After five months of largely amicable relations between Kevin McCarthy and a House Freedom Caucus that extracted significant concessions to make him House speaker, we got the clash we knew was coming sooner or later.
The right-wing caucus emerges from that clash looking bruised, hapless and apparently without the leverage it thought it had over McCarthy.
The House on Wednesday night overwhelmingly passed a debt ceiling deal forged by McCarthy (R-Calif.) and President Biden, 314-117. Surprisingly, not only did more than three-fourths of Democrats vote for it, but so too did more than two-thirds of Republicans. The latter did so despite members of the Freedom Caucus arguing that the bill was a complete nonstarter and aiming to keep support below a majority of the GOP.
Republicans were able to force Biden to the negotiating table in recent weeks. But the deal itself contained only modest wins for the right; they included two years of spending caps, permitting reform, work requirements for food stamps, and clawing back unspent covid money and IRS funding.
This one was, in many ways, teed up for the Freedom Caucus to flex its newfound muscle. The subject was the economy and spending cuts, which is in its wheelhouse. The deal was piecemeal, the kind of insufficient compromise that is anathema to the purity-obsessed right. And the leverage was right there, with a potentially catastrophic default right around the corner.
Nobody in Washington is more adept at projecting a willingness to blow things up than the Freedom Caucus, and it could point to an explosion just around the corner. It even had the leader of the GOP, Donald Trump, advocating for allowing a debt default if the party didn’t get “massive cuts.”
In the end, though, the messaging was all over the place and lacked commitment. And the levers the Freedom Caucus secured back in January proved wholly insufficient.
Perhaps the caucus’s best tool was in its long-standing, implied threat to McCarthy’s speakership. But it notably sought to denounce the deal without going too hard after the speaker who had forged it.
At a news conference Tuesday — notably attended by only about one-fourth of the caucus — members mostly talked around McCarthy’s role while saying the agreement he had reached was completely unacceptable. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) even credited McCarthy for doing “the best that he could do to some extent with this deal.”
A few members have floated trying to remove McCarthy as speaker if he followed through, but only one really committed to it, and most kept the idea at arm’s length or suggested that it would be something to consider only after passage. (This despite the utility of the threat seeming to be as a deterrent.) It became abundantly clear that the caucus didn’t want to or didn’t feel it would be productive to come after McCarthy too hard.
The McCarthy issue aside, some members asserted that this was ripping the party apart — in ways that seem rather silly after the vote Wednesday. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) said, “The Republican conference right now has been torn asunder.” Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) said that when the details of the deal were emerging, it would “collapse” the GOP majority.
At more than one point, its members suggested that McCarthy was violating previously unknown agreements with them.
One was Rep. Any Biggs (R-Ariz.), who claimed that it was agreed that such bills wouldn’t be allowed to pass with more Democratic votes than Republican ones. This doesn’t appear to have been a thing; rather, the usual agreement is that a bill must get votes from a majority of the majority party, which this one did with ease.
Another was Roy, who claimed that McCarthy had agreed to require the GOP votes on the powerful Rules Committee on which Roy serves to be unanimous. It’s true that we don’t know exactly what McCarthy gave away to become speaker, and deliberately so. But this agreement was apparently news to other Republicans — including fellow committee member Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) — and Roy soon backed off pressing that case.
Relatedly, Massie provided one of the most significant moments in all of this — in a way that appeared to undercut the Freedom Caucus’s goals moving forward.
One of the most significant concessions McCarthy gave away was putting three non-loyalists on the Rules Committee, which is usually stocked with the speaker’s allies. That meant Massie would serve as the potentially decisive fulcrum between the McCarthy loyalists and two Freedom Caucus members on the committee, which serves as a crucial stop for major pieces of legislation.
With the committee taking up the debt ceiling deal Tuesday, though, Massie not only voted to advance it, but he reasserted that he wouldn’t vote to halt bills there just because he opposed them on the substance. Massie isn’t a Freedom Caucus member, but he is aligned with it on plenty, and this suggests that won’t be a venue for gumming up the works.
With its opposition petering out and in an effort to save face, the Freedom Caucus has embraced a version of Biggs’s talking point. Repeatedly since Wednesday night, it has noted that the debt ceiling deal got more Democratic votes than Republicans ones. It has done so not in the service of arguing that McCarthy broke his promise, but to argue that this was a bad deal, period. If 78 percent of Democrats voted for it and 68 percent of Republicans voted for it, how could it possibly have been a good deal for Republicans?
Nevermind that those numbers aren’t really that far apart, or that eight of its own Freedom Caucus members voted for the bill. Far from convincing most of the party to vote against it, it couldn’t even get close to unanimity itself. And to the extent that this is the argument that’s left, that says a lot.
None of which means the Freedom Caucus is suddenly a nonentity in House GOP politics or that it won’t be a thorn in McCarthy’s side. The realities of the slim House majority and the concessions McCarthy made to become speaker mean you must cater to every corner of the party. And perhaps on this one, non-Freedom Caucus members simply didn’t feel enough of a pull from the GOP base to hold out for more.
But what the debt ceiling debate showed is that when the rest of the party decides it doesn’t need to toe the Freedom Caucus’s line, the caucus doesn’t really wield that much power — and doesn’t seem to know how to use the power it does have.
Which, beyond the legislative win, is about the best outcome McCarthy could have hoped for five months after the Freedom Caucus gave him fits during his ascent to the speakership.