For now, GOP House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is holding on, but the revolt against him over the debt ceiling bill is increasing daily, and the MAGA hardliners have all but shut down House business until further notice.
Hard-right Republicans pressed their mutiny against Speaker Kevin McCarthy into a second day on Wednesday, keeping control of the House floor in a raw display of their power that raised questions about whether the speaker could continue to govern his slim and fractious majority.
Mr. McCarthy, who enraged ultraconservative Republicans by striking a compromise with President Biden to suspend the debt limit, has yet to face a bid to depose him, as some hard-right members have threatened. But the rebellion has left him, at least for now, as speaker in name only, deprived of a governing majority.
“House Leadership couldn’t Hold the Line,” Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida and a leader of the rebellion, tweeted on Wednesday. “Now we Hold the Floor.”
After being forced for the second day in a row to cancel votes as they haggled privately with members of the House Freedom Caucus to get them to relent, leaders told Republican lawmakers on Wednesday evening that they were scrapping votes for the remainder of the week. In a remarkable act of intraparty aggression, about a dozen rebels ground the chamber to a halt on Tuesday by siding with Democrats to defeat a procedural measure needed to allow legislation to move forward, and business cannot resume until they back down and vote with their own party.
It underscored the severe consequences Mr. McCarthy is facing for muscling through a debt ceiling agreement with the White House that contained only a fraction of the spending cuts Republicans had demanded. The episode has reignited divisions within Mr. McCarthy’s own leadership team, with the speaker suggesting his No. 2 was in part to blame for the dysfunction. And it was a blunt reminder of the challenge Mr. McCarthy will face in holding together his conference to pass crucial spending bills this year, which will be required to avert a government shutdown this fall and punishing across-the-board spending cuts in early 2025.
The paralysis that has gripped the House this week — an exceedingly rare instance of a faction of the majority holding its own party hostage — recalled Mr. McCarthy’s weeklong, 15-round slog to win his post, which required him to win over many of the same hard-right lawmakers instigating the current drama.
On Wednesday night, Mr. McCarthy conceded that there was “a little chaos going on,” though he insisted that he would get the party agenda back on track.
“We’ve been through this before; you know we’re in a small majority,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters earlier in the day. “I don’t take this job because it’s easy. We’ll work through this, and we’ll even be stronger.”
But he also appeared to blame the impasse at least in part on Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the majority leader, saying that he had caused a misunderstanding that paved the way for the spontaneous hijacking of the House floor on Tuesday.
“The majority leader runs the floor,” Mr. McCarthy said.
The temper tantrum from the right had little immediate impact other than to deprive Republicans of the chance to pass a messaging bill that was all but certain to die in the Senate. The legislation that the rebels blocked is aimed at guarding against government restrictions on gas stoves and other federal regulations.
But ultraconservative Republicans said much more was at stake, arguing that Mr. McCarthy had betrayed promises he made to them during his fight for the speakership and now had to be forced into honoring them.
“There was an agreement in January and it was violated in the debt ceiling bill,” said Representative Ken Buck, Republican of Colorado. He said the conversations with Mr. McCarthy on Wednesday were to discuss “how to restore some of that agreement.”
McCarthy remains in power because nobody else wants his job. Speaker of the House is a governing job, and Republicans don't want to govern, they want to destroy. But, as I predicted several times since January, the moment McCarthy sealed a deal with Biden, the clock on his job started ticking.
It'll keep ticking right up until he's deposed. It may not be this month, but he's not going to make it until January 2025, and if he somehow does, he'll be a figurehead with no real power.
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