Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy appears to have quelled a revolt by Freedom Caucus conservatives that prevented any legislation from reaching the House floor. The 11 conservatives had blocked anything from being done by refusing to sign off on the procedural rules that govern how the legislation will be handled on the floor.
The unprecedented action in joining the Democrats to defeat a rules vote threatened to blow up the Republicans’ agenda and signified new stresses in the relationship between McCarthy and his most conservative members. The Freedom Caucus was livid over McCarthy’s failure to include many aspects of the Republican debt limit legislation passed in early May in the final debt limit package he negotiated with Biden.
But McCarthy massaged the rebels with some additional vague promises, and now the rules legislation will be passed. This will allow a vote on a bill protecting gas stoves and another one that would roll back a Biden administration provision on pistol braces.
“I thought we had a very productive meeting tonight,” McCarthy said of a meeting on Monday evening. “I think everybody’s attitude in the room was, how do we move forward? How do we move forward to where we were, with our strength together? And I think there’s a willingness. That doesn’t mean it’s all locked together, it means that we thought that meeting was great… we’ve got a lot more victories for the American people.”
A GOP lawmaker told Fox News Digital earlier on Monday that conservatives are seeking two key assurances from McCarthy in the upcoming appropriations process, when the House Committee on Appropriations will consider 12 separate spending bills for the next fiscal year. One is a promise to cap federal spending at fiscal year 2022 levels, which is below the limit agreed upon by McCarthy and Biden in the bipartisan Fiscal Responsibility Act.
A 2022 spending cap was the GOP’s original goal when it passed its first debt limit bill, the Limit, Save, Grow Act, along party lines in April. Several conservatives staging the blockade, who also voted against the bipartisan compromise, indicated that they view anything less than the GOP bill as a loss.
Those caps in spending would spare national defense but gut just about everything else. Such limits have zero chance in the Senate. GOP rebels also want a commitment to stop spending on programs whose authorization has run out, which is far more important and doable than caps in spending.
“We have 11,118 programs, okay, 11,118 programs that are unauthorized in the federal government. … It means when they passed a program like the Endangered Species Act of 1973, it had a five-year sunset on it. It went down, finished, over in five years unless it was reauthorized. So in 1978, it was reauthorized. It has not been reauthorized since, and every year we increase the spending to the Endangered Species Act,” Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) explained in a speech over the weekend.
“We have a House rule that we pass every Congress, Republicans and Democrats, [that] you can’t appropriate money to an unauthorized program… We waive that rule in every appropriations bill,” he said.
In other words, Congress would actually have to do its job to get those 11,000 programs reauthorized. You have to wonder how many of those programs would have passed in the first place without the “sunset” rule.
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Another major issue that’s obstructing progress in pushing the GOP agenda was a dustup between McCarthy and Majority Leader Steve Scalise. The two aren’t at the stage of open warfare yet, but they’re getting closer.
The problem began when Scalise threatened to keep one of Rep. Andrew Clyde’s legislative items — the pistol brace bill — from getting a floor vote if he did not vote “no” on the rule vote for the debt bill on May 31. That kind of pressure was out of bounds for many in the Freedom Caucus
“Cooler heads have got to prevail. They’re great people. They’re actually very similar,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said of Scalise and McCarthy, adding that he hopes they can work together: “They better.”
Indeed, the entire bruhaha was a symptom of something much bigger. Reps. Dan Bishop and Ken Buck go back to the “betrayal” of the debt limit negotiations.
“We had an agreement that had been forged by all of us together, and it was utterly jettisoned unilaterally by the Speaker,” Bishop said of the debt limit bill.
“We’re concerned that the fundamental commitments that allowed Kevin McCarthy to assume the Speakership had been violated as a consequence of the debt limit deal,” Matt Gaetz also said.
If McCarthy believed the right would forget those commitments, he badly underestimated the depth of feeling among conservatives about that commitment to cap spending at 2022 levels. That’s why going forward there’s likely to be a rebellion a week — at least until McCarthy can find a way to serve two masters: reality and his right flank.