Paralysis, limbo, stalemate — any of them describe the state of the House of Representatives this week.
On Wednesday, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) sent the House home until Monday after spending an entire day talking with a group of far-right conservatives who held up all floor action over their dissatisfaction with the debt limit bill signed into law last week, among other grievances.
They failed to reach any path forward.
McCarthy told reporters that he’s not exactly sure what they want and that different members are asking for different things.
This is a significant challenge to McCarthy’s leadership and his ability to govern and run the House. While it’s not as dire as the motion to vacate — the procedural maneuver by which a single House Republican could trigger a vote to depose McCarthy as speaker — supporters of the rebels say that their tactic of bringing the chamber to a halt by voting against House rules could be just as damaging.
They weren’t doing anything real anyway. All they had on the agenda were messaging bills for the wingnut faction. So, in reality, the MAGA Reps are just denying themselves the ability to say they passed the “Save Our Gas Stoves Act” on Fox News.
They didn’t have the guts to raise the Motion to Vacate and truly challenge McCarthy mainly because nobody else wants the job. So they are doing a little kabuki Dance to pretend they have power in circumstances that don’t matter. Hookay.
But the “Republicans in disarray” narrative is just delicious:
Rank-and-file Republicans are not happy — this is an understatement — about a small group grinding the entire body to a halt.
“This is, in my opinion, political incontinence on our part. We are wetting ourselves … and can’t do anything about it,” Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) said. “This is insane. This is not the way a governing majority is expected to behave, and, frankly, I think there’ll be a political cost to it.”
The discontent with the small group is widespread. It includes some far-right lawmakers in safe Republican districts, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), one of five Freedom Caucus members who voted for McCarthy and Biden’s debt limit deal last week.
“I don’t see any need for this,” she said.
Republicans in districts President Biden won are particularly stressed. One such member called the group the “Dysfunction Caucus.”
Who’s gumming up the works?
The group of disrupters include Reps. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Dan Bishop (N.C.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.), Ralph Norman (S.C.), Chip Roy (Tex.), Ken Buck (Colo.), Bob Good (Va.), Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Matt Rosendale (Mont.), Eli Crane (Ariz.) and Tim Burchett (Tenn.). They blocked a rule on the House floor Tuesday about gas stoves (a conservative priority that has nothing to do with the current fight), essentially halting all business.
“At the center of the far-right’s concern is an argument that McCarthy violated an agreement several of them struck in January in exchange for supporting his speakership bid. No list of those promises made exists publicly, so it’s unclear exactly what lawmakers and McCarthy agreed to. But several members of the Freedom Caucus have claimed he violated three main components of the agreement: Supporting legislation that reduces spending back to 2022 appropriation levels; putting legislation on the floor that is not passed overwhelmingly by Democrats; and not taking up bills that don’t have unanimous support from Republicans on the House Rules Committee,” our colleagues Amy B Wang, Marianna Sotomayor, Paul Kane and Leigh Ann write.
The tactics are reminiscent of the struggle McCarthy endured to become speaker, a process that spanned four days and 15 rounds of voting, to appease fewer than two dozen conservatives.
But McCarthy and Republicans said that the conference came out of that painful exercise stronger and more united than before.
The fallout
Now, Republicans worry that this standoff will play into the Democratic narrative that Republicans are a “party of chaos” that can’t govern, potentially threatening their fragile control of the House in next year’s elections.
“We have to govern,” Rep. Blake Moore (R-Utah) said. “If we can’t govern, we won’t get a chance to govern.”
Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.), who represents a district Biden won by 12 points, said Republicans should be focusing on Biden.
“The goal is to operate as a team,” Garcia said. “To provide solutions in contrast to the problems being created by the Biden administration right now.”
Moderate angst
While McCarthy dealt with the rebels on the second floor of the Capitol, a group of moderate House Republicans met in Republican Whip Tom Emmer‘s office on the first floor about their legislative priorities.
While the meeting was not related to the drama ensuing above, it did come up, according to several members who attended. The lawmakers worried that some of their priorities, some of which are bipartisan, would be blocked by far-right members.
They also discussed a specific conservative priority: bringing H.R. 7, a bill to make permanent the Hyde Amendment which prohibits taxpayer dollars from being used for abortion, up for a vote soon. It was supposed to be one of the first bills voted on in the new House but was never brought up because it didn’t have the votes.
“I think some people are putting their own interests ahead of that of the conference,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), a freshman whose seat is a top target for Democrats next year. “And I think they need to think long and hard about that.”
There is fear that the far-right’s demands will spill into bigger, more significant fights, including during the annual process to fund the government.
“You got a small group of people who are pissed off that are keeping the House of Representatives from functioning today, and I think the American people are not going to take too kindly to that,” Womack, a senior appropriator, said.
Keep it coming MAGAs. We need the laughs.