Kevin McCarthy's biggest win may come back to haunt him

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Nick Reynolds

By Nick Reynolds

Senior Reporter, Politics

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Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy completed one of the biggest deals of his career earlier this year: getting the White House to sign off on a GOP-backed deal to raise the debt ceiling. But it's not over yet.

The deal—which garnered bipartisan support—cost him the backing of some of the most conservative members of his conference, prompting a revolution in their ranks that threatened to grind Congress to a standstill. And soon, McCarthy could end up with more problems than before.

Last week, GOP hardliners disgruntled with McCarthy joined Democrats in blocking legislation that Republican leadership had championed to limit federal restrictions on gas stoves, robbing McCarthy of his narrow majority until their demands were met.

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By Monday, McCarthy was telling reporters he believed he had come to a tentative agreement with his party's holdouts, agreeing to give them a greater say in the conference's policy positions and to support some of their legislative goals to cut spending.

But some already fear that agreement could potentially jeopardize support for the recently enacted bipartisan agreement, with terms the Democratic-controlled Senate would likely find to be untenable.

Shortly after party hardliners announced their blockade last week, McCarthy signaled he would allow members to introduce spending bills with appropriations below the spending caps they'd agreed on with Democrats—an artificial reduction in spending that caught Democrats and party moderates flat-footed.

"I was surprised to hear the Speaker say that because this was always envisioned as a cap to what people would go up to," Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins said in an interview with Punchbowl News last Friday. "It wasn't considered to be something people would write below."

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Entering Wednesday, however, McCarthy's promise to his conference's defectors would likely be happening.

On Monday evening, Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Kay Granger rolled out a proposal to cut federal spending levels enacted last December to what was appropriated for the fiscal year 2022—approximately $119 billion less than the spending caps outlined in the debt ceiling package negotiated between House Republicans and the White House just weeks before.

While McCarthy has stressed that the caps are intended to be a ceiling for spending, rather than a fully allotted amount, the reductions in spending are likely to incense Senate Democrats who were already uneasy about accepting the terms of the White House's previous agreement.

According to the Washington Times, the hardline House Freedom Caucus announced Monday it was planning to back legislation defunding more than 1,100 unauthorized federal programs in the upcoming government spending fight, setting the conference on a collision course with Senate Democrats in an upcoming fight on the federal budget.

"This is a real plan to put downward pressure on spending after the horrible debt bill," Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican and a member of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, said. "We should be doing this asap."

Such an impasse would likely require the House and Senate to appoint a conference committee to hash out the differences between the two chambers, setting up yet another showdown between Republicans and Democrats mere weeks after a grueling series of negotiations that brought the U.S. to the brink of defaulting on its national debt.

If Congress fails to come to an agreement by January 1, 2024, there will be automatic and indiscriminate spending cuts across the board, including areas like defense that have already drawn concerns of underfunding by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell as well as Republicans like South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.

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