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Tag: House Freedom Caucus

  • Democrats poised to trigger government shutdown if White House won’t meet demands for ICE reform

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    Senate Democrats are threatening to block legislation that would fund the Department of Homeland Security and several other agencies Thursday, potentially bringing the government a step closer to a partial shutdown if Republicans and the White House do not agree to new restrictions on President Donald Trump’s surge of immigration enforcement.As the country reels from the deaths of two protesters at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis, irate Senate Democrats laid out a list of demands ahead of a Thursday morning test vote, including that officers take off their masks and identify themselves and obtain warrants for arrest. If those are not met, Democrats say they are prepared to block the wide-ranging spending bill, denying Republicans the votes they need to pass it and triggering a shutdown at midnight on Friday.Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday that Democrats won’t provide needed votes until U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is “reined in and overhauled.”“The American people support law enforcement, they support border security, they do not support ICE terrorizing our streets and killing American citizens,” Schumer said.There were some signs of possible progress as the White House has appeared open to trying to strike a deal with Democrats to avert a shutdown. The two sides were talking as of Wednesday evening, according to a person familiar with the negotiations who requested anonymity to speak about the private talks. One possible option discussed would be to strip the funding for the Homeland Security Department from the larger bill, as Schumer has requested, and extend it for a short period to allow time for negotiations, the person said. The rest of the bill would fund government agencies until September.Still, with no agreement yet and an uncertain path ahead, the standoff threatened to plunge the country into another shutdown just two months after Democrats blocked a spending bill over expiring federal health care subsidies, a dispute that closed the government for 43 days as Republicans refused to negotiate.That shutdown ended when a small group of moderate Democrats broke away to strike a deal with Republicans, but Democrats are more unified this time after the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good by federal agents.Democrats lay out their demandsThere’s a lot of “unanimity and shared purpose” within the Democratic caucus, Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith said after a lunch meeting Wednesday.“Boil it all down, what we are talking about is that these lawless ICE agents should be following the same rules that your local police department does,” Smith said. “There has to be accountability.”Amid the administration’s immigration crackdown, Schumer said Democrats are asking the White House to “end roving patrols” in cities and coordinate with local law enforcement on immigration arrests, including requiring tighter rules for warrants.Democrats also want an enforceable code of conduct so agents are held accountable when they violate rules. Schumer said agents should be required to have “masks off, body cameras on” and carry proper identification, as is common practice in most law enforcement agencies.The Democratic caucus is united in those “common sense reforms” and the burden is on Republicans to accept them, Schumer said, as he has pushed for the Homeland spending to be separated out to avoid a broader shutdown.Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has indicated that he might be open to considering some of the Democrats’ demands, but he encouraged Democrats and the White House to talk and find agreement.Many obstacles to a dealAs the two sides negotiated, it was still unclear whether they could agree on anything that would satisfy Democrats who want Trump’s aggressive crackdown to end.The White House had invited some Democrats for a discussion to better understand their positions and avoid a partial government shutdown, a senior White House official said, but the meeting did not happen. The official requested anonymity to discuss the private invitation.The House passed the six remaining funding bills last week and sent them to the Senate as a package, making it more difficult to strip out the homeland security portion as Democrats have demanded. Republicans could break the package apart with the consent of all 100 senators or through a series of votes that would extend past the Friday deadline.Even if the Senate can resolve the issue, House Republicans have said they do not want any changes to the bill they have passed. In a letter to Trump on Tuesday, the conservative House Freedom Caucus wrote that its members stand with the president and ICE.“The package will not come back through the House without funding for the Department of Homeland Security,” according to the letter.Republican oppositionSeveral Republican senators have said they would be fine with Democrats’ request to separate the Homeland Security funds for further debate and pass the other bills in the package. But it might be more difficult to for Democrats to find broad GOP support for their demands on ICE.North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis said he’s OK with separating the bills, but is opposed to the Democrats’ proposal to require the immigration enforcement officers to unmask and show their faces, even as he blamed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for decisions that he said are “tarnishing” the agency’s reputation.“You know, there’s a lot of vicious people out there, and they’ll take a picture of your face, and the next thing you know, your children or your wife or your husband are being threatened at home,” Tillis said. “And that’s just the reality of the world that we’re in.”Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said that “what happened over the weekend is a tragedy,” but Democrats shouldn’t punish Americans with a shutdown and a “political stunt.”Democrats say they won’t back down.“It is truly a moral moment,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. “I think we need to take a stand.”___Associated Press writer Michelle Price in Washington contributed to this report.

