The House Freedom Caucus voted against McCarthy’s bipartisan debt suspension-debt-reduction deal: Rep. Michael Schumer, C.R. Ogles, and A.J. Norman

The compromise legislation was passed by the Congress after being brokered by President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

The bipartisan deal would pair a suspension of the debt limit for nearly two years to a package of spending cuts. The policy changes would include claw-back of un spent COVID-19 funds, an upgrade of permitting reviews for energy projects and changes to work requirements for some federal assistance programs.

The bill will need 60 votes in the Senate to get to Biden’s desk. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has already said lawmakers are prepared to stay the weekend to pass the legislation, if needed.

The majority of the majority of their conference will eventually support the bill after Republicans emerged from a closed-door conference meeting.

On Tuesday, members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus slammed the deal, arguing it doesn’t go far enough on spending cuts and doesn’t align closely enough with a bill they passed in April.

Comments from the caucus opened up questions about whether members’ displeasure over the bill could lead to a motion to vacate — a concession McCarthy made in January in his quest to become speaker that allows any one House member to offer a resolution to remove the speaker.

I know where the American people are so I didn’t change my mind. The people of the United States want us to cut spending. She left the meeting saying that the bill did not do that. She said talk of a motion to vacate the speaker is “premature.”

Two of the most vocal opponents of McCarthy’s role in the deal, Roy and fellow Freedom Caucus member Dan Bishop of North Carolina wouldn’t discuss McCarthy’s future as speaker with reporters.

Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles, one of the conservative holdouts who opposed McCarthy’s speakership in January, said he has been “very pleased” with McCarthy’s leadership.

“Not being happy with the deal or trying to make the deal better is not a reflection of McCarthy, it’s just the other way around,” he said. “It’s a reflection on the specifics of the package.”

South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman, another Freedom Caucus member who initially held out against McCarthy, said discussions about a motion to vacate were unfair to the speaker.

The co- founder of the Freedom Caucus, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, was pretty much sure the bill would get a majority of Republican votes and called the motion to vacate a terrible idea.

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene told reporters she “came into town undecided” but plans to vote to support the bill. She was very pleased with the deal’s spending cuts. Nowhere have we been able to do that this far, especially when we control this Congress with just a handful of seats.”

Massie said in the meeting that he was happy they had three days to read the bill because it took him 2.5 to get to yes.

This bill cuts spending for the first time in 10 years and I’ve never voted for it before. In the Rules Committee, we had a hearing — I asked every Democrat, every Republican who testified, does it cut spending? They all know that it does. “This is the first chance I have in 10 years and I’m not missing it,” the Kentucky Republican told NPR.

A no-go theorem for McCarthy: Why he’s a good senator and why we’re going to roll with him

He claims the private meeting “put a big wet blanket” on the motion to leave because members said they would not vote for the bill but support McCarthy as speaker.

“Look, I was a part of all three efforts to get rid of [former Speaker] John Boehner. He said he co-wrote the motion to leave with MarkMeadows. It’s on my wall. There are at least eight ‘whereas’ clauses that describe a long train of grievances, OK? There’s a short train of grievances. Here. You don’t hit the umpire in the first. You didn’t like the call. If the ump is good or not, then we’ll get in there and play ball.

Florida Rep. Byron Donalds, another member of the Freedom Caucus, agreed — saying although he’s a no on the bill, McCarthy’s “the guy that we’re with. We’re going to roll with him.”

The Deal on the Debt Ceiling Measure: How Many Votes Do We Need to Get? Kevin McCarthy, the Freedom Caucus, and the Speaker’s Correspondence

The Democrats had to decide between voting for a bill to avoid a potentially catastrophic default and also having their vote count, because of provisions their districts don’t support.

“I have talked to people from the White House. They know what my concerns are,” she said Tuesday afternoon. There’s another 24 hours.

Although it’s expected that a bloc of moderate Democrats will support the bill, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries signaled Tuesday that members could wait on the floor to see how many Republicans support it before offering up their votes.

“What we all are interested in is how many votes are the Republicans – who negotiated this resolution – going to produce. Initially, we heard that 95% of the House Republican conference supports this agreement. That doesn’t appear to be the case,” he said. “It’s my expectation that House Republicans will keep their commitment to produce at least two-thirds of their conference, which is approximately 150 votes.”

The debt ceiling deal will tell us a lot about what this Republican Party is really about and how it works if Congress approves it. And it will have proved something important about what lines Democrats can hold and which they can’t.

Threatening default — and we came within days of it this time — in order to get a deal like this is like threatening to detonate a bomb beneath the bank unless the teller gives you $150 and a commemorative mug. There is a weird mismatch of means and ends.

Is it true we have a deal? Kevin McCarthy was forced to make a slew of concessions to get the speakership. He served at their pleasure, that is what the message seemed to say. He agreed to allow dissatisfied members to call a vote on his speakership as part of the deal that brought him the gavel, but he didn’t want them to be unhappy. That was the location where the danger of default existed. A deal between Biden and McCarthy was always possible. A deal that would satisfy Biden, McCarthy and the Freedom Caucus was not.

The House-Debates the Biden-McCarthy Debt-Ceiling Bill as Default Deadline Line looms

The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2017/18, which would lift the debt ceiling for nearly two years, was overwhelmingly passed in the chamber on Wednesday evening.

“Was [the bill] everything I wanted? No. McCarthy claimed that sitting with one House and a Senate with Democrats who did not want to meet with him was good for the American public.

