House conservatives threaten push to oust McCarthy over debt deal

Conservative angst over the debt deal is threatening to trigger Kevin McCarthy’s biggest fear — a push to oust him from the speakership.

Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) on Tuesday became the first House conservative to explicitly state he is considering a push to strip McCarthy of the gavel over his recent deal with President Joe Biden.

“Absolutely,” Bishop told POLITICO in an interview, when asked about using the tool to force out a sitting speaker. “It is inescapable to me. It has to be done.”

The procedure Bishop is considering would essentially trigger a vote of no confidence against McCarthy — a tool that’s been weaponized by the conservative House Freedom Caucus against the past two speakers in attempts to keep party leaders from leaning too much towards the center. It would only take one House member to decide to trigger the vote, which would then require a simple majority to oust the speaker.

It’s not clear yet if Bishop will go ahead with his threat: He noted he wants support from other colleagues before he takes such a move: “I don’t make single decisions like that alone. And so it depends on what the members who have courage” also do, he said.

And Bishop isn’t alone: Other conservatives have indicated they’re considering drastic measures over a debt-and-budget deal that they despise.

That includes Rep. Ken Buck, who raised the issue on a private call with House Freedom Caucus members on Tuesday. Buck asked the group’s chair, Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), whether any of his fellow members were planning to trigger what’s known as a motion to vacate, the Colorado Republican recalled in an interview Tuesday.

On the call, Buck claimed that McCarthy’s deal violated his promise to conservatives during the January speaker fight, when he promised to return Congress to pre-pandemic spending levels. Perry’s response, according to Buck, was: “Let’s see, it’s premature.”

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a longtime McCarthy antagonizer, also suggested a vote of no confidence could be in the cards depending on the outcome of this week’s vote.

“If a majority of Republicans are against a piece of legislation and you use Democrats to pass it, that would immediately be a black-letter violation of the deal we had with McCarthy” Gaetz told Newsmax on Tuesday. “And it would likely trigger an immediate motion to vacate.”

Publicly, though, few Freedom Caucus members are willing to go that far even as they trash the McCarthy-Biden deal. During a press conference hosted mainly by members of the House Freedom Caucus on Tuesday, members were asked who believed ousting McCarthy was on the table. Only Bishop raised his hand.

“We are not there yet. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” said Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), who added that he may change his mind if the debt deal does clear the House. ”We’re focused right now on making sure that bill doesn’t pass. If it does pass, then we’ll see where we are.”

McCarthy, for his part, shrugged off the ouster threat.

“I’m not sure what, in the bill, people are concerned about,” he told reporters, touting the spending cuts and changes to work requirements. “We couldn’t get everything we wanted … [but] these are major victories.”

“I think it is an easy vote for Republicans to vote for it,” he added.

McCarthy is meeting with some conservative members Tuesday afternoon amid the blowback.

Conservatives for months have lined up behind McCarthy, explicitly saying they are not looking to push him out, though his allies have been concerned about such an effort since January. McCarthy agreed to rules during the speaker’s race that would allow just a single member to trigger that vote.

McCarthy has vociferously defended the agreement he reached with the White House. And for weeks, he has side-stepped questions about whether he was concerned that his right flank would disagree with the final product.

But the second the debt deal came out — and even in the days beforehand — conservatives started to voice their displeasure.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) on a radio show on Tuesday called the deal a “betrayal of the power sharing arrangement that we put in place” among the House GOP. He added that if he can’t squash the package, either in the Rules Committee or on the floor, “then we’re going to have to then regroup and figure out the whole leadership arrangement again” — a veiled threat against the speaker.

He also told reporters after the Tuesday press conference: “Today, we ought to be seeking to have something that we can report out unanimously, and right now this bill, in my opinion, is not that — so they either need to amend it, change it or pull it down.”

But not all Freedom Caucus members think pushing out McCarthy is the answer, even if they dislike the bill.

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) — another vocal opponent of the deal — told reporters on Tuesday it would be “unfair” to McCarthy for conservatives to jump to that option.”

Others have privately said they can make a more effective difference by focusing on the upcoming appropriations bill.

One thing many conservatives do agree on: They’re going to fight the debt bill. House Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry (R-Pa.) declined to get into whether members would try to oust McCarthy, but he did tease that the roughly dozen members standing with him at the press conference would do “everything in their power” to stop the deal.