    WASHINGTON —

    Senate Democrats are threatening to block legislation that would fund the Department of Homeland Security and several other agencies Thursday, potentially bringing the government a step closer to a partial shutdown if Republicans and the White House do not agree to new restrictions on President Donald Trump’s surge of immigration enforcement.

    As the country reels from the deaths of two protesters at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis, irate Senate Democrats laid out a list of demands ahead of a Thursday morning test vote, including that officers take off their masks and identify themselves and obtain warrants for arrest. If those are not met, Democrats say they are prepared to block the wide-ranging spending bill, denying Republicans the votes they need to pass it and triggering a shutdown at midnight on Friday.

    Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday that Democrats won’t provide needed votes until U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is “reined in and overhauled.”

    “The American people support law enforcement, they support border security, they do not support ICE terrorizing our streets and killing American citizens,” Schumer said.

    There were some signs of possible progress as the White House has appeared open to trying to strike a deal with Democrats to avert a shutdown. The two sides were talking as of Wednesday evening, according to a person familiar with the negotiations who requested anonymity to speak about the private talks. One possible option discussed would be to strip the funding for the Homeland Security Department from the larger bill, as Schumer has requested, and extend it for a short period to allow time for negotiations, the person said. The rest of the bill would fund government agencies until September.

    Still, with no agreement yet and an uncertain path ahead, the standoff threatened to plunge the country into another shutdown just two months after Democrats blocked a spending bill over expiring federal health care subsidies, a dispute that closed the government for 43 days as Republicans refused to negotiate.

    That shutdown ended when a small group of moderate Democrats broke away to strike a deal with Republicans, but Democrats are more unified this time after the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good by federal agents.

    Democrats lay out their demands

    There’s a lot of “unanimity and shared purpose” within the Democratic caucus, Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith said after a lunch meeting Wednesday.

    “Boil it all down, what we are talking about is that these lawless ICE agents should be following the same rules that your local police department does,” Smith said. “There has to be accountability.”

    Amid the administration’s immigration crackdown, Schumer said Democrats are asking the White House to “end roving patrols” in cities and coordinate with local law enforcement on immigration arrests, including requiring tighter rules for warrants.

    Democrats also want an enforceable code of conduct so agents are held accountable when they violate rules. Schumer said agents should be required to have “masks off, body cameras on” and carry proper identification, as is common practice in most law enforcement agencies.

    The Democratic caucus is united in those “common sense reforms” and the burden is on Republicans to accept them, Schumer said, as he has pushed for the Homeland spending to be separated out to avoid a broader shutdown.

    Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has indicated that he might be open to considering some of the Democrats’ demands, but he encouraged Democrats and the White House to talk and find agreement.

    Many obstacles to a deal

    As the two sides negotiated, it was still unclear whether they could agree on anything that would satisfy Democrats who want Trump’s aggressive crackdown to end.

    The White House had invited some Democrats for a discussion to better understand their positions and avoid a partial government shutdown, a senior White House official said, but the meeting did not happen. The official requested anonymity to discuss the private invitation.

    The House passed the six remaining funding bills last week and sent them to the Senate as a package, making it more difficult to strip out the homeland security portion as Democrats have demanded. Republicans could break the package apart with the consent of all 100 senators or through a series of votes that would extend past the Friday deadline.

    Even if the Senate can resolve the issue, House Republicans have said they do not want any changes to the bill they have passed. In a letter to Trump on Tuesday, the conservative House Freedom Caucus wrote that its members stand with the president and ICE.

    “The package will not come back through the House without funding for the Department of Homeland Security,” according to the letter.

    Republican opposition

    Several Republican senators have said they would be fine with Democrats’ request to separate the Homeland Security funds for further debate and pass the other bills in the package. But it might be more difficult to for Democrats to find broad GOP support for their demands on ICE.

