A New York jury deliberated for 9½ hours over two days before convicting Trump of 34 counts of falsifying business records in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through hush money payments to a porn actor who said the two had sex.

After the verdict, California’s Republican leaders quickly cast doubt on the verdict’s legitimacy and argued it would boost Trump’s chances of reelection in November.

Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield said that Trump’s “only ‘crime’ is running against Joe Biden in 2024.”

Jessica Millan Patterson, the chair of the California Republican Party, said the prosecution was “a politically motivated case brought by a far-left district attorney” and that the guilty verdict “never should have happened.”

San Diego-area Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Bonsall) called the verdict and the trial “a disgrace.”

Democrats, by contrast, praised the verdict as proof of the American legal system functioning as it should. Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), who is running for Senate, said that “the rule of law prevailed” despite Trump’s efforts to “distract, delay and deny.”

In California’s most hotly contested congressional races, though, few wanted to publicly tangle with the question of Trump’s conviction.

Representatives for Reps. Young Kim (R-Anaheim Hills), Michelle Steel (R-Seal Beach), Mike Garcia (R-Santa Clarita), David Valadao (R-Hanford) and John Duarte (R-Modesto) did not return requests for comment. Nor did representatives for Matt Gunderson, who is challenging Rep. Mike Levin (D-San Juan Capistrano) in coastal Orange and San Diego counties, or Stockton Mayor Kevin Lincoln, who is running against Rep. Josh Harder (D-Tracy) in the Central Valley.

A representative for Republican Steve Garvey, who is running for Senate against Schiff, said he had no comment on the verdict.

One exception was Scott Baugh, who is running to flip the coastal Orange County seat held by Rep. Katie Porter (D-Irvine). Baugh, the former chair of the Orange County GOP, characterized Trump’s trial as a political prosecution and said the verdict “should surprise no one.”

“A politically motivated prosecutor and a hostile judge set the trial up for so many prejudicial errors,” Baugh said in a prepared statement. “President Trump will have his opportunity to appeal and I am confident that a fair hearing will expose and resolve these issues.”

And longtime Riverside Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Corona), who is fighting to retain his once-safe seat in a now-competitive swing district, said in a statement on Thursday evening that Trump’s prosecution was political — but his comment was more muted than the loudest GOP voices.

Calvert said that Americans who believe that “justice should be blind to politics” should be “concerned” by the trial’s outcome. He continued: “It’s alarming that our criminal justice system continues to be taken advantage of by partisan prosecutors who want to use the power of their office to influence our democratic elections.”

Whether to lock arms with Trump has been a fraught question for Republicans in California for nearly a decade, but especially this year. Republicans hold such a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives that a handful of hyper-competitive races in the Golden State could determine which party controls the chamber. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report has rated 10 California races as competitive.

Remaining silent on the verdict makes sense for Republicans in those competitive battleground districts, said Dan Schnur, a politics professor at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine.

“You’ll notice that the loudest voices supporting Trump on this tend to be Republicans in very safe seats,” Schnur said. “Candidates who need to reach swing voters don’t have that luxury.”

One challenge for candidates, said UC San Diego political science professor Thad Kousser, is that partisan allegiances determine how voters viewed the trial.

Polling has found that Democrats overwhelmingly saw the trial as fair, while only a tiny percentage of Republicans agreed. Independents were evenly split. A Trump-like message about a rigged, unfair trial that might resonate with a candidate’s Republican base could also turn off independents, Kousser said.

“Anyone trying to win a November race in a competitive district needs to worry about both mobilizing their base through more Trump-like rhetoric, but also the cost of alienating the middle,” he said.

Rob Stutzman, a GOP strategist who isn’t involved in any congressional races, said that while the verdict can be used as a tool by both parties to turn out voters in November, it’s a “touchy subject.”

“You may have independents in congressional seats who are indifferent to the verdict, but don’t necessarily want to see Republican incumbents defending Trump or decrying the verdict,” Stutzman said.

But Shawn Steel, who represents California on the Republican National Committee and is married to Steel, of Orange County, said the verdict will have “absolutely no impact” on California’s House races.

