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Tag: GOP leadership

  • Republicans defy Johnson to force House vote on extending health insurance subsidies

    WASHINGTON — Four House Republicans broke with party leadership on Wednesday to join Democrats in overriding the GOP majority and forcing a vote on extending healthcare tax credits — a defection that underscores the party’s growing vulnerability on economic issues ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

    The healthcare tax credits, which were central to the fight that led to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, are set to expire at the end of the year unless Congress takes action.

    Democrats, and a small but increasingly vocal group of Republicans, warned that allowing the tax credits to lapse would lead to sharp healthcare premium increases for millions of Americans, which could prove a politically perilous outcome in competitive districts.

    House Republicans, including Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), have resisted extending the tax credits, arguing instead for an alternative approach to lowering healthcare costs. But that stance on Wednesday showed that they were at odds with members who say the issue would hurt constituents.

    “I’m pissed for the American people,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) told reporters.

    His remarks came after he joined Republican Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, Robert Bresnahan and Ryan Mackenzie, all from Pennsylvania, in signing a Democrat-led petition that needed 218 signatures to force a floor vote on a bill to extend the healthcare subsidies for three years. The four Republicans were the final votes needed.

    California Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin), who represents a swing district, was not among the Republicans to sign the petition, but he told reporters it is important for leadership to take up the matter sooner than later. Otherwise, he said, it would be a “failure of leadership.”

    “We have members on both sides who believe this is an urgent issue and it is for all of our members in terms of what their constituents are going to have to deal with at the end of the year,” Kiley said. “So, what is wrong with having a vote?”

    Californians are bracing for monthly premiums on the Covered California exchange — a state portal for Obamacare coverage — to soar by 97% on average for 2026. Open enrollment for the coming year runs until Jan. 31.

    Even if the subsidies remained intact, premiums for plans offered by Covered California were set to rise by roughly 10% for 2026, due to spikes in drug prices and other medical services, experts said. But a failure to address the lapsing credits is expected to result in sticker shock across the state and the country. Nearly six in 10 Americans who use the ACA marketplace live in Republican districts.

    A vote on the House measure is expected in January, after the subsidies have already expired. Even if the House effort succeeds, its prospects remain dim in the Senate, where Republicans last week blocked a three-year extension.

    Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has argued against the Democratic extension as “an attempt to disguise the real impact of Obamacare’s spiraling healthcare costs.”

    On Wednesday, after the petition gained enough votes in the House, Thune told reporters the chamber will “cross that bridge when it comes to it.”

    The push in the House underscored a breakdown in Johnson’s control of the chamber as well as the deep divisions among GOP lawmakers on how to address healthcare costs, which polling consistently ranks as a top concern among voters.

    The small rebellion against Johnson came after tensions emerged on healthcare talks in the chamber.

    Johnson had discussed allowing more politically vulnerable GOP lawmakers a chance to vote on bills that would temporarily extend the subsidies while also adding changes such as income caps for beneficiaries.

    But after days of discussions, the leadership sided with the more conservative wing of the party’s conference, which has assailed the subsidies as propping up a failed marketplace through the ACA, which is widely known as Obamacare.

    House Republicans pushed forward Wednesday a 100-plus-page healthcare package without the subsidies, instead focusing on long-sought GOP proposals designed to expand insurance coverage options for small businesses and the self-employed.

    Fitzpatrick and Lawler tried to add a temporary extension of the subsidies to the bill, but were denied.

    “Our only request was a floor vote on this compromise, so that the American People’s voice could be heard on this issue. That request was rejected. Then, at the request of House leadership I, along with my colleagues, filed multiple amendments, and testified at length to those amendments,” Fitzpatrick said. “House leadership then decided to reject every single one of these amendments.”

    After the four Republicans broke with him on Wednesday, Johnson pushed back against the notion that the episode shows he is losing influence over the chamber.

    “I have not lost control of the House,” Johnson said. He instead pointed to a “razor thin margin” in the chamber, which he says allows a few defectors to circumvent leadership.

    “These are not normal times,” he added.

    This article includes reporting from the Associated Press.

