House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) spoke to former president Donald Trump a few days ago on a range of topics, including — “just for a second” — on the Republican negotiations with the Biden administration on raising the debt ceiling.
“Make sure you get a good agreement,” the former president said, according to what McCarthy relayed to reporters Thursday.
With Saturday’s announcement of a deal in principle with President Biden, McCarthy now gets to find out if Trump and others think it’s a good agreement. The talk with Trump might have been a fleeting moment, but it demonstrated the speaker’s need to manage outside forces like Trump and a constellation of conservative groups that regularly weigh in on fiscal deals on Capitol Hill.
Over the past dozen years, these far-right voices have shown an ability to peel away votes, sometimes tanking legislation altogether and other times just severely wounding the power of Republican speakers.
Last Monday, during a brief photo opportunity before his meeting with McCarthy, Biden laid out how any deal with Republicans will have to work to increase the Treasury’s borrowing authority and set the budget parameters for the next few years.
“We have to be in a position where we can sell it to our constituencies. We’re pretty well divided in the House, almost down the middle, and it’s not any different in the Senate. So we’ve got to get something we can sell to both sides,” Biden told reporters.
Here’s the simple math: If one-half of the 222 House Republicans vote yes, as do half of the 212 Democrats, the vote would deadlock at 217-217.
So it will take a little more effort for both men to win. The percentage each gets will also set the stage for future Biden-McCarthy negotiations. If he can rally a large majority of his Republicans, the speaker will have better footing going forward.
A few days ago, that sales job looked more difficult for the president, whose allies on Capitol Hill voiced a range of complaints about potential concessions to McCarthy and a lack of a vigorous messaging effort to define the issues publicly.
House Democrats issued ultimatums that their votes should not be taken for granted. And their outside liberal allies have demonstrated an ability to cause stress for congressional leaders by opposing some compromises with Republicans. Biden, 80, is generationally and ideologically out of touch with the younger, more liberal House caucus.
However, Democrats breathed a little easier as details leaked a couple of days ago that seemed more favorable to their terms. “President Biden and congressional Democrats are doing as much as we can with our inside maneuvering, fighting relentlessly for our values,” Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the former speaker, told activists Saturday at the California Democratic Convention in Los Angeles.
And, historically, over the past 15 years of these fiscal standoffs, Democrats have regularly provided their fair share of votes to avoid calamity and keep the federal government operating. Over that time span, Republicans have regularly carried out a high-wire act.
For now, Trump seems content with McCarthy. “I think he’s doing a really good job. Tough situation,” he told reporters Thursday at his Virginia golf course before it hosted the Saudi-funded golf tour this weekend.
Later in the week, however, far-right Republicans and their outside allies began to sound the alarm in ways that resembled their battles a decade ago against GOP speakers making deals with a Democratic president.
Russ Vought, the former Trump administration budget director, sent a tweet just before 9 a.m. Thursday complaining that the deal would double the increase to the debt ceiling from the original House GOP offer while paring back much of the conservative policy ideas.
An hour later, Republicans in the Freedom Caucus, who have sought Vought’s advice on the debt bill, echoed his sentiment.
“Our package was $1.5 trillion,” Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) said of the original debt offer. “You want to go to $3 trillion or $4 trillion, you’ve got to add things into it, not compromise things away.”
Kevin McCarthy is on the verge of striking a terrible deal to give away the debt limit thru Biden’s term for little in the way of cuts. Nothing to crush the bureaucracy. They are lining up Democrats to pass it. The DC cartel is reassembling. Time for higher defcon. #HoldTheLine
— Russ Vought (@russvought) May 25, 2023
Those comments signal that, as many have expected, the roughly three dozen members of that hard-right caucus will oppose the compromise deal.
The question is: How many other conservatives also bolt from supporting the biggest negotiation of McCarthy’s leadership?
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), one of the speaker’s biggest antagonists, predicted about 150 Republicans, more than 67 percent of their caucus, and nearly 100 Democrats would support the compromise deal. And he suggested McCarthy’s internal enemies have no interest now in trying to oust him as speaker so soon after the embarrassing 15-ballot marathon in early January.
“I think there is no serious threat to McCarthy’s speakership,” Gaetz said Thursday during a social media gathering of conservatives.
As far-right conservatives ramped up opposition early Saturday, Republicans privately acknowledged they would rejoice if they won a two-thirds majority from their caucus when the roll call comes.
That would resemble the August 2011 vote for former speaker John A. Boehner’s debt bill that lifted the borrowing cap and won nearly $2 trillion in savings through 10-year restrictions on spending, supported by a little more than 70 percent of the Ohio Republican’s caucus.
But House Democrats fear that McCarthy will not be able to deliver that much, considering how difficult it was for him to win the speaker’s post and how Boehner had to face his own brutal insurrections.
“One of the challenges that we confront is that it’s unclear how many votes House Republicans can produce,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said on CNN’s “The Situation Room” on Friday evening.
Understanding the debt ceiling
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Trump’s earlier comments on the debt ceiling have been much more confrontational, which is in line with the right-wing faction. Trump had used his social media platform to declare, “Republicans should not make a deal on the debt ceiling unless they get everything they want.”
While he holds little sway with Senate Republicans, Trump has enjoyed outsize support among the House GOP. More than 50 House Republicans have endorsed his 2024 campaign and many more live in political fear of provoking his wrath during their primaries next year.
If Trump and outside conservative groups lead the opposition to a compromise, House Republicans may see the reemergence of what some dubbed the “Vote No, Hope Yes” caucus: a group of dozens of GOP lawmakers who quietly backed Boehner but, on some very big votes, abandoned him.
Boehner, in late 2012, pushed a compromise bill negotiated by President Barack Obama, then-Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that granted tax relief to more than 99 percent of Americans. But conservative groups opposed it because it did not pass their purity test of not increasing taxes by a single dollar.
The tax bill passed with 257 votes, but with just 85 Republicans, barely a third of Boehner’s caucus.
His power was gutted. Two days later, Boehner nearly lost the speaker vote at the start of the new Congress. By September 2013, the overwhelming majority of Republicans disregarded his advice and forced an ill-advised government shutdown that ended with complete capitulation to Obama and Democrats.
Other veterans of congressional fiscal wars worry that a 2008 scenario could be emerging. Back then a Democratic speaker, Pelosi, led negotiations with advisers of a GOP president, George W. Bush, and crafted a $700 billion rescue plan for Wall Street.
Pelosi expected Boehner, then minority leader, to produce about 100 votes from his side, but Republican backing collapsed in the final hours and the bill failed. Financial markets collapsed.
Four days later, a slightly modified version of the bill won passage, with the strong backing of both presidential nominees, Obama and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
A failed House vote this time would probably trigger another market crash, but it’s unclear whether Trump and other GOP presidential contenders would cheer on a default regardless of the economic consequences.
McCarthy’s allies know this history. They are determined to get a deal that can both pass the House and shore up enough internal support so that he emerges without the reduced standing Boehner endured his final couple of years in office.
Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.), a close friend and a top negotiator with Biden officials, predicted McCarthy’s resilience during the speaker’s contest would be demonstrated again.
“I would point you to what happened the first week of January,” McHenry said.
Of course, that took 14 failed votes over more than four days. That cushion is not available this time around.