Republican hardliners’ revolt against speaker shuts down US House

The US House of Representatives has been forced to postpone all votes until next week after being paralysed by a revolt from ultra-conservative Republicans against their own speaker, Kevin McCarthy.

The standoff between McCarthy and a hardline faction of the Republican majority looks likely to persist until at least Monday. Members of the House Freedom Caucus have been upset over the bipartisan debt ceiling bill that McCarthy brokered with Joe Biden, as well as claims that some hardliners had been threatened over their opposition to the deal.

“You’ve got a small group of people who are pissed off that are keeping the House of Representatives from functioning,” said one Republican representative, Steve Womack. “This is insane. This is not the way a governing majority is expected to behave, and frankly, I think there will be a political cost to it.”

The hardliners were among the 71 Republicans who opposed debt ceiling legislation that passed the House last week. They say McCarthy did not cut spending deeply enough, and claim he retaliated against at least one of their members. McCarthy and other House Republican leaders dismissed the retaliation claim.

They also accuse McCarthy of violating the terms of an agreement that allowed him to secure the speaker’s post in January, though it was not clear which aspects they believe were not honoured.

House action came to a sudden halt at midday on Tuesday when the band of conservatives refused to support a routine procedural vote to set the rules schedule for the day’s debate. It was the first time in about 20 years a routine rules vote had been defeated.

Days of closed-door negotiations had not yielded a resolution yesterday, but McCarthy said he was

‘This is insane. This is not the way a governing majority is expected to behave … I think there will be a political cost to it’

Steve Womack

Republican

confident they would sort out their differences. “We’re going to come back on Monday, work through it and be back up for the American public.”

McCarthy oversees a narrow House Republican majority of 222213, meaning that he can lose only four votes from his own party on any measure that faces uniform opposition from Democrats.

Along with an attempt by Republicans to pass a bill preventing the banning of gas stoves, the dispute also has delayed bills that would increase congressional scrutiny of regulations and expand the scope of judicial review of federal agencies. As a result of the revolt, the pair of pro-gas-stove bills important to GOP activists stalled out.

McCarthy brushed off the disruption as healthy political debate, part of his “risk taker” way of being a leader — not too different, he said, from the 15-vote spectacle it took in January for him to finally convince his colleagues to elect him as speaker.

But the aftermath of the debt ceiling deal is coming into focus. The McCarthy-Biden compromise set overall federal budget caps – holding spending flat for 2024, and with a 1% growth for 2025– and Congress still needs to pass appropriations bills to fund the various federal agencies at the agreed amounts. That is typically done by 1 October. After Biden signed the debt deal into law last weekend, lawmakers have been working on the agency-spending bills before votes this summer to meet the deadline.

Not only did the conservatives object to the deal with Biden as insufficient, they claim it violated the terms of an agreement they had reached with McCarthy to roll back spending even further, to 2022 levels, to make him speaker.

If Congress fails to pass the spending bills by the autumn it risks a federal government shutdown. The longest federal shutdown in history was during the Trump era when Congress refused his demands for money to build the border wall between the US and Mexico.