The Democrats continued to claim that the economy was held hostage by the Republicans’ refusal to pass a clean debt limit bill.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries praised his members for pushing back against “extreme MAGA Republican efforts to jam right-wing cuts down the throat of the American people.”

McCarthy said he would have done the same thing, if Jeffries had waited until the last moment to give his members the okay to vote. “Well played.”

The bill phases in higher age limits for work requirements on certain federal safety net programs like food stamps, lifting the maximum age from 50 to 54 by 2025. It would create more exemptions that would waive requirements for veterans and people experiencing homelessness as well as young adults who have been out of foster care.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/31/1179246766/house-debates-the-biden-mccarthy-debt-ceiling-bill-as-default-deadline-looms

The New York Democrat Against Kevin McCarthy’s Decline to Save a Clean Debt Ceiling and What We Don’t Want to See

A bloc of conservative members expressed their dismay at some of the provisions in the legislation, and argue McCarthy didn’t align the bill close enough to a version the House passed in April.

The congressman said before the vote that people want to compare what they want to what others want. They should compare with where we were at, which was to get a clean debt ceiling with nothing.

The GOP members left a closed-door conference meeting Tuesday night largely squashing the idea of disgruntled members trying to oust McCarthy under a provision that he agreed to during his fight for the gavel that allows anyone to bring up a snap vote to potentially oust the speaker.

New Hampshire Rep. Annie Kuster told NPR Biden has been “very involved” in reaching out to members to boost support for the bill. The two spoke by phone about the legislation on Monday. The center- left New Democrat Coalition gave a significant portion of Democratic votes Wednesday night. Kuster, who voted for the bill, said she hopes the compromise deals paves the way for a new chapter in bipartisanship.

“Since the prior president and certainly since Jan. 6th, it’s been very difficult in the Capitol working across the aisle. She said that it has been painful. “And I think this whole agreement is a turning of a corner toward a more productive relationship between Republicans and Democrats.”

On the other side, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy doesn’t have a good relationship with his members. He has a sliver of a majority — just four seats — and squeaked through to become speaker after a historic 15 rounds of voting.

The Californian congressman, who has never been beloved by the conservatives in his party, agreed to lower the threshold in order to get a vote to oust the speaker.

Even with that looming, in his first big deal with Democrats, McCarthy didn’t turn to the hard right, but to the likes of Reps. Johnson and Garret Graves, R-La.

Graves is seen as a get-it-done person. Before becoming a congressman, he was chairman of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority of Louisiana, where he was integral in fighting for dollars after the BP oil spill.

Bipartisan bipartisan vote on McCarthy’s removal of the $20$CDM budget from the Tex-Road Caucus

Freedom Caucus member Chip Roy of Texas seemed willing to go to the brink of default — or indeed over that cliff — to force McCarthy’s hand and ask for more cuts.

During Speaker negotiations to build the coalition, it was clearly stated that Rules would not pass without at least 7 GOP votes, and the Committee would not allow reporting out rules without unanimous Republican votes.

But like another Roy this week who needed just one more vote to get what he wanted (see Roy, Kendall of Succession), in the end, he couldn’t persuade conservative Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie to help him block the bill from advancing past the committee.

The Freedom Caucus chairman declined to say if a vote on McCarthy’s removal was imminent if the debt ceiling vote failed.

Of course, before McCarthy gets too comfortable, he would do well to remember that, in the end, Michael Corleone took out Stracci, Cuneo, Tattaglia and Barzini to wrest control.

The delayed rematch also means McCarthy might not have to put forward another hard vote for his members for a year and a half. That’s important for him, since he may have angered the far right to get this deal over the finish line.

With an already iffy economy, persistent inflation and climbing interest rates, that’s good news for Biden. He has a lot of vulnerabilities to worry about and another debt-ceiling fight in the middle of a presidential campaign is the last thing he or his staff needed.

In 2011 he did it with McConnell. Since taking office, Biden has been able to pull off multiple bipartisan pieces of legislation, despite GOP intransigence.

Biden got the presidential nomination despite his more moderate profile, and McCarthy had the support of the majority of his conference.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/01/1179367537/debt-ceiling-congress-bipartisan-vote-biden-mccarthy

Dusty Johnson and the Five Families: “Moderates” versus “Five Families” during the debt-ceiling crisis

A few dozen of the 435 districts can be considered truly competitive today, which gives lawmakers little incentive to compromise.

In a time when cynicism about politics seems to be everyone’s gut reaction, it’s easy to overlook the role of lower-profile lawmakers who helped avert a debt-ceiling crisis.

“Moderates?” tweeted Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., one of the lead negotiators of the debt-ceiling deal that passed the House overwhelmingly Wednesday night. He favors the term “pragmatic conservatives who actually care about getting to work.”

The Republicans in Congress call it the mafioso-themed “Five Families.” The Main Street Caucus and other coalitions in the middle were critical in getting support for the deal.

There were plenty of well-founded complaints on either side — on the left, worries about increased work requirements that could hurt people in poverty, nervousness about the environmental impact of sped-up energy permits; on the right, continued head-shaking about what they see as out-of-control spending and debt, now topping $30 trillion.

If the measure passes the Senate, it will be those who shun the wings of their parties which have some of the most attention-getting members, who saved the day.

In the last two years, conservatives have inaccurately portrayed him as a puppet of the progressive left, and the negative feelings towards him on the right have ballooned.

He had to make compromises to get the job he’s wanted for a long time, and he ended up empowering the most pugilistic parts of the party in the process.

That is backed up by data. The Republicans are more conservative on many issues, from guns to abortion rights to gender identity.