What's next for McCarthy's fight with the far right

Speaker Kevin McCarthy sent lawmakers home early last week, unable to move legislation on the House floor amid an uprising by a group of conservative hard-liners upset over a deal with the White House to increase the nation’s debt limit.

With lawmakers returning to the Capitol on Monday, there’s no sign that McCarthy is any less stuck than he was last week.

“We could be sitting here all week just twiddling our thumbs,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), one of the 11 members to grind lawmaking on the House floor to a halt last week.

The faction of Republicans revolting against McCarthy are still grumbling and are considering tanking more bills teed up for floor action this week. “I’m not going into this week assuming that any of the rules will pass,” a senior GOP aide told POLITICO Sunday night, warning that hard-liners might vote down a House rule just as they did last week for the first time in two decades.

The group’s gripes have been hard to pin down, with wide-ranging accusations of broken promises and strong-arm tactics aimed at various GOP leaders. But the upshot of their protest is simple: McCarthy cannot move any significant legislation across the House floor until the rebel faction is brought back into the fold.

McCarthy was somewhat critical of the rebels last week, suggesting that the group did not have a goal in mind. But as of Monday morning, it’s clear that the hard-right faction does have an ask, which it has guarded closely.

Two people close to the group say the hard-liners are discussing ways to ensure next year’s spending bills are written at fiscal 2022 levels — that is, below the caps McCarthy agreed to with Biden. That, they say, would fulfill a promise McCarthy made during the speakership fight in January.

The same senior GOP aide who expressed skepticism that the House might pass any rules this week said it’s not out of the realm of possibility that McCarthy could throw the angry conservatives a bone and instruct appropriators to do just that. But those bills would die in the Democratic-majority Senate, meaning Congress will ultimately have to swallow the numbers McCarthy negotiated with Biden. “And these guys, yet again, are going to get pissed,” the aide added.

Burchett’s role in the revolt in particular is noteworthy because he’s far from McCarthy’s worst nightmare within the GOP caucus. He consistently backed McCarthy for speaker back in January, he’s not a member of the ever-restive Freedom Caucus, and he has kept his criticism focused on policies, not on personalities.

But Burchett is still smarting over the debt-ceiling deal and it not ready to look past his concerns yet.

“I just feel like we gave too much,” he said. “Conservatives aren’t represented at the table, fiscal conservatives, when the decisions are being made.”

Any solution, Burchett said, lies with McCarthy — and he’s pushing for a group meeting between the speaker and his critics. While McCarthy has met with and spoken to a few of the 11, Burchett said, “That divide and conquer stuff just isn’t working.”

“I just wish we could put all the egos aside and just come down here and meet,” he said. “I just feel like it needs to be McCarthy … not a bunch of the ‘advisers’ or whatever. Not one-on-one, but all at once, and just listen to what they say for 30 minutes.”

Burchett is among those grumbling about leadership’s alleged arm-twisting and retaliatory threats aimed at the conservative dissidents. Most notable among those complaints was an alleged threat leveled by House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) to keep a bill sponsored by hard-right Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) off the floor amid the debt-limit wrangle. Scalise denied the report, and Clyde’s bill — which would overturn a Biden administration firearms rule — is scheduled for a vote this week.

But Burchett said he was concerned about an entirely separate episode of intimidation he witnessed, one that didn’t involve Scalise at all, but someone he called “the chairman” whom he refused to identify further.

“It just needs to stop,” he said. “Everybody has a cell phone and everybody’s capable of recording these things — and eventually one of these little beat-downs is going to be recorded, and it’s not going to look good, and they need to cool it.”

As for who is responsible for that behavior? “It ends at the top,” he continued. “And I’ve said this many times: Until there is a public denunciation … if they don’t call it out, then they condone it, in my opinion.”