When Speaker Mike Johnson said last week that he would “strongly request” that a damning congressional ethics report on the conduct of former Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida be kept under wraps, it was a full-circle moment for the man at the center of the controversy.
After all, Mr. Gaetz was the one who orchestrated the coup against the last speaker, Kevin McCarthy, that made room for Mr. Johnson, a little-known Louisiana Republican, to ascend to the top job in the House. And Mr. McCarthy always claimed his nemesis moved against him because he refused to halt the very same House Ethics Committee investigation into sexual misconduct and illicit drug use allegations against Mr. Gaetz. (Mr. Gaetz has long denied the charges.)
Now Mr. McCarthy is long gone, Mr. Gaetz is the president-elect’s choice to run the Justice Department, and Mr. Johnson is doing what Mr. McCarthy never would — intervening to try to make sure the damaging material on Mr. Gaetz never sees the light of day.
It is a fitting coda to two years of tumult in the Republican-led House, disorder that was exacerbated by bad blood among individual members.
The chaos has been driven by big-picture political dynamics: a polarized Congress where compromise is a lost art, a G.O.P. split between center-leaning conservatives and the hard right, and a too-small majority that gave outsize power to rebels like Mr. Gaetz.
But that public drama was also fueled at least in part by more personal and petty feuds, chief among them the one between Mr. Gaetz and Mr. McCarthy over the ethics inquiry.
Their epic rivalry became emblematic of the party’s deeper problems. Personal vendettas and shifting alliances became as important to its players as any ideology or policy win. Over the past two years in Congress, governing often took a back seat to intraparty feuding.
Mr. McCarthy has long claimed that Mr. Gaetz tried to block his ascension to the speakership, and then patiently plotted his downfall because of his refusal to quash the investigation.
“I’ll give you the truth why I’m not speaker,” Mr. McCarthy said in April during an appearance at Georgetown University. “It’s because one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year-old.”
Mr. Gaetz, for his part, has claimed that the yearslong inquiry into his conduct was a smear campaign driven by Mr. McCarthy and his allies.
“It seems that the Ethics Committee’s interest in me waxes and wanes based on my relationship with the speaker,” he said last year.
Mr. Gaetz insisted his opposition to Mr. McCarthy was driven by principles about wasteful government spending and a devotion to single-subject spending bills. But the fight stayed nasty and personal long after most people had moved on. And Mr. Gaetz never targeted Mr. Johnson when the current speaker pushed through the same kinds of catchall spending bills that Mr. McCarthy had passed.
At the Republican National Convention over the summer, Mr. Gaetz heckled Mr. McCarthy on live television.
“What night are you speaking?” he taunted the former speaker, who he knew did not have a speaking role. “If you took that stage, you would get booed off of it.”
Mr. McCarthy hit back in a CNN interview, saying of Mr. Gaetz, “I’m not sure if he was on something, but I do hope he gets the help that he needs.”
Wearing a somber expression, he added that his real concern was for the underage girl Mr. Gaetz had been accused of having sex with.
“I hope the young women get the justice they deserve when it comes to him,” Mr. McCarthy said.
Mr. McCarthy always said his refusal to intervene in the ethics inquiry into Mr. Gaetz was merely because of longstanding House rules prohibiting outside interference in the business of the highly secretive, bipartisan panel.
“It would be illegal for me to do anything in that committee,” he told Fox News last year. “Legally, I can’t do anything, and I’m not going to do anything.” (In response, Mr. Gaetz said that Mr. McCarthy was “trying to signal to the Ethics Committee to pursue me.”)
Just days ago, Mr. Johnson, too, had said the speaker could not be involved in the work of the ethics panel. But then he visited with Mr. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and returned to Washington with a different take.
Mr. Johnson on Friday cited the same institutional rules Mr. McCarthy once invoked — though he has reached a different conclusion. He said that because Mr. Gaetz had resigned from Congress, the rules bar the committee, which only has jurisdiction over sitting lawmakers, from releasing material on him, though it has done so at least once in the past.
Senators from both parties have demanded to see the report as they consider Mr. Gaetz’s nomination to be attorney general. That could lead to a constitutional clash between the House and the Senate, which is charged in Article II with vetting and confirming presidential nominees.
For Mr. Johnson, who is relying on Mr. Trump’s support to keep his job, moving to block the release of the report could be the price of reclaiming his office in the next Congress. Doing a solid for Mr. Gaetz also helps Mr. Johnson curry favor with some of the hard-right members whose support he will need while trying to govern next year with another tiny majority.
Watching from the sidelines, Mr. McCarthy has been uncharacteristically quiet about the whole situation.
He has said little publicly about Mr. Trump’s selection of Mr. Gaetz for attorney general, and did not respond to a request for comment about Mr. Johnson’s move to block the release of the ethics report.
In a wide-ranging interview with Bloomberg TV earlier this week, Mr. McCarthy said of Mr. Trump’s cabinet picks, “I think the choices are very good, except one.”
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