    North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis said he’s OK with separating the bills, but is opposed to the Democrats’ proposal to require the immigration enforcement officers to unmask and show their faces, even as he blamed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for decisions that he said are “tarnishing” the agency’s reputation.

    “You know, there’s a lot of vicious people out there, and they’ll take a picture of your face, and the next thing you know, your children or your wife or your husband are being threatened at home,” Tillis said. “And that’s just the reality of the world that we’re in.”

    Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said that “what happened over the weekend is a tragedy,” but Democrats shouldn’t punish Americans with a shutdown and a “political stunt.”

    Democrats say they won’t back down.

    “It is truly a moral moment,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. “I think we need to take a stand.”

    ___

    Associated Press writer Michelle Price in Washington contributed to this report.

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  • GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene will leave Congress after five turbulent years

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    (CNN) — Georgia GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced on Friday that she will be resigning from office in January, stunning some in her own party after a shocking, monthslong political pivot that catapulted her from one of President Donald Trump’s closest allies to one of his top antagonists.

    Greene dropped the news in a post on social media just days after her public falling out with Trump, who called her a “traitor” and said he’d support a GOP challenge to her House seat next year.

    In her statement, Greene said she wanted to avoid a nasty primary — while predicting that the GOP would lose its House majority in the midterms.

    “I have too much self-respect and dignity, love my family way too much, and do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms,” Greene said in a statement.

    The decision to step down will cap a turbulent five-year career in Washington, during which Greene was publicly condemned for violent rhetoric on the House floor and booted from the hard-right Freedom Caucus over a feud with a fellow Republican — while wielding extraordinary influence in her party as one of Trump’s most trusted political allies on Capitol Hill.

    In the days since Trump’s “traitor” comments, Greene faced direct threats against her life, the congresswoman said in an interview with CNN. In the same interview, the conservative firebrand apologized for her own years of “toxic” rhetoric — comments that reverberated around the country amid an increasingly violent political culture.

    Greene had been contemplating her resignation for over a week, according to a person close to her, as the threats against her continued to escalate amid her falling out with the president.

    Her next steps remain unclear. But the Georgia congresswoman, who just months earlier had been discussed as a potential candidate for her state’s high-stakes Senate race, currently has no plans to run for any office, the person added.

    CNN has reached out to the White House for comment.

    In recent weeks, Greene criticized the president for being too focused on foreign policy and not doing enough with his domestic agenda at home — going as far as to side with Democrats over the contentious issue of costly enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that expire next month.

    Greene also became one of the White House’s most vocal critics of the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case files. She and fellow Republican Rep. Thomas Massie accused the White House of attempting to conceal details of the files. Following fierce resistance, Trump ultimately signed an Epstein transparency measure into law earlier this week.

    “I’m very sad for our country but so happy for my friend Marjorie. I’ll miss her tremendously. She embodies what a true Representative should be,” Massie wrote on X, shortly after Greene’s announcement.

    Greene’s exit is likely to be quickly felt in the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson must navigate a razor-thin majority. The Republican leader already faces the tall order in the new year of corralling his fractious conference to move on major legislation and further the president’s priorities.

    First elected in 2020, the Georgia congresswoman was known for vocally touting conspiracy theories and for her incendiary rhetoric, including prior remarks endorsing violence against Democrats in Congress.

    Her first year in office, a Democratic-led House under then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi took the extraordinary step of stripping Greene of her committee assignments because of her past rhetoric endorsing violence and claims the deadly Sandy Hook and Parkland school shootings had been staged.

    In a sign of Greene’s recent political turnaround, the Georgia congresswoman praised Pelosi’s leadership in an interview with CNN, saying of the longtime Democrat, “She had an incredible career for her party. … I served under her speakership in my first term of Congress, and I’m very impressed at her ability to get things done.”

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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    Sarah Ferris, Kaitlan Collins, Kaanita Iyer and CNN

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  • Kevin McCarthy’s Defeat Could Cost Republicans the House

    Kevin McCarthy’s Defeat Could Cost Republicans the House

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    Few Americans are shedding tears for Kevin McCarthy. The former House speaker engendered little public sympathy as he tried, and ultimately failed, to wrangle a narrow and fractured Republican majority into a functioning governing body. His ouster on Tuesday has, in the short term, paralyzed Congress and increased the likelihood of a prolonged government shutdown in the coming weeks.