“The White House got the verdict they planned years ago,” Steel said. “The Manhattan jurors who convicted Trump did it out of malice and hate. Today’s verdict, along with the not-guilty verdict of the O.J. Simpson criminal trial, proved the steep decline of trust in the American criminal justice.”

Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco attorney who also represents California on the Republican National Committee and whose law firm represents the Trump campaign, said Californians are more concerned with quality-of-life issues, such as homelessness, crime and illegal immigration than they are with the trial.

“People are fed up,” she said. “People are much more motivated in this election to vote because things are getting bad here in California.”

While California Republican House candidates were largely quiet, some of their allies in other states, such as Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake and vice presidential hopeful Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, were not.

“This was a rigged, disgraceful trial,” Trump told reporters after leaving the courtroom. “The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5 by the people.”

The Biden campaign said Thursday’s verdict showed that the law applied to everyone, but warned that the only way to keep Trump out of the White House is voting in November.

“Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president,” campaign spokesman Michael Tyler said. “The threat Trump poses to our democracy has never been greater. He is running an increasingly unhinged campaign of revenge and retribution, pledging to be a dictator ‘on Day One’ and calling for our Constitution to be ‘terminated’ so he can regain and keep power.”

In the wake of Trump’s conviction, Democrats seized upon 23 vulnerable House Republicans who had endorsed the former president, including Duarte, Garcia, Calvert and Steel.

“House Republicans have continued to put Donald Trump first and the American people last,” said Courtney Rice, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “Their districts deserve better than their cult-like adherence to a wannabe dictator. Each and every one of them should rescind their endorsement, but won’t.”

Trump’s trial, which began in April in New York City, was one of four felony cases that Trump was facing, though it was thought to be the only one likely to see a trial before the November election.

The verdict hinged on whether Trump falsified business records to hide a $130,000 hush money payment that Michael Cohen — Trump’s lawyer and, later, a witness for the prosecution — made to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, who alleged she’d had a sexual encounter with Trump a decade prior.

Manhattan Dist. Atty. Alvin Bragg had to convince the jury that Trump not only commanded Cohen to make the payments, but that he did so in order to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, rather than to shield his family from the story. Trump pleaded not guilty and denied the sexual encounter with Daniels; Cohen testified that he had been deeply involved in the scheme.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The day before he was ousted, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was doing what he loved — stopping to greet tourists at the Capitol, gushing about the beauty of the place and its history at the center of American democracy.

On Wednesday, McCarthy’s House was shuttered, his Republican majority in chaos and unable to legislate for the foreseeable future, with grave ramifications for the U.S. experiment in governing.

With no speaker of the House, a constitutional officer second in line to the presidency, the Congress cannot fully function — to pass laws, fund the government and otherwise serve as the branch of government closest to the people — during a time of simmering uncertainty at home and abroad.

“A democracy relies on its legislative branch — it’s the most important branch of any democratic government,” said Matthew Green, an expert on Congress at Catholic University.

“Without a speaker, you have real risk.”

For McCarthy, it’s the end of the arc of his political career, from running a sandwich counter in Bakersfield, California, to the pinnacle of power, only to have his downfall engineered by the hard-right Republican lawmakers he once recruited to Congress but ultimately could not tame.

Democrats compounded the pain, only too happy to help oust him, in a brutal display of partisan politics.

“He had made his bed,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., said ahead of the vote.

McCarthy is no bystander to the turmoil that so often defined his tenure in Congress, and in fact he was an early architect of the new Republican Party that has almost fully replaced what once was.

In office for nearly 20 years, McCarthy played a pivotal role in the 2010 election that sent a new generation of “ tea party ” Republicans to take control of the House. He was the campaign chairman who recruited the dozens of conservative newcomers who swept to power.

With fundraising skills and a keen eye for unique candidates, McCarthy was the party’s winning strategist, adding to Republican ranks even when it meant electing hard-right figures.

Part of the trio of “Young Guns” with Majority Leader Eric Cantor and future Speaker Paul Ryan, McCarthy and his political operation were crucial for the party as he crisscrossed the country with an extensive base of connections to wealthy donors.