    Ana Ceballos, Michael Wilner

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  • Kevin McCarthy’s Brief Speakership Meets Its End

    Kevin McCarthy’s Brief Speakership Meets Its End

    Kevin McCarthy began his 269th day as House speaker by recounting all the times he proved his doubters wrong. In January, after a series of humiliating defeats, the California Republican hung on to become speaker of the House. In the months since, he reminisced, he has narrowly averted the twin crises of a national-debt default and, this past weekend, a government shutdown. “I just don’t give up,” McCarthy told reporters after making one more plea to his party to keep him in his post.

    Today, McCarthy’s streak of defying his skeptics came to an end as a group of his GOP critics joined Democrats to vote him out of the speakership after fewer than nine months in office. The unprecedented move could paralyze the House for days or even weeks, as Congress faces a November 17 deadline for funding the federal government.

    Whether McCarthy is done for good as speaker remains unclear. The vote to remove him will trigger a new election, and McCarthy was coy with reporters earlier in the day about whether he’d try to reclaim the gavel. Assuming he doesn’t, his tenure atop the House—the briefest in nearly 150 years—was as historic as it was short-lived: He won the office after fighting through more ballots than any speaker in a century, and he was the first to be removed in the middle of a term by a vote of the House.

    Few of McCarthy’s 54 predecessors had assumed the speakership with lower expectations. His years rising through the GOP leadership had left him with a reputation as a glad-handing lightweight with few convictions. And his majority seemed ungovernable from the start. He had just a five-vote margin over the Democrats, and was surrounded by hard-liners who demanded confrontation over compromise. McCarthy traded away much of his power as speaker during the marathon series of votes that ended, after 15 rounds, with his election. As part of the horse trade, McCarthy handed his Republican foes the means of his own destruction: the ability for a single member to call, at any time, a vote on whether to remove the speaker.

    “From day one, he knew and everyone knew that he was living on borrowed time,” Representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia told me recently.

    McCarthy’s most ardent Republican critic, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, had made the speaker’s ouster his singular mission even before McCarthy made a surprise reversal on Saturday to avert a government shutdown. Gaetz ultimately persuaded seven Republicans to join him in voting to remove McCarthy via a procedural maneuver known as a motion to vacate the chair.

    Read: Kevin McCarthy finally defies the right

    Democrats faced their own conundrum: Was the speaker they knew a safer bet than a replacement they didn’t? Whichever Republican succeeds McCarthy is likely to be just as conservative and just as beholden to the hard-line faction that deposed him—if not more so. Yet Democrats ultimately decided that McCarthy was not worth rescuing; all 208 in attendance today voted to remove him.

    The speaker had lurched to the right far more often than he governed from the center; he had joined the bulk of the GOP in forgiving former President Donald Trump for his role in fomenting the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, and just a month ago buckled to conservative demands to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. “It is now the responsibility of the Republican members to end the House Republican Civil War,” the House minority leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, declared after a lengthy Democratic Party conference this morning, urging members to support McCarthy’s removal as speaker.

    In the end, McCarthy almost survived only because Democrats struggled to get their members to the Capitol in time for the crucial votes. McCarthy, however, had suffered too many Republican defections for it to matter. The process began with a vote on a motion to table Gaetz’s motion to vacate the chair. Eleven Republicans voted with the entire Democratic caucus to clear the way for McCarthy’s ouster, more than twice as many members as the speaker could afford to lose within his own party. “The office of speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant,” Representative Steve Womack of Arkansas, presiding over the vote, said after the 216–210 roll call concluded.

    No obvious successor has emerged. McCarthy’s top lieutenant, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, is popular with conservatives but is now undergoing treatment for blood cancer. Majority Whip Tom Emmer or GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik could also emerge as alternatives, but neither has been openly campaigning for the job.

    Ever the optimist in public, McCarthy seemed to sense before the votes that the run of good fortune and political survival that had taken him to the nation’s third-highest office would not last much longer. He had struck a defiant tone, defending to the end his decision to keep the government open even if it cost him his job. “If you throw out a speaker” for averting a government shutdown, he warned reporters and, implicitly, his Republican colleagues, “then I think we’re in a really bad place.”

    Russell Berman

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