    Republicans are only now beginning to contemplate the significant political ramifications of tossing McCarthy. Retaining their narrow majority in the House next year was already going to be a challenge. But the GOP will now have to defend its four-seat advantage without a leader who, for all of McCarthy’s political shortcomings, was widely recognized as its best fundraiser, candidate recruiter, and campaign strategist. “They just took out our best player,” a rueful Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma told me on Thursday, referring to the eight renegade Republicans who voted to remove McCarthy.

    Cole, the chair of the Rules Committee and a 22-year veteran of the House, was a McCarthy loyalist to the end. He could become his successor if neither of the declared GOP candidates, Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Representative Jim Jordan, the Judiciary Committee chair, are able to secure the votes needed to become speaker. Cole has declined offers to run for the job himself—he told me the chances that the gavel lands in his hands are “very low, and if I have anything to say about it, zero”—but as someone with good relationships across the party, he’s seen as a solid backup.

    For now, Cole is, like other McCarthy allies, still seething at the unprecedented vote to overthrow the speaker and is backing efforts to change the House rules so that whoever replaces McCarthy does not face the same ever-present threat. “We put sharp knives in the hands of children, and they used them,” Cole said.

    Read: Kevin McCarthy’s brief speakership meets its end

    In an hour-long phone interview, he told me that the hard-liners’ revolt against McCarthy could “very easily” cost the GOP its majority next year. “I think these guys materially hurt our chances to hold the majority,” Cole said. “That’s just the reality.”

    McCarthy is neither a policy wonk nor a brilliant legislator. But his strengths  were underappreciated, Cole said. Committees he controlled raised more than half a billion dollars for the House Republican majority in recent years. McCarthy has also played a leading role in persuading promising Republicans to run for pivotal House seats. “This guy was by far the best political speaker that I’ve seen,” he told me. (Democrats and more than a few Republicans would dispute that assertion, pointing to the fact that Republicans won a much slimmer majority under McCarthy’s leadership in 2022 than they were expected to.)

    “This is going to cost us candidates,” Cole said, and “God knows how much money.” The spectacle of an internal leadership war bringing the House to a halt also undercuts the GOP’s credibility as a governing party, he lamented. “They just messed up the House. They had no exit plan, no alternative strategy, no alternative candidate.”

    Both Jordan and Scalise are more conservative than McCarthy, as is a third potential candidate, Representative Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, who heads the Republican Study Committee, the GOP’s largest bloc of conservative members. None of them, however, can match McCarthy’s fundraising prowess. Cole told me he’s “leaning pretty strongly” toward Scalise, the second-ranking House Republican. Donald Trump has endorsed Jordan, but Scalise is nevertheless considered the favorite to win the party’s nomination for speaker in a secret ballot based on his years in the leadership and because he’s more palatable to Republicans in swing districts. The internal vote, expected next week, will test how much sway the former president has in a leadership battle that typically plays out more in private than in public. (GOP lawmakers reportedly recoiled at plans for Fox News to host a televised debate between the candidates, who normally make their pitches behind closed doors.)

    Scalise is well-liked within his party, but he’s undergoing treatment for blood cancer, which Cole acknowledged was a concern for some Republicans. “People are worried,” he said. “They’re worried that we’re going to put him in a job where he hurts himself.” In 2017, Scalise underwent several months of rehab after being shot by a would-be assassin targeting Republican lawmakers at a baseball practice.

    Jordan is by far the more bombastic of the two. A former college-wrestling champion, he helped found the House Freedom Caucus and made his name as a conservative foe of former Speaker (and fellow Ohioan) John Boehner. Jordan’s antagonism toward the leadership alienated many rank-and-file Republicans then, but he struck something of a truce with McCarthy, his onetime rival. McCarthy didn’t stand in the way of Jordan’s promotion to become the top Republican on first the House Oversight Committee and then on the Judiciary Committee, a perch from which he’s launched aggressive investigations into President Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Jordan returned the favor by backing McCarthy’s bid to become speaker, sticking by him during all 15 rounds of voting in January and during this week’s revolt.

