Rep. Ralph Norman says he will not support Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become speaker without firm assurances that House Republicans will enact spending cuts and move to balance the federal budget. The Republican from South Carolina isn’t optimistic he will get there, adding in an interview that McCarthy doesn’t have “a track record of being a fiscal conservative able to tackle the issues we have here.”
Rep. Scott Perry is pushing for procedural changes and immediate votes on issues such as term limits that he says will help fix a “completely broken” Washington. This is not, the Republican from Pennsylvania has insisted, about “personalities. It’s about the policies that come out of here.”
But for Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Matt Gaetz of Florida, it’s personal. They said McCarthy (R-Calif.) is a product of establishment Washington that needs to be excised. Boebert said she feels McCarthy cannot be trusted and there is nothing McCarthy could do to win her over. On Wednesday evening, as the House sat adjourned as negotiations happened behind closed doors, Gaetz called McCarthy “a desperate guy” and said, “I’m ready to vote all night, all week, all month and never for that person.”
These hard-right House Republicans belong to a group of 20 who for two straight days have stood between McCarthy and the speaker’s gavel. The impasse has ground the new Congress to a halt and exposed extraordinary divisions within the GOP ranks. It has left open the question of who will lead the new and narrow Republican majority and what it will be able to accomplish while plagued by such fierce infighting.
Overnight, McCarthy made concessions to the group that he’d previously objected to, offering to lower from five to one the threshold of members required to sponsor a resolution to force a vote to oust the speaker, to seat more members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus on the powerful Rules Committee that dictates what legislation and amendments are debated on the floor, and to allow votes on term limits for members of Congress. It was not immediately clear whether the moves would swing support in his favor.
“I think we’re making progress,” McCarthy told CNN on Thursday morning. “Look, we’re all working together to find a solution.”
Many members of the anti-McCarthy faction met for several hours Thursday morning at a conservative nonprofit off Capitol Hill, almost all exiting without saying a word. But Rep Bob Good (R-Va.) emerged defiant in his opposition.
“You don’t ever have to ask me again if I’m a no,” he said “I will never vote for Kevin McCarthy.”
A review of the comments and statements from the members and their aides show the GOP holdouts have made a broad range of demands that have been vague at times, making it difficult to resolve and negotiate disagreements and adding to the chaos and confusion of the first days of the new House Republican majority. Critics, including more moderate Republican members, have accused them of being inconsistent and unclear about what they want.
McCarthy allies grew increasingly frustrated on Wednesday as the 20 holdouts refused to budge, with one member earlier in the week referring to them as the “Taliban 20″ and others questioning their motives.
“They want to pull the pins on the grenades and lock the doors,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.) said of the defectors. “They need to be men and adults and say what they want, instead of playing these little games, that’s what we’re asking.”
He added, “I’m tired of your stupid platitudes that some that some consultant told you to say on the campaign trail, alright. Behind closed doors tell us what you actually want, or shut the f— up.”
The group is ideologically aligned, with 19 members of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of hard line Republicans that was created eight years ago, born out of the tea party movement that challenged the GOP establishment and sought to disrupt Washington. All but two of the 20 baselessly denied the results of the 2020 presidential election and 14 of them voted not to certify President Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021.
Some of the McCarthy critics played a role in unsuccessful efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Perry was actively engaged with the White House in the move to decertify Biden’s votes and the FBI seized his phone as part of its investigation into the use of fake electors to try to overturn President Biden’s victory.
Rep. Andrew S. Clyde of Georgia, another McCarthy defector, said during a May 2021 hearing examining security lapses during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob that the rioters resembled a “normal tourist visit.”
Most of McCarthy’s foes hail from deeply conservative districts and won their elections handily, though Boebert held her seat by just over 500 votes in a surprisingly close race. Five are newly-elected freshmen Republicans who, because of the speakership stalemate, are still waiting to be sworn in for the first time.
Some of the hard-right members started voicing dissatisfaction with McCarthy last year. On New Year’s Day, nine Republicans signed a letter opposing McCarthy. “The times call for radical departure from the status quo — not a continuation of past, and ongoing, Republican failures,” read the letter, posted on Twitter by Perry.
A group of 19 rejected McCarthy in two consecutive votes on Tuesday. During a the third round of voting, Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida joined the defectors. They all voted for Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, a founding Freedom Caucus member, though Jordan has voiced support for McCarthy.
On Wednesday, the 20 coalesced around Donalds, one of two Black Republicans in the House, to challenge McCarthy’s bid. After multiple rounds of votes, the only change was a 21st member, Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana, who switched her vote to “present” in protest of the process, but said she would support McCarthy if he secured enough votes.
When reporters asked if Donalds, who had voted for himself, wanted to be speaker, he said, “No, not really.”
Although most of the 20 were endorsed by former president Donald Trump in 2022 and align themselves with his MAGA movement, they were unmoved when Trump weighed in on social media with a tepid endorsement of McCarthy on Wednesday morning. “Sad!” Gaetz said in a statement to Fox News, adding that Trump’s opinion “changes neither my view of McCarthy nor Trump nor my vote.”
“We love Mr. Trump, but we also appreciate the moment. We also appreciate that Mr. McCarthy has a history that has been off putting to some and we don’t think he’s the guy,” said Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who had originally offered himself as an alternative to McCarthy. “He’s just not the guy.”
Biggs sent a fundraising appeal on Tuesday, asking supporters to make a donation to his campaign if they “agree a CONSERVATIVE should lead us in Washington… not another RINO Establishment hack like McCarthy.” A link to a donation page says, “BREAK THE ESTABLISHMENT ONCE AND FOR ALL. EVERY DOLLAR HELPS SECURE THE SPEAKER POSITION.”
On Thursday morning he tweeted, “Hold the line!”
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), who supports McCarthy, said there have been constant conversations between different groups of people trying to reach a deal for the last several days, but it’s been hard to determine exactly what the 20 naysayers want other than to stop McCarthy from becoming speaker.
“I don’t see a lot of policy differences here. Clearly we’ve got 20 people who don’t trust the current leader. We’ve got a lot of other members that are losing their trust in those 20 members. And so that’s a personal problem, but it’s not a political or a policy one,” Cole said.
A common complaint from the 20 was McCarthy’s failure to engage with them over the summer when many in the party felt that the GOP would retake the House by larger margins than they did in the midterms. Instead, the GOP’s narrow hold on the majority meant that to get to the 218 needed to win the speaker job if all members vote for a candidate, McCarthy could afford to lose only four votes.
“He thought it was going to be a red wave, he didn’t need us. That’s not good faith,” Norman said.
After the sixth round of voting resulted in no change on Wednesday, the House adjourned for several hours. Several McCarthy allies and foes gathered in an office to continue discussions. “Of course we’ll get to 218,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) said before heading into the meeting. “We just have to find the right person.”
Roy, one of the holdouts, has been deeply involved in the negotiations, pushing to decentralize power and ensure dissenters more influence over legislation and debate.
“It’s all about the ability in the empowering us to stop the machine in this town from doing what it does. Exhibit A was the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill. It’s absolutely absurd. That bill is just exactly what is wrong with this place,” Roy told reporters, referring to a spending package to fund the federal government that passed in December.
Paul Kane, Marianna Sotomayor, Liz Goodwin and Jacqueline Alemany contributed to this report.