House Speaker Kevin McCarthy canceled a series of planned votes on Monday amid negotiations with 11 conservative rebels who have frozen the chamber.
Mr. McCarthy’s allies said the decision to scrap votes was a positive development. It comes after Mr. McCarthy met privately with some of the conservative lawmakers who have blocked GOP initiatives from coming to the House floor.
“We aired our issues,” said Rep. Ralph Norman, South Carolina Republican. “We want to see this move forward as a body.”
Rep. Bob Good, a key GOP holdout, said that progress was being made between the rebels and Mr. McCarthy.
“I think you’re going to see an agreement to move forward in the next day or two on moving the legislation we wanted to move last week,” said Mr. Good, Virginia Republican.
Conservatives allied with the House Freedom Caucus are upset that Mr. McCarthy ignored their opposition and pushed through legislation suspending the debt limit until after the 2024 elections with help from House Democrats. Last week, to signal that their votes could not be taken for granted, 11 GOP lawmakers blocked a slew of GOP priorities from coming to the House floor.
On the losing end of the conservative blockade are bills prohibiting the Biden administration from banning gas stoves and requiring Congress to approve any regulation costing the economy more than $100 million annually.
Given the narrow House majority, Mr. McCarthy can only lose four GOP lawmakers on any vote before having to rely on Democrats as happened with the debt limit deal. Democrats, however, were not willing to bail out Mr. McCarthy last week.
The conservative blockade went on for nearly two days, prompting Mr. McCarthy to send lawmakers home early for the weekend. House lawmakers returned to Washington on Monday and were set to vote upon a series of noncontroversial bills as a test of conservative resolve.
Those votes were scrapped, however. Instead, Mr. McCarthy is slated to address the entire House GOP conference and afterward, lawmakers are expected to vote on bringing to the floor the ban on gas stoves.
Rep. Matt Gaetz said the blockade would end for the time being as Mr. McCarthy has agreed to reopen negotiations on a “power-sharing” agreement with conservative hard-liners.
“The power-sharing agreement that we entered into in January with Speaker McCarthy must be renegotiated,” said Mr. Gaetz, Florida Republican. “He understood that, we understood that.”
The Freedom Caucus nearly tanked Mr. McCarthy’s speakership bid this year. In exchange for allowing Mr. McCarthy’s ascension, the group pushed through a rules package that decentralized the power of congressional leadership.
The crux of the overhaul rests on a provision letting any lawmaker force a vote on retaining the speaker, a threat that looms over Mr. McCarthy’s standoff with the conservative rebels.
Hard-liners have not expressly committed to ousting Mr. McCarthy yet. Instead, they are pushing for commitments that Mr. McCarthy only pass legislation with GOP votes in the future.
“We want him to choose us as his coalition partner, not the Democrats,” said Mr. Gaetz. “We can’t live in a world in which the Democrats are the coalition partner on the substantive and we’re the coalition partner on the frivolous. And that’s what we’re trying to work through.”
They also want Mr. McCarthy to agree to cut $130 billion from the upcoming government funding bill. The demand contradicts Mr. McCarthy’s debt limit agreement with the White House, which keeps domestic spending flat while hiking the defense budget by more than 3%.
• Haris Alic can be reached at halic@washingtontimes.com.
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