    Peter Wehner: Kevin McCarthy got what he deserved

    Scalise would likely have an easier time than Jordan winning the 218 Republican votes needed to secure the speakership in the public House floor vote. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who led the effort to topple McCarthy, has said he would support either candidate. Jordan’s close ties to Trump and his disdain for bipartisan compromise could make him a problem for politically vulnerable Republicans, particularly those from New York and California who represent districts that Biden carried in 2020. His nomination would also likely revive questions about his handling of allegations of sexual misconduct against a wrestling-team physician at the Ohio State University when Jordan served as a coach. Jordan has denied wrongdoing, but former student athletes have said he knew about the physician’s abuse and failed to report it.

    The scandal could haunt Republicans come election time if Jordan is the speaker, but the issue animating the leadership race is whether to, as Cole put it, “take away the knives” and restrict the procedural tool, known as the “motion to vacate,” that Gaetz used to remove McCarthy. “We’ve driven out three speakers now with this weapon,” Cole said. Boehner resigned in 2015 after it became clear that he might lose the speakership in a floor vote, and his successor, Paul Ryan, was under increasing pressure from his right flank when he chose to retire three years later.

    The Main Street Caucus, a coalition of more pragmatic and ideologically flexible Republicans, is pushing to change the rules, and a few members have said they’ll only support a candidate who promises to do so. Currently, any single lawmaker can force a vote on a motion to vacate. To raise that threshold, Republicans might need votes from Democrats, who refused to help rescue McCarthy. “I think it would get a lot of Democratic support,” Cole said. “We’d have to endure another hour of ‘I told you so.’ That’s fair enough.” Though he was critical of Democrats for voting to remove McCarthy, he said he understood why they did. “If we had the opportunity to take out [Nancy] Pelosi,” Cole said, “we probably would have done the same thing.”

    He recounted a conversation with a long-serving House Democrat, Representative Bill Pascrell of New Jersey, who alluded to worries that dissident Democrats could use the same tactic to oust a future speaker in their party. “We have our nuts too,” Cole recalled him whispering in an elevator. (Pascrell did not respond to a request for comment.)

    The outcome of the rules debate could determine when Republicans are able to elect a speaker, reopen the House, and repair the harm they’ve done to their chances in next year’s elections. For his part, Cole is hoping that whoever they choose can quickly win a majority in a floor vote next week. And if they don’t? “Then,” he said, “it’s really a chaotic situation.”

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    Russell Berman

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  • How Moderate Republicans Became an Endangered Species

    How Moderate Republicans Became an Endangered Species

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    Early this summer, the federal government will, in all likelihood, exhaust the “extraordinary measures” it is now employing to keep paying the nation’s bills. As the country careens toward that fiscal abyss, Congress will face a now-familiar stalemate: Republicans will refuse to raise the debt ceiling unless Democrats agree to cut spending. Democrats will balk. Markets will slide—perhaps precipitously—and the economy will swiftly turn south.

    When that moment arrives, the most important people in Washington won’t be those who work in the White House, or even the party leaders who occupy the Capitol’s most palatial offices. They will be the House Republicans who sit closest to the political center: the so-called moderates. The GOP’s majority is narrow enough that any five Republicans could dash Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s plan to demand a ransom for the debt ceiling. They will have to decide whether to stand with him or join with Democrats to avert a first-ever default on the nation’s debt.

    “Those guys will be called on to save the day,” says former Representative Charlie Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican who, until his retirement in 2018, was one of the House’s most prominent moderates.

    Yascha Mounk: How moderates won the midterms

    Dent is talking about Republicans such as Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, whose Omaha district voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump in 2020. Bacon is a leader of the faction of Republicans hoping to serve as a counterweight to the House Freedom Caucus and the far-right hard-liners who extracted all manner of concessions from McCarthy earlier this month in exchange for allowing him to become speaker. During the four days of voting that McCarthy endured, Bacon regularly held court with reporters outside the House chamber, castigating the holdouts as the “chaos caucus” and comparing them to the Taliban.

    Bacon, a 59-year-old former Air Force commander first elected in 2016, styles himself as a pragmatist and a realist, and he is keenly aware of the sway that he and other like-minded Republicans could have. Indeed, he and his allies have already blocked two bills backed by some on the far right—including a measure to replace the federal income tax with a 30 percent sales tax—from coming up for a vote. But don’t call him a moderate. “I’d rather be called a conservative who gets things done,” Bacon told me.

