees, which other freshman representatives would fight over. 

“I took the outside committees,” McCarthy said. “But then you know what happened? Like seven months in, some guy fell down the stairs, broke his neck and died. But he had a good committee. Had to get filled … I had five committees freshman year, because everybody turned to me.”

Once more established in Congress, McCarthy said he developed a good relationship with former President Joe Biden, who was Barack Obama’s vice president at the time. McCarthy said he felt Biden’s age caused him to deteriorate, citing that he had to read from cards during a meeting on the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual review of the military spending budget. 

“[Biden] starts to read, he starts going off on Jan. 6,” McCarthy said. “I just, out of the blue, say, ‘Stop it. Nobody in this room had anything to do with Jan. 6. I got evacuated. Just stop this crap.’ It flusters him. He doesn’t know what to do, and he closes his book and he doesn’t know where to go. And then Kamala Harris is next to him, and she doesn’t know what to do.”

In the conversation with Biden, McCarthy said he threatened to let the NDAA deal pass by, waiting for one less favorable to the Democratic party, unless Biden waived the COVID vaccine requirement for military service members. Ultimately, Biden relented. 

This situation gave McCarthy a strategy for negotiating with Biden moving into the debt ceiling crisis, he said. McCarthy said he told Biden that, while contemporaries might blame him for killing the debt ceiling deal, the global economic fallout would ultimately be the President’s legacy. McCarthy said he would try to apply pressure to the president by hosting three news conferences a day.

“I would say, ‘why won’t the president negotiate?’” McCarthy said. “‘I’d be facetious and say, ‘Look, I’ll come down for lunch. I’ll bring soft food, if that’s what it takes.’” 

The event ended with praise from Shrum, who offered McCarthy a CPF fellowship on the spot. 

“If you’re a Democrat,” Shrum said, “you probably should be relieved that he’s not running the midterm Republicans right now.”