Conservatives shut down House floor as revenge for debt deal

The House’s conservative hardliners aren’t done exacting revenge on GOP leaders for what they see as Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s broken promises during Washington’s debt drama.

A band of roughly a dozen firebrands, mostly in the Trump-aligned Freedom Caucus, have successfully derailed senior Republicans’ plans to pass even widely popular party priorities on the floor this entire week.

And they’re preparing to make trouble beyond choking some floor action. More broadly, McCarthy’s right flank is trying to reassert control over a large swath of the GOP agenda. Already, blocs of conservatives are pushing Republican leaders to ramp up attacks against Biden administration officials — while also pushing for spending cuts this fall that would essentially renege on last week’s debt deal.

Simply put, conservatives who feel they got rolled by McCarthy’s deal with President Joe Biden are now telling him: Not again. Now, they’ve ground the House floor to a halt for the foreseeable future and returned GOP leaders to a familiar spot: forced to assuage hard-right critics who make up a tiny minority of their five-seat majority.

“You got a lot of people mad at us,” said conservative Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), shrugging off the frustration. “I mean, [the bill] is gonna sit in the Senate. We’re not holding up anything. We delayed a vote. It’s not like this is gonna release the missiles to protect Americans.”

McCarthy “knows what he did,” Norman added, referring to members’ claims that the speaker broke promises he made to Freedom Caucus members behind closed doors back in January, which McCarthy has dismissed. And he said while the group hasn’t yet decided whether they would continue to block action on additional bills, they’d be discussing the idea.

Putting it more directly, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) tweeted: “House Leadership couldn’t Hold the Line. Now we Hold the Floor.”

By Wednesday evening, McCarthy and his leadership team were forced to ditch plans to vote at all this week, sending lawmakers home through the weekend. The members behind the idea, meanwhile, has shown little sign of backing down.

“Some of these members, they don’t know what to ask for. There’s numerous different things things they’re frustrated about,” McCarthy told reporters, adding he hoped to reach a deal with them Wednesday night. “We’ve got a small majority. There’s a little chaos going on.”

McCarthy and his leadership team failed again on Wednesday to reach a truce with the conservatives who are refusing to allow floor action — delivering a humiliating blow to the speaker days after a debt agreement that his allies considered a huge victory. And what’s more, it has exposed some long-simmering tensions between McCarthy and his No. 2, after the speaker surprised many in his conference on Wednesday by pointing some fingers himself.

“I wasn’t blindsided. ... And the majority leader runs the floor,” McCarthy said of Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), noting that the protest wasn’t about the bill itself, which was focused on preventing gas stove bans. “It was a conversation that the majority leader had with Clyde and I think it was a miscalculation or misinterpretation of what one said to another. And that’s what started this. ... Like any family, people have differences of opinion.”

At the center of the drama is a claim by conservatives that party leaders, specifically Scalise, had threatened to block Rep. Andrew Clyde’s (R-Ga.) gun-related bill from getting a floor vote in the House unless he stood with the party to advance the debt bill last week.

But Scalise denied the charge, telling reporters Wednesday: “I’ve been very clear to him, there’s no threats. My main interest is passing the bill.”

The Louisiana Republican said he’d told Clyde as recently as last week that they would bring the bill to the floor — but that the GOP was still “a little short on the vote count.”

Conservatives, meanwhile, say they are angry at both McCarthy and Scalise. Norman claimed the No. 2 Republican threatened to block Clyde’s bill from coming to the floor and dismissed claims that Scalise argued otherwise. But he wasn’t giving McCarthy a pass, saying the debt ceiling agreement with Democrats “affects the country a lot more.”

And all that internal drama is a far cry from what GOP leaders expected in the days following a surprisingly anticlimactic debt deal vote. Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), a McCarthy confidante and major player in the debt talks, said Tuesday that this fall’s looming spending fight was a “component” of the standoff. He tried to strike an upbeat note, hoping that a broader “airing” of concerns within the conference might “resolve internal tensions.”

“In a narrow majority, individual members have an outsized power,” McHenry said. “Five members can have a really powerful role in this House.”

The conservative blockade also eroded efforts by McCarthy to tamp down the potential for one member on his right flank to force a vote on ousting the speaker, an outcome that leadership allies have repeatedly dismissed. Nonetheless, Bishop lobbed a short-lived threat to oust the speaker last week.

The North Carolina Republican and others on the right aren’t specifically vowing to deploy that so-called nuclear option — yet.

The roughly dozen conservatives who tanked their own party’s gas stoves bill Tuesday have refused to say publicly what specific concessions they’re seeking in return for allowing McCarthy to bring legislation to the floor again. They have called for reopening the discussion about the deals they cut with McCarthy during the speaker’s race, most of which were made as informal handshake agreements — to the frustration of some of their GOP colleagues.

Some in the conference have privately urged GOP leaders to send lawmakers home to cool off, fearing that the group of rebels is unlikely to relent this week. And as the talks with conservatives dragged on into Wednesday evening, leadership made the call to punt the next House votes to Monday.

And next week, GOP leaders could have an entirely different headache: Some of their moderate members are raising concerns with a bill related to Congress’ ban on federal funding for abortions, known as the Hyde Amendment. GOP leaders held a meeting on that topic later Wednesday with a small group of members, according to three people familiar with the discussions.

Even before Tuesday’s unexpected revolt on the floor, several House conservatives were signaling that they planned to force McCarthy and his leadership team to essentially revisit the spending component of his deal with Biden.

Those Freedom Caucus members, including some who sit on the House appropriations panel, have pushed their leadership to set government funding levels below what McCarthy and the White House agreed to as part of the debt bill. If it doesn’t happen, they warn there won’t be enough GOP votes to carry their own party’s spending bills on the floor this year.

While a final decision on the GOP’s funding figure hasn’t been made, senior Republicans privately expect that their original plans will end up close to the conservative demands. But House Republicans were already drafting their government funding bills to lower levels before the debt deal, and GOP lawmakers tasked with drafting those spending measures are signaling they expect to plow forward with their original plan.

“I’m comfortable going under those caps. I would expect it could be lower,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), who noted that Republicans would use whichever number “helps us get the bill passed” without Democratic help on the floor.

“We have to pass them with primarily Republican votes in a very narrow majority,” Cole said.

Fellow appropriator Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas), a Freedom Caucus member, added that the committee was “working toward that already.”