    In rejecting the moderate label, Bacon is no different than the other 221 Republicans now serving in the House, virtually all of whom describe themselves as some version of conservative. As the party has moved to the right, so, too, has its leftmost flank. The decline of the GOP moderate is a story more than two decades in the making, but it carries particular significance at a moment when centrist lawmakers could wield so much power. If they choose to use it. If they exist at all anymore.

    Two years ago, Bacon picked up the discarded flag of a dormant GOP group called the Main Street Caucus. The caucus is the House extension of the Republican Main Street Partnership, a political organization founded 25 years ago by then-Representative Amo Houghton of New York. The original Main Street Partnership was explicitly, and proudly, moderate; Houghton called himself a “militant moderate,” and the group’s aim was to “serve as a voice for centrist Republicans,” as well as to soften the GOP’s harsh rhetoric and policies on abortion, gay rights, and the environment, among other issues.

    The Partnership remains active—it spent $25 million in support of Republican candidates last year—but it has rebranded itself to stay relevant in today’s GOP. Searching through its website history on the Internet Archive, I found that the Partnership dropped the words moderate and centrist from its mission statement sometime in the fall of 2011, shortly after the last new Republican House majority forced a confrontation over the debt ceiling with a Democratic president. They’ve since been replaced by more generic descriptors, such as common sense and pragmatic.

    “We used to be called moderate. We are not moderate,” says Sarah Chamberlain, the Partnership’s CEO and a former aide to Houghton (who retired from Congress in 2004 and died in 2020). Its members now identify as “pragmatic conservatives.” “The entity from day one has the same name, but it looks very different,” Chamberlain told me.

    David A. Graham: Kevin McCarthy’s predicament is a warning

    The Main Street Caucus isn’t the only congressional group whose members once might have identified as moderate. Others include the Republican Governance Group (formerly known as the Tuesday Group) and the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus. A couple dozen Republicans, including Bacon, are members of all three groups. But they each eschew the word, in part, Bacon explained to me, because in primaries “it’s used as a cudgel.”

    Another reason is they are simply more conservative than their predecessors. As Republicans who embraced the moderate label, including Dent, have left Congress over the past 20 years, the Republicans replacing them have moved ever further from the political center. Many of the original members of the Tuesday Group and the Main Street Partnership, for example, backed abortion rights; Dent, who left the House five years ago, told me he believed he was either the last, or one of the last, House Republicans to hold that position.

    Earlier this month, the Main Street Caucus—the largest of the three groups, with about 60 members—elected as its chair a Republican even more conservative than Bacon, Representative Dusty Johnson of South Dakota. When I spoke with him by phone, Johnson eagerly volunteered that both he and the group’s new vice chair, Representative Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma, earned higher ratings than the average House Republican on the scorecard kept by Heritage Action, the conservative activist group that has warred with GOP moderates for years. “We are members who overwhelmingly want to deliver policy wins—conservative policy wins,” Johnson told me.

    The big question now is whether the GOP’s self-identified pragmatists will stand up to—or simply behind—the party leadership in the fiscal battles to come. During the speakership fight, Johnson, Bacon, and other pragmatists served as McCarthy’s protective guard, staring down the GOP holdouts by declaring that they would vote for no one other than McCarthy. Yet, with only a few complaints, they largely blessed the concessions the new speaker made to empower the far right at his own expense.

    Bacon assured me that he and his fellow pragmatists will use the leverage they have, noting the two bills that they had already prevented from coming for a vote. On the debt-ceiling debate, however, many of the deal-seeking Republicans are sounding like McCarthy, who has said the president must endorse spending cuts in order to lift the borrowing limit. “We’re not going to raise the debt ceiling until we have some additional fiscal responsibility returned to spending in this town,” Johnson told me. He put the onus on Biden and the Democrats to negotiate, equating their refusal to do so with “choosing the path of legislative terrorism.” Other members of the Main Street Caucus struck a slightly more malleable tone. “We have to be aggressive on spending, and it’s something I ran for Congress on, so I’m comfortable with that,” Representative Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota told me. “But we also have to continue to be able to govern.”

