Former McCarthy aide revisits chaotic 2023 House speaker fight

John Leganski’s new memoir returns to the week when the House could not choose a speaker, turning Kevin McCarthy’s long quest for the gavel into a test of how much damage a small bloc of Republicans could inflict. The January 2023 fight stretched from January 3 into the early hours of January 7 and required 15 roll-call votes before McCarthy finally reached 216 and claimed the third-highest office in the U.S. government.

The final tally made the breakdown plain. McCarthy won with 216 votes, Hakeem Jeffries finished with 212, and six members voted present, forcing repeated ballots until McCarthy crossed the majority threshold needed to win the speakership. House history records the chamber has elected a speaker 129 times since 1789, but this contest was the first decided on multiple ballots since 1923. The Congressional Research Service says multiple-ballot elections have been necessary only in 1923 and in the two elections in 2023.

Leganski, who served as McCarthy’s deputy chief of staff for floor operations, has framed the episode in Glory, Grief, and the Gavel as an inside account of a decade-long battle for the gavel that culminated in the January 2023 floor fight. That perspective matters because the episode was not just a procedural oddity. It showed how a tightly organized anti-establishment faction could use the rules of the House to stall the chamber, extract concessions, and force the party’s eventual leader to endure an almost unprecedented public humiliation before he could take the chair.

The consequences did not end once McCarthy was elected. On October 3, 2023, he became the first House speaker ever removed during an active congressional session, after a motion to vacate passed 216-210 with eight Republicans joining all Democrats. Patrick McHenry then served as speaker pro tempore until the chamber elected Mike Johnson on October 25, 2023.

Taken together, the speaker fight and McCarthy’s ouster exposed a Republican conference in which a small but determined bloc could paralyze the House, dictate the pace of legislation, and threaten any leader who strayed too far from the far right. Leganski’s account lands on an episode that now reads less like a one-off revolt than the opening act in a broader era of leadership instability and legislative brinkmanship.