House is paralyzed as far-right rebels continue their mutiny against McCarthy

Hard-right Republicans continued their mutiny against Speaker Kevin McCarthy for a second day on Wednesday, retaining control of the House floor in a raucous display of their power that raised questions about whether the speaker will lose his meager and troublesome majority. could continue to rule.

Mr. McCarthy, who enraged ultra-conservative Republicans by compromising with President Biden to suspend the debt limit, must face yet another attempt to impeach him, as some hard-right members have threatened. But the uprising has deprived him of a governing majority, at least for now, as a nominal speaker only.

“The House leadership couldn’t hold the line,” Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican and a leader of the insurrection, tweeted Wednesday. “Now we keep the floor.”

After being forced to cancel votes for a second day in a row while privately negotiating with members of the House Freedom Caucus to get them to concede, the leaders told Republican lawmakers on Wednesday night that they are scrapping votes for the rest of the week . In a notable act of aggression within the party, about a dozen rebels brought the chamber to a halt on Tuesday by siding with the Democrats to defeat a procedural measure needed to move legislation forward, and things cannot resume until they concede and vote with their own party.

It underlined the dire consequences McCarthy faces if he works through a debt-ceiling deal with the White House that contains only a fraction of the cuts the Republicans had demanded. The episode has caused division within Mr McCarthy’s own leadership team, with the speaker suggesting his number 2 was partly responsible for the dysfunction. And it was a blunt reminder of the challenge Mr McCarthy will take on to get his conference together to pass crucial spending bills this year, which will be needed to avoid a government shutdown this fall and general austerity to be punished in early 2025. .

The paralysis gripping the House this week — an extremely rare example of a majority faction holding its own party hostage — was a reminder of McCarthy’s weeks-long, 15-round slog to win his post, for which he put in many of the same hard- right-wing legislators inciting the current drama.

On Wednesday evening, Mr McCarthy admitted there was “a bit of chaos going on”, although he insisted he would get the party’s agenda back on track.

“We’ve been through this before; you know we are in a slim majority,” Mr. McCarthy to reporters earlier today. “I am not taking this job because it is easy. We will work through this, and we will be even stronger.

But he also seemed to blame the deadlock at least in part on Louisiana’s Representative Steve Scalise, the majority leader, who said he created a misunderstanding that paved the way for the impromptu hijacking of the House floor on Tuesday.

“The Majority Leader is in charge,” Mr McCarthy said.

The tantrum from the right had little immediate effect, except that Republicans were deprived of the chance to pass a messaging bill that would almost certainly die in the Senate. The legislation the rebels blocked is designed to guard against government restrictions on gas stoves and other federal regulations.

But ultra-conservative Republicans said there was much more at stake, arguing that Mr. McCarthy had betrayed promises he made to them during his contest for the speakership and now must be forced to keep them.

“There was a deal in January and it was violated in the debt ceiling bill,” said Colorado Rep. Ken Buck. He said talks with Mr McCarthy on Wednesday were to discuss “how to reinstate part of that agreement”.

In the meantime, some mainstream Republicans lamented the spectacle—“political incontinence,” as Arkansas Rep. Steve Womack called it—and predicted a major backlash against their party in 2024 if they don’t straighten things out soon.

“We’re getting ourselves wet and there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Mr. 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.”

In a way, the drama was a reset to how House Republicans have long functioned, with a speaker under constant threat from a small group of far-right bombers who make his job impossible unless he bows to their demands. Former Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio resigned from Congress in 2015 under pressure from House conservatives who repeatedly threatened to move to overthrow him.

But Mr. McCarthy is determined not to repeat those mistakes and tries to dissuade his biggest opponents by rewarding them with committee chairs and powerful positions on the Rules Committee. That approach seemed to have worked until Mr. McCarthy, knowing that the right wing would not provide the votes to pass a debt limit bill, worked with Democrats to push the legislation through just days before a default. to press.

“We’re back to business as usual, where the speaker should be concerned about this group — and have been for a decade,” said Brendan Buck, who was a top advisor to Wisconsin speaker Paul D. Ryan and Mr. Boehner. “These guys want to be relevant more than anything. They find a way to assert themselves in the conversation again.

Former speakers have had to endure the embarrassment of picking bills off the floor because they didn’t have the votes to pass their legislation. But it had been almost 21 years since a procedural measure had been defeated on the Chamber floor, as happened on Tuesday.

Mr. McCarthy had privately leaned on the Republicans not to resort to such a move. Speaking at the weekly party conference on Tuesday morning, he said lawmakers were always free to vote against a bill they didn’t like, but they were never allowed to take actions that give the minority the floor, such as voting against a procedural motion, as many of them in an attempt to block the debt ceiling bill, according to two people familiar with the meeting.

Hours later, about a dozen Republicans did just that, voting with Democrats against allowing the bills.

Minnesota Representative Tom Emmer, the majority whip, called the episode a minor setback after several months of a well-functioning home, blaming it on “an accumulation of frustration that has built up since January.”

“Don’t expect it to always be like this,” he said. “Every team gets setbacks from time to time. That is literally what we are going through.”

It was not clear exactly what the Freedom Caucus members were demanding in exchange for giving up control of the floor.

“They don’t know what to ask,” McCarthy said Wednesday night. “There’s a lot of different things they’re frustrated about.”

And Mr. Gaetz made it clear that demands were secondary to forcing Mr. McCarthy to make a decisive decision — whether to pass bipartisan bills with the Democrats or have the support of the far right.

“We’re going to force him into a monogamous relationship with one or the other,” he said in an interview on “War Room,” the podcast hosted by Stephen K. Bannon. “What we’re not going to do is hang out with him for five months and then watch him jump in the backseat with Hakeem Jeffries.”

Karun Demirjian reporting contributed.