As House Republicans flail, fears of a government shutdown reemerge

Kevin McCarthy’s ouster from the House speakership Tuesday appears to have increased the risk that the U.S. government will shut down next month, as the far-right lawmakers who toppled him demand that the GOP extract impossibly large concessions from the White House and Democratic-controlled Senate.

House Republicans on Wednesday started the process of choosing their next leader, but whoever they choose is likely to face the same political constraints that led to McCarthy’s ouster. The former speaker was deposed in part over the fury that followed his decision on Saturday to extend government funding with Democratic votes. After the House did not pass several other Republican spending bills, McCarthy agreed to essentially take up a bipartisan Senate measure, jettisoning the far right’s demands for hundreds of billions in budget cuts and a crackdown on immigration.

Already, the chaos on the House floor is eating into the time necessary to forge a bipartisan agreement on spending. Congress passed a law on Saturday night to keep the government operating for about 45 days. But now the House is in recess through this weekend, and the mess consuming the GOP will carry on at least into next week’s vote on the next speaker, reducing the number of days lawmakers have to work to about 30, said Bill Hoagland, senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank.

“It becomes substantially harder to do a government spending deal, because the message has been sent that Republicans should not rely on Democrats to pass any bills,” said Brian Riedl, a former aide to Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) who is now a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank. “Things can always get worse. The no-compromise fringe has been strongly empowered and essentially has a veto over House Republican policy - which can’t be squared with what Democrats and the White House want.”

The eight House Republicans who voted to strip McCarthy of his speakership had a mixture of explanations for their decision, ranging from wanting a tougher line on immigration to personal frustrations with the speaker. But many of them emphasized conservative displeasure with the deal McCarthy struck with President Biden this spring to lift the U.S. borrowing limit, a deal that kept domestic spending levels largely flat rather than curbing federal budgets sharply. Given House Republicans’ narrow majority, the next speaker will face immense internal pressure to abandon the agreement with Biden and seek bigger cuts - or risk incurring the wrath of the far right as McCarthy did.

“Here’s the reality: The only Republicans in America who believe that the debt limit deal was conservative are in this chamber right now,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), the ringleader in the plot to unseat McCarthy, said on the House floor Tuesday. “Because all over America, Republicans think that when you [McCarthy] negotiated that debt limit deal, they took your lunch money.”

Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), one of the eight to vote against McCarthy, also cited the deal with Biden as evidence McCarthy had violated his agreement to use the debt ceiling to extract spending cuts.

“We need a speaker who will fight for something, anything besides just staying or becoming speaker,” Good said on the House floor. “Despite all the help of the media blaming Republicans in the House, the polls showed that the public was blaming Biden and the Democrats for an imminent shutdown. If not fight now, when would we fight?”

(Polling was mixed on this question, with some surveys finding that voters would have blamed Republicans by a large margin and others with more mixed findings.)

The uncertainty over who will lead the House makes predicting how the fights over funding will play out inherently challenging. Some congressional aides say the next speaker could insist on changing the rules that empowered Gaetz to push to boot McCarthy with just one vote. That could give the next speaker more room to operate.

The next GOP speaker may also be free of some of the personal animosity that characterized McCarthy’s relationship with Gaetz. Many GOP leadership allies said Gaetz was more interested in picking a high-profile battle with GOP leadership than in lowering domestic discretionary spending targets. A new speaker could be freed of some of those constraints.

“The way we get through it will be the same way we’ve cobbled it together through it every year,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) told reporters Wednesday. “We’ll find a way like we always do.”

[Vote to oust McCarthy is a warning sign for democracy, scholars say]

Perhaps most important, no matter how angry House backbenchers are at GOP leadership, the far-right bloc simply does not have the votes to push massive spending cuts into law. McCarthy’s bill on Saturday received more than 300 votes, and even Republicans in the Senate do not support the cuts demanded by the far-right House backbenchers.

“They have to do it bipartisan, just like we did here in the Senate,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee told The Washington Post. “That’s how we’re getting our bills done, and in the House, that’s how you have to get bills done.”

The White House has already threatened to veto several spending bills covering the full 2024 fiscal year that the House has passed with sharp spending reductions.

“This was the message the right was trying to send: We’ll do everything on our own, and we will depose you if you work with Democrats,” said Hoagland, of the Bipartisan Policy Center. “But what are they going to do when the Senate comes back with different numbers? It doesn’t work, because then you will have government shutdowns and even more chaos. It’s not a strategy that makes sense.”

Signs were already emerging on Capitol Hill on Wednesday that the fallout of the McCarthy drama would make it harder to secure a government funding deal.

It takes six weeks to bring an appropriations bill to the House floor, said Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee. The lower chamber is running out of time to complete that process, a situation that worsens with each day that passes without a speaker.

That could force Congress to take up another stopgap funding bill and trigger the same fights that brought the federal government to the brink of a shutdown over the weekend.

“Every day, we lose our ability to get something done by November 17,” she told The Post. “In which case, we will be looking at the same madness.”

DeLauro wasn’t the only lawmaker concerned about time running short.

“I know how long it takes to work appropriations bills,” Sen. Cynthia M. Lummis (R-Wyo.) added, “and 45 days is not much under any circumstances. But these circumstances are unique.”

On the Senate floor Wednesday morning, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) gave voice to Democratic sentiment that House Republicans must learn they have no choice but to reach bipartisan deals across the aisle.

Around the same time, Good, one of the conservative holdouts, told Semafor that he would insist on keeping the House rule that allowed any one member to call for a vote to strip the speaker of the position.

“Whoever the House elects as speaker will not be able to ignore the realities of divided government, no matter what the hard right demands,” Schumer said. “For the good of the country, I urge my Republican colleagues in the House to, once and for all, accept that reality. If not, it is my fear, deep fear, that the chaos from yesterday is just the beginning.”

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Mariana Alfaro contributed to this report.