Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is in an impossible position. Some of his fellow Republicans are preparing to commit seppuchu and send the government hurtling toward a shutdown.
The right-wingers in the Freedom Caucus are hell-bent on forcing cuts in federal spending — both now and in future budgets. There’s nothing much wrong with that except they’re proposing to cut far too much, far too quickly. It took 70 years to create a national debt of $32 trillion. Trying to get most of it back all at once is stupid.
Since there’s no way that Congress is going to be able to pass all 13 individual budget bills by Sept. 30, McCarthy is proposing the favorite gimmick of congressional leaders in years past: the “continuing resolution.” The CR funds all government agencies for a limited period — usually a week or two. In this case, McCarthy may want a CR to fund the government until early December.
That’s not going to cut it with the Freedom Caucus.
When Biden and McCarthy struck a deal to suspend the nation’s debt ceiling in June, it included provisions for topline spending numbers. But under pressure from the House Freedom Caucus, House Republicans have advanced spending bills that cut below that agreement.
Republicans have also tried to load their spending packages with conservative policy wins. For example, House Republicans added provisions blocking abortion coverage, transgender care and diversity initiatives to a July defense package, turning what has traditionally been a bipartisan effort into a sharply contested bill.
But Democrats control the Senate and are certain to reject most of the conservative proposals. Senators are crafting their spending bills on a bipartisan basis with an eye toward avoiding unrelated policy fights.
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McCarthy is going to be forced to beg for Democratic support in the House to get both the CR and the eventual budget passed. And given the more liberal rules in calling for a vote on the speaker’s ouster, McCarthy is almost certain to face a vote of “no confidence” in his leadership.
“The challenge for McCarthy, and I’ll be real honest with you, is that if he works with the Democrats, obviously, the Democrats are not going to do it for free. They want something. So, it’s going to be a compromise – one of those really bad words in Washington for some reason,” Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) told CNN. “Then you’re going to find a resolution introduced on the floor to vacate the chair.”
One GOP lawmaker acknowledged there have been conversations among conservative hardliners about using a “motion to vacate” — a procedural tool that forces a floor vote to oust the speaker — to gain leverage in the funding fight, if they feel like McCarthy isn’t sticking to his spending promises or gives too much away to Democrats.
McCarthy has been trying to make the point to the Freedom Caucus that if there’s a government shutdown, it will sidetrack the investigations into Biden wrongdoing.
“If we shut down, all of government shuts it down — investigations and everything else — it hurts the American public,” the speaker said on Fox News last week.
The key for McCarthy will be to craft a rule to bring the CR to the floor that would be supported by the Freedom Caucus. That rule is routinely supported by the House majority as a procedural measure — until recently. In June, several members of the Freedom Caucus tanked a rule vote that would have brought several measures favored by the leadership to the floor for a vote. The Freedom Caucus was venting their anger over the recent debt limit vote that McCarthy wrangled through the House.
McCarthy does not want to be in the position of going hat-in-hand to the Democrats to keep the government running.
Over the next 30-90 days, we can expect at least one motion to “vacate the chair” and force McCarthy to scramble for the votes to stay speaker. It won’t be an edifying spectacle to see the effort by his own party to oust him. But McCarthy has no choice if he wants to continue to play the game.