House clears final procedural hurdle before expected passage of debt bill

The House on Wednesday cleared a final, crucial hurdle before it can pass legislation to raise the nation’s debt limit, following weeks of nonstop drama, including rumblings of a conservative rebellion to sink the bill.

Now all that’s left in the House is passing the legislation and sending it to the Senate.

GOP leadership is confident that the party will be able to supply a majority of the Republican conference's votes needed to clear the bipartisan debt deal through the House in a matter of hours — though Democrats say Republicans privately have pledged to hit a higher threshold of 150 votes.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) worked Wednesday afternoon to try to shore up GOP support for clearing the procedural hurdle, a rule laying out the parameters for debate on the debt bill. But Republicans privately indicated shortly before the vote started that they would likely need help from Democrats.

A broad swath of Democrats held off from voting as they waited to see how much support Republicans could put up, but some members were spotted grabbing "green cards," an indication they ultimately planned to vote for the rule. As the vote was closing, with the rule short of the requisite tally, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries held up a green card, alerting the Dems who planned to vote yes that they could move to push the measure across the finish line.

The rule was eventually approved 241-187, with 29 GOP lawmakers opposing it and more than 50 Democrats helping approve it.

It's a U-turn from earlier Wednesday, when Republicans were adamant ahead of the procedural vote that they wouldn’t ultimately need to lean on Democrats. Emmer said “Republicans are the ones who are running this place, and Republicans will pass the bills, and that’s what we are doing.”

But the prospect that Republicans could need help to approve the rule sparked intense behind-the-scenes speculation about what Democrats could try to demand in return for their votes. Typically, it is something the party in power does on its own.

Democrats were discussing trying to extract concessions on the floor during the rule vote, such as directing more Democratic-directed earmark funding, according to two people familiar with the situation.

But McCarthy, after the vote, said he did not cut a deal with Democrats in order to get their backing. Jeffries, asked whether Republicans had made any assurances to Democrats in exchange for helping pass the rule, declined to elaborate. Democrats had “bailed out the majority from their own extremism,” he said.

Meanwhile, Republicans held round-the-clock meetings as they tried to drive up the number of GOP members who would support the debt bill during the final vote on Wednesday evening. More than 30 GOP lawmakers, including some of McCarthy’s most vocal critics, have publicly said they intend to vote against the deal, while dozens more remain publicly undecided. Some Republicans who have said they are opposed to the debt bill had supported the rule, meaning those numbers won't look the same at the passage vote.

McCarthy declined to discuss the whip count on the final vote Wednesday, but the speaker downplayed signs of divisions within his own ranks.

“You know, what matters is it’s going to become law. … Everybody has a right to their own opinion. But on history, I'd want to be here with this bill today,” McCarthy said.

Even if McCarthy loses dozens of his own members during Wednesday evening’s vote, the debt bill is still expected to easily pass. A large number of Democrats are expected to help during the final passage of the bill, which raises the debt ceiling until 2025.

The last-minute wrangling caps off a frenzied 24 hours to avoid several pitfalls in the Republican conference. McCarthy and his allies defanged an attempt to kill the debt bill in the Rules Committee on Tuesday, after Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who kept Washington in suspense throughout the day, voted to advance the legislation out of the panel.

And McCarthy offered another carrot to potential holdouts on Wednesday morning, telling reporters that he would establish a “bipartisan commission” to look into the nation’s spending and debt that would be “looking long-term to solve this problem once and for all.”

The Californian faced fresh chatter Tuesday from a band of conservatives who floated trying to strip him of the speaker’s gavel over the bipartisan deal he cut with President Joe Biden. Such a move would be all but guaranteed to fail — but would also reignite angst between McCarthy and his right flank that had cooled since the contentious speaker’s race.

McCarthy and his allies are downplaying the threat that a motion to vacate could end up booting him from the top House office. McCarthy also made a swaggering pitch to his members during a closed-door hours-long conference meeting Tuesday night, which several GOP lawmakers compared to a pep rally meant to drive up support for the agreement.

“If you think I failed you, I’m sorry,” McCarthy told Republicans. “But if you think I failed, I think you’re wrong.”

Notably, talk of removing McCarthy from the speakership was mostly muted after the closed-door meeting. And other high-profile conservatives and members of the House Freedom Caucus also dismissed the possibility of trying to boot McCarthy from the speakership.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a former Freedom Caucus chair and McCarthy ally, called talk of using the motion to vacate a “terrible idea.” And Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), who is opposing the debt bill, said “we’re not talking about" trying to boot McCarthy. He also questioned if the immediate reaction to opposing a bill should be, “Uh oh, you didn’t like something. It’s the MTV," referring to the technical name of an attempt to oust a speaker, motion to vacate.

McCarthy’s team is pushing for an overwhelming Republican vote for the deal he negotiated, knowing that the more GOP yeas he can put on the board, the more leadership can isolate the small crop of conservatives contemplating mutiny — strengthening McCarthy’s hand as he heads into new governing challenges, not to mention the 2024 elections.

And his allies are warning that they believe some of the bill’s most ardent opponents made a “strategic error” by coming out so strongly before a deal had even been reached. Those tensions and “raw feelings”, GOP negotiators warn, will reopen old wounds.

“We have some relationship repair that needs to happen,” Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), the lead GOP negotiator, said. “[Chip Roy] and I have talked about this a bit. We have discussed we’re going to need to sit down and talk … probably over several bottles of something.”

Nancy Vu, Rachael Bade and Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.