Speaker Kevin McCarthy brokered an end Tuesday to a week-long conservative blockade of legislation coming to the House floor, but there are already signs the truce could be short-term.
In a 218-209 vote, nearly every GOP lawmaker voted to bring a slew of Republican-messaging bills to the House floor. The move came after a tense week of negotiation between Mr. McCarthy and 11 conservatives allied with the House Freedom Caucus.
Last week the hard-liners voted with House Democrats to block GOP initiatives from coming to the floor. The effort, which froze the House, was to show that Mr. McCarthy could not take conservative lawmakers’ votes for granted.
Given the narrow House majority, Mr. McCarthy can only lose four Republicans on any vote before having to rely on Democrats. Indeed, he did exactly that to force a vote on his deal with President Biden to waive the debt limit until after the 2024 election.
The deal passed over the opposition of the Freedom Caucus thanks to a coalition of House Republicans and Democrats. In exchange for restoring order to the House, conservative hard-liners pushed Mr. McCarthy to rule out using the tactic in the future.
“We want him to choose us as his coalition partner, not the Democrats,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz, Florida Republican. “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.”
Conservatives also demanded that Mr. McCarthy back a $130 billion cut to government spending in the upcoming appropriations process.
Mr. McCarthy appeared to agree to the spending cut. House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Kay Granger announced the decision ahead of a planned markup this week.
“By clawing back $115 billion in unnecessary, partisan programs, we will refocus government spending consistent with Republican priorities, keeping total spending 1% lower than if we were operating under a continuing resolution,” the Texas Republican said.
It remains unclear what else was agreed to in order to mollify the Freedom Caucus into dropping its legislation blockade.
Mr. Gaetz said that after meeting with the speaker, “everyone understood” there would negotiations on a “power-sharing” structure with the Freedom Caucus.
“The power-sharing agreement that we entered into in January with Speaker McCarthy must be renegotiated,” Mr. Gaetz said. “He understood that. We understood that. And it has to be renegotiated in a way so that what happened on the debt limit vote would never happen again.”
Mr. McCarthy, for his part, denies any such negotiations will take place.
“I don’t know any power-sharing agreement that came out of that meeting,” said Mr. McCarthy, California Republican. “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.”
The Freedom Caucus nearly tanked Mr. McCarthy’s leadership bid earlier 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. Although hard-liners have not expressly committed to ousting Mr. McCarthy, the threat still underlines his standoff with the Freedom Caucus.
Mr. McCarthy’s relationship with the hard-liners will be tested in the upcoming government funding fight. The pledge to cut more than $100 billion in spending reneges on Mr. McCarthy’s debt limit deal with the White House, which agreed to keep domestic spending flat while raising the defense budget by 3%.
“This is an agreement that the speaker made directly,” said Rep. Pete Aguilar, California Democrat. “He took pains, remember, to get everybody else out of the room to get to a deal with just him and the president. And now he’s walking away from that deal.”
The speaker and his allies have defended the move, arguing that the debt-limit agreement set a ceiling not a floor for budget talks.
Democrats, who control the White House and Senate, are unlikely to back a government-funding bill that reneges on the spending levels set in the debt limit law.
“The Senate is going to mark up to the deal that was made,” Mr. Aguilar said. “House Republicans are going to completely make themselves irrelevant, make their members vote on these deep cuts, and have [a bill] that has no possibility of becoming law.”
Senate opposition to the $130 billion cut would force Mr. McCarthy to rely on House Democrats to keep the government open, pass a short-term funding measure, or risk a shutdown.
None of those options is appealing to the California Republican.
Shutdowns have burned the GOP in the past with voters, while leading to few victories for reining in federal spending. A short-term government funding measure is only slightly better.
The debt limit deal struck by Mr. Biden and Mr. McCarthy includes a provision implementing a 1% spending cut if Congress fails to pass an annual budget by Jan. 1, 2025. The spending cut would affect both defense and domestic programs alike.
“This was an incentive to get both sides to work together on a bipartisan spending deal,” a senior House GOP aide said. “Now it could very likely be the best option of a series of bad options that still leaves us on the hook for cutting popular programs.”
• Haris Alic can be reached at halic@washingtontimes.com.
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