“The House has really abandoned the McCarthy CR strategy today and has embraced the MATT GAETZ strategy of single subject spending bills.”
That was Gaetz last night on a podcast, explaining what transpired in the House on Thursday. And he was not wrong.
The Florida Republican, who has been pilloried by Speaker KEVIN McCARTHY and his allies for the last two weeks, wakes up this morning as the architect of the House GOP’s newest legislative strategy.
Here’s how it happened.
Yesterday, five House Republicans voted down the rule to advance the GOP’s Pentagon spending bill — the third rule defeat McCarthy has suffered this year.
Voting down a rule used to be a rare event (the last speaker to lose a rules vote was DENNIS HASTERT). But McCarthy believed he had the votes yesterday because Reps. RALPH NORMAN (R-S.C.) and KEN BUCK (R-Colo.), who both opposed the same rule on Tuesday, agreed to support the rule on Thursday.
But what McCarthy and his whip team missed was that Reps. ELI CRANE (R-Ariz.) and MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE (R-Ga.), who voted for the rule on Tuesday, opposed the rule on Thursday.
Within two hours of this humiliating defeat, at the nadir of McCarthy’s awful week, a surprising visitor showed up at his office: Gaetz. He had a plan.
In another closed-door meeting, Gaetz huddled with a larger group of Republicans, including some moderates, and pitched them on the same idea.
Gaetz had spent the week proving to McCarthy that the speaker could not pass a continuing resolution to keep the government temporarily open, no matter how much the speaker refashioned it to appease the hard right. “#NOCR” has become a rallying cry for Gaetz and his crew that has hardened as a government shutdown approaches.
Making things worse for McCarthy was the fact that the never-CR Republicans and the no-on-the-rule Republicans are actually slightly different groups (though the former has more members). In fact, Gaetz voted for the rule for the Defense bill on both Tuesday and Thursday.
But the rule votes increased McCarthy’s desperation and strengthened his chief antagonist. “This opportunity has come to pass only because a handful of us had the stones to take down the defense approps rule today,” Rep. DAN BISHOP (R-N.C.) said last night.
Gaetz told his Republican colleagues that McCarthy should bring single subject appropriations bills to the floor one at a time. He dictated his list of the first four: Defense, Homeland Security, State-Foreign Operations, and the Agriculture-FDA bill.
A few hours later, the Rules Committee put out notice that it would be taking up four bills today at 1 p.m.: Defense, Homeland Security, State-Foreign Operations, and the Agriculture-FDA bill.
WHAT GAETZ FEARS: The premise of the Gaetz plan is to kill what he calls governing by CR. It assumes a government shutdown is inevitable. And instead of using a hard-right CR as the House’s opening move in negotiations with the Senate, the (lengthy) floor debates on the House GOP-crafted appropriations bills will serve that purpose.
Gaetz has a surprising partner in this plan: Rep. MARC MOLINARO, a New York moderate who is one of the 18 House Republicans representing a district carried by JOE BIDEN. Molinaro has been involved in various attempts to solve the shutdown crisis this week, including the bipartisan effort to use a discharge petition to force a vote on a CR. “It is absolutely an option,” he told NBC News yesterday even as he worked with Gaetz on the plan to kill the CR.
Now that his strategy has prevailed, Gaetz said last night that he sees one serious obstacle to keeping it on course and preventing a return to the CR.
“The threat is that five liberal or moderate Republicans say, ‘We don’t want to do the single subject bills,’” he said on the podcast last night. “So we’re just going to go sign what’s called a discharge petition and then just move that thing like shit through a goose.”
Since the Gaetz strategy assumes a shutdown, we suspect that Gaetz is right that there will be a backlash against this plan from plenty of House Republicans as the shutdown approaches and that the discharge petition will start to look like an increasingly appealing option. After all, McCarthy himself noted this week that his rebels have already crossed two of the three major red lines for a member of the House majority: (1) voting against the speaker candidate approved by a majority of the conference and (2) voting against a rule. He suggested that it may be inevitable that the third red line will soon be crossed: supporting a discharge petition.
MEANWHILE IN THE SENATE: The Molinaro-Gaetz plan did not look like a winner to CHUCK SCHUMER last night. As it was being crafted, he moved to begin debate on a bill that can be used to send the House the Senate’s version of a CR, which opens the possibility that McCarthy will have a bill in hand to avert a shutdown before next Sunday.
If you squint hard, you might see a possible scenario in which McCarthy allows a week to be wasted on the Gaetz plan but then — bowing to pressure from the Senate, the public and his own conference — passes the Senate CR with a bipartisan vote at the last minute or after a short shutdown. Of course, McCarthy passing any CR is an outcome that Gaetz and others have promised would trigger a motion to vacate.
THE PLAYBOOK INTERVIEW: KATHERINE CLARK — Speaking of the motion to vacate, we wanted to get a better idea of what Democrats might do if McCarthy faces such a vote, so we sat down with Democratic Whip Katherine Clark in her office yesterday afternoon and pressed her on what it would take to help McCarthy.
On her list: ending the impeachment probe of Joe Biden. The full interview is available here on Deep Dive. What follows are some key excerpts.
— When pressed on what Dems might want in exchange for helping McCarthy: “We want him to live up to the agreement that he made [with President Biden]. We want to get disaster aid out. We want to continue our support for Ukraine. And we want them to end this sham of an impeachment inquiry.”
— On the Dems’ role at this stage in the government funding standoff: “We respected the deal that the president made with Speaker McCarthy. And they signed that deal. And 314 of us voted — in an almost equal bipartisan fashion — to support it. And the ink was barely dry when Kevin McCarthy was back trying to placate the extremists in his conference. And he is just telling the American people what matters is him retaining his speakership and they don’t. And so when people come and say, Are Democrats going to help?, it is beyond frustrating.”
— On McCarthy: “When you have a leader whose sole focus has become remaining that leader, then bad things emanate from that. And that’s the situation where we are. … Nothing about Kevin McCarthy’s behavior as speaker gives me confidence that he is going to turn into the leader that this moment is calling for.”
— On what Dems will do if a motion to vacate comes to the floor: “It is going to be totally dependent on the actions of Kevin McCarthy. … [I] he comes back to [the bipartisan spending deal], we can talk about it, because our goal is to prevent a shutdown. … We’ve been here waiting to have Kevin McCarthy ask for help in governing responsibly. I haven’t gotten that call.”
— On her nicknames, which include “the quiet assassin” and “the velvet assassin”: “There is some sort of stereotype that if you’re friendly, if you’re nice, like, do you really have political strength, political acumen? … I think sometimes, people are uneasy with both of those things residing in a woman.”
I don’t think anyone knows how this is going to come out but I’m fairly sure that Matt Gaetz has delusions of grandeur. They’re trying to appease him, sure. But they loathe him with every fiber of him being and it’s not just the leadership. Even Byron Donalds hates him.
I have to say though that I love the idea that the Dems are going to demand that they rescind the Biden Impeachment inquiry. Hahahaha. How do you like ’em now, MyKev?
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