    The primary mechanism that the pragmatic Republicans could use to bypass McCarthy is a discharge petition, which would force a vote on increasing the debt limit. Given the GOP’s narrow lead in the House, only five Republicans would need to join Democrats to get the requisite support. (One GOP leader of the Problem Solvers Caucus, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, mentioned this as a possibility when the hard-liners were blocking McCarthy’s path to speaker.) “It would be very difficult for me to sign a discharge petition against leadership,” Armstrong told me. “I would never say never, but I would be very, very skeptical that I would ever sign that.” Yet in the next breath, Armstrong suggested that if the stock market were crashing, that could change his mind: “I’m not cratering every senior in my district’s 401(k). I’m not doing it.”

    Annie Lowrey: The trillion-dollar coin might be the least bad option

    A discharge petition is an imperfect vehicle for resolving a debt-ceiling crisis; because of the House’s procedural rules, gathering signatures would have to begin weeks or even months in advance. In 2015, Dent helped lead a bipartisan coalition in using a discharge petition to go around the GOP leadership to pass legislation reviving the Export-Import Bank, a federal credit agency that conservatives wanted to let die. Then-Speaker John Boehner had already announced his departure, having been ushered into retirement by a far-right revolt. “Ordinarily, the speaker would be pretty upset about it. I can assure you he was not,” Dent recalled.

    A dozen years ago, it was Boehner leading a House GOP majority bent on securing spending cuts in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling. After several rounds of negotiations failed—including an attempted “grand bargain” on taxes and entitlement programs with then-President Barack Obama—Congress agreed to form a “super committee” to put in place budget caps that became known as sequestration. (Congress would later prevent many of these caps from being put in place.)

    Dent predicted that Republicans would win few if any concessions from Democrats for raising the borrowing limit this time around. “You’re going to get something close to a clean debt-ceiling bill,” he told me. Perhaps Biden will agree to form a fiscal commission to propose possible spending cuts, Washington’s favorite face-saving punt. A fig leaf, in other words. Bacon told me he’s hoping for something more, such as a commitment to keep increases in federal spending below inflation. “I’d like to see more than a fig leaf. I’d like to at least see some underwear on.”

    What’s all but certain is that a significant chunk of the House Republican conference won’t go for that kind of deal. Republicans told me that they doubt the party could pass any debt-ceiling increase on its own, and many conservatives might reject any deal that McCarthy could get Democrats to endorse, if he can get Democrats to negotiate at all. That will put the pressure once again on the GOP’s pragmatists, the Republicans who pass for moderate in 2023 but won’t dare use that word. If and when the debt crisis comes, they could well be the ones deciding between, well, moderation and default.

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    Russell Berman

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  • Nothing Is Working for Kevin McCarthy

    Nothing Is Working for Kevin McCarthy

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    At this point in the unending search for a House speaker, Donald Trump’s candidacy is making as much progress as Kevin McCarthy’s.

    The former president (and half-hearted 2024 White House applicant) today secured his first vote as the House slogged through its seventh fruitless attempt to elect a leader. The semi-serious effort to elevate Trump, put forward by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, came at the expense of McCarthy, the Trump-endorsed Republican leader whose bid hasn’t improved in the past six ballots. McCarthy twice more lost 21 Republicans and fell well short of the 218 votes he needs for a majority.

    Today’s votes were notable because they were the first since McCarthy reportedly made an offer to his GOP opponents that seemingly encompassed all of their public demands. The two sides have engaged in intense negotiations over the past day, keeping McCarthy’s candidacy alive and offering perhaps a slim hope that he can win over enough of the holdouts to become speaker. But none of that progress was evident in the tallies this afternoon.

    McCarthy’s concessions represented the equivalent of giving away the remaining trinkets in an already ransacked store. He had previously agreed to significantly lower the threshold of members needed to force a vote to remove him as speaker, known as a “motion to vacate.” After setting the minimum at five members, McCarthy gave in to the renegades’ demand that a single member could trigger that vote—restoring the standard conservatives had used in 2015 to push Speaker John Boehner out of office. His allies could argue that with so much opposition to McCarthy already, there was little difference between a threshold of five and one.