Those years saw the stirrings of a party purge that continues to this day, leaving an open question of who, if anyone, can lead the House Republicans.

Then-Speaker John Boehner tried but failed to corral the newly conservative flank — enduring a U.S. debt default crisis, a prolonged government shutdown and a fiscal cliff that put the country on edge — before he was ultimately chased to early retirement by the same threat that would befall McCarthy.

Boehner’s chief antagonist at the time was Mark Meadows, then a Republican congressman who led the Freedom Caucus and would go on to become President Donald Trump’s chief of staff. Meadows filed a “motion to vacate” — at the time an unheard-of procedural move resurrected from political obscurity.

Rather than risk the continued threat of an ouster, Boehner simply mic-dropped and left.

A California Republican, McCarthy was never considered much of an ideologue. Rather, he positioned himself as a Reagan Republican, part of a generation that came of age during Ronald Reagan’s presidency captivated by a more sunny-side telling of the American experience.

That lack of a firm ideological footing in far-right politics cost McCarthy the speaker’s gavel when he first reached for it, after Boehner’s ouster in 2015, as fellow Republican lawmakers viewed him as insufficiently conservative at best. Others viewed him as operating without a political compass.

He abandoned the speaker’s race to Ryan, who was chased from the office a few short years later as he came up against the right flank during the Trump era.

“All three of them were chased out,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday.

“Speaker Boehner, Speaker Ryan and now Speaker McCarthy have all learned the same lesson: You cannot allow the hard right to run the House, or the country.”

As Republicans fell into minority status with Speaker Nancy Pelosi in charge, McCarthy went on to recruit the class of 2020 Republicans to retake House control — in line for the speaker’s gavel in another history-making moment.

But it took a brawling 15-vote slugfest over the first week of the new Congress in January for McCarthy to win the votes from his own reluctant Republican Party to become speaker, a prelude of his ouster to come.

With just a slim majority hold, a handful of hard-right holdouts forced him to make concessions for the gavel, including the ability to more easily remove him from office.

Still, finally becoming speaker after so long seemed to have changed McCarthy, and he quickly grew into the role. His mantra: “I never quit.”

His suits appeared sharper, his sunny demeanor more pronounced, the flashes of anger subdued as he ambled through the halls.

In his element, McCarthy would open the House chamber, making a point to stop and chat with visitors along the way — at times even setting up a photo line for those who swarmed to snap pictures.

Underestimated from the start, he surprisingly delivered at two crucial moments, reaching a debt deal with President Joe Biden to avoid default and preventing a government shutdown last weekend at grave risk to his job.

McCarthy had become the magnanimous “Man in the Arena,” as he liked to think of himself — the portrait of Teddy Roosevelt hanging with that of Reagan in his suite of speaker’s offices at the Capitol.

“I give as good as I get,” he quipped the night he was ousted.

But like the others before him, McCarthy was no match for the increasingly hard-right flank that has come to dominate the Republican Party.

A handful of hardliners led by Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., blocked McCarthy in January from becoming House speaker, and many of them cast the votes Tuesday on the “motion to vacate” to remove the speaker — with the government shutdown deal the latest complaint against him.

Others, including Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., who had been beneficiaries of McCarthy’s campaign funding, also turned on him in the end.

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said he had just one piece of advice to the next House speaker: Get rid of the motion to vacate.

“It makes the speaker’s job impossible,” he said. “The American people expect us to have a functioning government.”

McCarthy bitterly unleashed on his foes and intimated he would use his vast campaign sums in the future to wage primary candidates against them as he tries to steer the Republican Party back to some earlier vision of itself.

“They’re not conservative,” McCarthy railed in a rambling press conference on his way out. Evoking Reagan, he said of his foes: “They don’t get to say they’re conservative because they’re angry and they’re chaotic. That’s not the party I belong to.”

McCarthy had taken great pride in reopening the House this year after pandemic closures and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — the people’s House, he would say.

But after nine months on the job, one of the shortest speakerships in history, the leader who said he would never quit did just that, announcing he would not try to regain the gavel as the House closed up.

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