A mutiny last week among the GOP’s far-right faction spells trouble for Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and everyone else.
Ellen Ioanes covers breaking and general assignment news as the weekend reporter at Vox. She previously worked at Business Insider covering the military and global conflicts.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s compromises with far-right members of his own Republican party to gain leadership of the House in January may be coming back to haunt him.
Last week, 11 members of the far-right GOP contingent known as the House Freedom Caucus expressed their displeasure with McCarthy, voting with Democrats to block a procedural vote on two Republican bills to limit regulations on gas stoves, as well as halting business on the House floor for days in what has been described widely as a revolt.
Seemingly innocuous legislation restricting regulations on gas stoves would, in theory, be popular among Republicans. Scientific findings suggesting that such appliances can cause health problems became a major touchstone in the right’s culture war earlier this year, with Republicans falsely claiming that the government would ban gas stoves.
Those bills, however, became collateral damage, at least for now, in the ongoing fight between McCarthy and the far-right wing of the Republican party — a fight that has threatened to boil over since McCarthy and the White House managed to avoid a cataclysmic national default with their debt limit deal late last month. With House Republicans in disarray, leadership announced it would meet Monday to attempt to move forward with planned votes.
Ultimately, the drama isn’t just about a vote to advance legislation on gas stoves; it’s a referendum on McCarthy’s leadership, and whether he can keep his conference on his side to maintain his position and pass critical legislation as the end of the government’s fiscal year draws nearer.
McCarthy’s power is contingent on a number of compromises he made with Freedom Caucus members in January, including a concession to the motion to vacate. That would allow any one member to offer a motion to “vacate the chair,” initiating a new election for speaker at any time, according to Vox’s Andrew Prokop. Now that possibility hovers in the background as the House’s ultraconservatives continue to withhold their support from McCarthy in their quest to move their party further to the right.
Freedom Caucus members expressed their fury over a debt limit deal
Republicans had hoped for greater spending cuts as part of a deal to suspend the debt limit; in exchange for suspending it until 2025, Republicans wanted increased work requirements for people to access Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and sought caps on non-defense spending through 2033. The compromise legislation did change work requirements for some SNAP recipients and will end the three-year pause on student loan repayments by the end of the summer.
With just a 10-seat majority in the House and a Democratic majority in the Senate, however, McCarthy and Republican leadership have had to concede to their Democratic colleagues to get anything done, spiting the far-right Republicans, particularly Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX).
But even the legislators trying to disrupt McCarthy and Congress can’t seem to agree on what it is they actually want to move the voting process forward this week, according to McCarthy and other leaders. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said on Thursday, however, that his faction had had “encouraging” talks with House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA).
The battle puts McCarthy in a particularly difficult position. Any concession to the far-right risks alienating more moderate Republicans, some of whom are already very publicly frustrated with the mutiny in their ranks.
“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-AR) told the Washington Post. “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.”
McCarthy’s relationship with the House Freedom Caucus has always been tense
McCarthy’s mandate to lead has never been strong; you might remember January’s dramatic 15 rounds of voting for the speakership, caused in part by opposition from his party’s ultraconservative caucus.
McCarthy had, through developing a relationship with far-right Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, sought to court that extreme wing of his party in order to avoid the pitfalls of the previous Republican speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan. But his relationship alone with Taylor Greene, the former QAnon follower elected to Congress in 2020, could not win his GOP opponents — McCarthy had to agree to several measures, including restoring a rule that allows any single member of the House to trigger a recall vote on the speaker.
