As House Republicans prepared to approve their right-wing debt ceiling ransom note in late April, Speaker Kevin McCarthy had a problem. The GOP leader was desperate to pass the bill, but he didn’t have the votes: Some of his members saw the measure as too extreme, while others said they’d balk if it was made any less extreme.
Left with limited choices, McCarthy told both contingents what they wanted to hear: Pragmatic members were told to “ignore the substance“ of the plan and vote it to keep the process alive, knowing that the package would be overhauled during bipartisan talks, while hardliners were told he’d fight tooth and nail to defend the substance of the plan, demanding it remain intact.
In the short term, the tactic worked, and Republicans narrowly passed the bill. But it seemed inevitable that McCarthy’s method — delivering two contradictory messages to different factions of his own conference — would come back to bite him. And that’s exactly what happened this week.
NBC News reported late yesterday that a “small bloc of conservative bomb-throwers is holding the floor of the House of Representatives hostage, forcing GOP leaders to cancel votes for the rest of the week.”
For the second straight day, the conservatives blocked several leadership-backed bills from moving forward Wednesday in protest of Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s handling of the debt deal he struck with President Joe Biden. The brazen revolt means this hard-right faction, made up mostly of House Freedom Caucus members, has ground legislating on the chamber floor to a halt, undermining the Republican majority and McCarthy’s power.
As we discussed yesterday, the Freedom Caucus’ original plan was to retaliate against the House speaker by trying to force a vote to take his gavel away. That strategy was never going to work, and it quickly unraveled.
But the radicals’ Plan B is proving to be far more effective. On Tuesday, for example, Freedom Caucus members defeated a…
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