The House broke a week-long impasse on Tuesday after conservative hardliners ended their blockade of Republican-backed legislation coming to the floor.
In a 218-209 vote, nearly every single GOP lawmaker voted to bring a slew of GOP messaging bills to the House floor. The move came after a tense week of negotiation between Speaker Kevin McCarthy and 11 GOP conservatives allied with the House Freedom Caucus.
“We aired our issues,” said Rep. Ralph Norman, South Carolina Republican who backed the blockade “We want to see this move forward as a body.”
The House will now consider legislation to prevent President Biden from banning gas stoves. It will also weigh a bill to roll back a new rule by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on pistol braces.
The pistol brace legislation and its author, Rep. Andrew S. Clyde, were part of the reason why conservative hard-liners initially revolted against Mr. McCarthy. Last week, Mr. Clyde publicly accused GOP leaders of threatening to kill his legislation if he voted against Mr. McCarthy’s deal with President Biden to raise the nation’s debt limit past the 2024 elections.
“I was threatened that if I voted against the closed rule to the debt ceiling agreement, it would be very difficult to bring my pistol stabilizing brace bill to the House floor for a vote,” said Mr. Clyde, Georgia Republican.
The claim stirred to action the Freedom Caucus, which was already fuming that Mr. McCarthy had used Democratic votes to pass the debt limit deal over their opposition.
“We’re not going to live in the era of the imperial speaker anymore,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, a Freedom Caucus ally who voted to block the bills. “We had one of our members threatened.”
While hard-liners see bringing Mr. Clyde’s legislation to the floor as a step forward, they also say that Mr. McCarthy has a long way to go to earn back their trust. Specifically, they want Mr. McCarthy to rule out using Democratic votes to pass legislation over their opposition — as happened with the debt limit deal.
Conservatives have also demanded Mr. McCarthy back a $130 billion cut to government spending in the upcoming appropriations process.
Mr. McCarthy agreed to the latter in an effort to end the blockade, but says a power-sharing agreement with the Freedom Caucus is not on the table.
“I don’t know any power-sharing agreement that came out of that meeting,” he said Tuesday. “If I’m going to create an agreement with five people out of a [220-person GOP] conference… I would have to have more than 400 million different agreements. It doesn’t work.”
Mr. McCarthy added that any agreement would have to be “with the entire conference.”
Correction: A previous version of this article misstated Mr. McCarthy’s position toward the Freedom Caucus.
• Haris Alic can be reached at halic@washingtontimes.com.
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