Fallout on debt bill slows House
Conservatives block legislation
WASHINGTON — House conservatives staged a mini-revolt Tuesday in retaliation for Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s leadership on last week’s vote to raise the debt ceiling, with the right wing banding together to block progress on a mixture of bills and vent their frustration.
Led by outspoken members of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of 11 Republicans broke with their party on an otherwise routine procedural vote that threw the day’s schedule — and the rest of the week — into disarray. It’s the first such procedural rule vote to fail in nearly two decades.
The group is among some of the same conservative Republicans who tried to stop the debt ceiling bill from advancing last week and who then threatened to try to oust McCarthy after passage of the package that President Biden signed into law. Short of taking that step, they have demanded a meeting a with McCarthy, leaving it unclear how the standoff will be resolved.
“We’re frustrated with the way this place is operating,” said Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, one of the more outspoken members of the group. “We’re not going to live in the era of the imperial speaker anymore.”
At issue is not just a gas stove bill and others that are now indefinitely stalled as the conservatives wage their protest, but the political standing of the House Republican majority. McCarthy is working with just a four-seat majority, which gives a small bloc of lawmakers considerable power to gain concessions from him.
“We’re trying to resolve internal tensions within the House Republicans. And from time to time you have to have an airing within your family and I think that’s part of what happened today," said Representative Patrick McHenry, a North Carolina Republican.
Just hours earlier Republican leaders were extolling how the House Republicans had learned to work together as a team after the rocky start and the spectacle of McCarthy’s protracted election to become speaker.
“In sports, it’s called a game plan,” said Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the top GOP vote-counter and a former hockey coach. “The debt limit last week displayed just how far House Republicans have come as a team.”
Representative Dan Bishop, of North Carolina said the conservative group was now demanding that McCarthy meet with them to hash out an agreement for how the House would operate in the future.
For his part, McCarthy has targeted his colleagues in the Senate, saying his chamber has no plans to take up legislation that would boost military aid to Ukraine and other defense spending above the levels allowed in the debt limit package.
McCarthy’s posture puts him at odds with Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, and majority leader Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, who assured defense hawks in their chamber that the bipartisan debt deal would not prevent Congress from passing supplemental funding for Ukraine beyond the agreement’s $886 billion for defense in the next fiscal year.
“I’m not going to prejudge what some of them [in the Senate] do, but if they think they're writing a supplemental because they want to go around an agreement we just made, it's not going anywhere,” McCarthy told Punchbowl News on Monday.