    David Frum: No tears for Kevin McCarthy

    But according to reports, McCarthy went even further. He agreed to give the House Freedom Caucus designated seats on the powerful Rules Committee, a panel traditionally controlled by the speaker that decides whether and under what parameters legislation can come to a vote on the floor. He also reportedly promised to allow members to demand virtually unlimited amendment votes on spending bills; that change could open up a process that in recent years has been centralized by the leadership, but it could also lead to free-for-alls that drag out debates on bills for days or weeks.

    The concessions are sure to frustrate McCarthy supporters who believe the wannabe-speaker had already surrendered too much to his opponents. Representative Ann Wagner of Missouri told me that the threshold for the motion to vacate should be a majority of the Republican conference. Lowering it to five, she said, was akin to the speaker having “a knife over your head every day.” Earlier this week, I asked Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, a McCarthy supporter who has spoken of partnering with Democrats on a consensus pick for speaker, whether he might desert McCarthy if the GOP leader kept empowering his far-right critics. “It depends on what it is,” Bacon told me. “But I think we went too far as it was already.”

    McCarthy was betting that Republicans closest to the political center would stick with him if it meant finally ending a leadership crisis now on its third day. And yet, even this most generous offer to his foes was not enough, and none of the 21 holdouts crossed over to McCarthy’s corner.

    McCarthy downplayed today’s first vote before it even began, telling reporters, “Nothing is going to change.” For McCarthy, maintaining the status quo might count as progress. His lingering fear is likely that the bottom will fall out among supporters who are growing tired of the stalemate and are looking to alternatives. Representative Ken Buck of Colorado told CNN that Republicans could nominate McCarthy’s lieutenant, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, by the end of the day if a deal wasn’t struck.

    McCarthy’s allies had hoped for another delay to buy time for negotiations, perhaps even through the weekend, but Republicans evidently determined they could not muster the voters to adjourn for a third time in 24 hours. The desire for delay revealed a tactical reversal by McCarthy born out of desperation. At the outset of the voting on Tuesday, his stated goal had been to keep lawmakers on the House floor, casting ballot after ballot until either his far-right opponents or possibly the Democrats got tired enough to let him win. But six consecutive defeats, during which McCarthy lost rather than gained support, disabused him of that idea. Beginning yesterday afternoon, McCarthy tried to adjourn the House to give him more time for backroom negotiations, having apparently realized that his repeated public floggings were doing him no good.

    David A. Graham: Kevin McCarthy’s predicament is a warning

    Democrats reluctantly agreed to adjourn after the sixth vote yesterday afternoon, but when McCarthy allies sought to close down the House again in the evening, the Democrats fought back. The vote to adjourn became something of a circus. McCarthy’s critics on the right splintered, with four of them voting alongside Democrats to keep the House in session and one arch-conservative, Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, switching his vote at the last minute. With the outcome in doubt, both parties began shoving late-arriving members—some still wearing their winter coats—to the front of the chamber to cast their votes before the House clerk, Cheryl Johnson, gaveled the motion closed. When Johnson shouted the final tally over the din of the House—the motion to adjourn passed, 216–214—McCarthy and his allies cheered. McCarthy had won his first vote in his bid for speaker, one that staved off his next public abasement for at least another day.

    Earlier yesterday, the House took three more failed speaker votes that were nearly identical to the three failed votes it took on Tuesday. The lone differences were that the anti-McCarthy GOP faction nominated a new candidate, Representative Byron Donalds of Florida, and McCarthy lost 21 Republican votes instead of the 20 defections he had suffered previously.  Representative Victoria Spartz of Indiana switched her vote from McCarthy to “present,” telling reporters after that the party needed to have more conversations about the way forward. “What we’re doing on the floor is wasting everyone’s time,” she said.

    Spartz’s protest made little difference. The House met again for more time-wasting this afternoon, and the best that McCarthy could accomplish was not losing any more votes. His candidacy survived a seventh losing ballot, and the House moved quickly on to an eighth and then a ninth (during which Gaetz abandoned his support for Trump and voted for Representative Kevin Hern of Oklahoma instead).

    Those votes proceeded no better and no worse for McCarthy, who now seems to be one or two more defections away from a final defeat. He is hanging on for now, but the deadline for him to strike a deal or exit the race is fast approaching.

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    Russell Berman

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