GOP conservatives say they’ll end House floor blockade — for now

House conservatives said Monday that they’re ready to end their blockade of the House floor — at least temporarily — while they continue discussions with Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) about ways to grant the hard-liners more power and curb deficit spending in future funding packages. 

The conservative rebels have essentially held the floor hostage since last Tuesday, when 11 hard-liners blocked a procedural measure in protest of McCarthy’s handling of the debt-limit negotiations with President Biden, which led to passage of a bipartisan agreement to avoid a government default earlier in the month. 

The detractors, while vague in their demands, were essentially asking for assurances that the Speaker would hold a harder line on spending in the budget fights to come. 

Emerging from McCarthy’s office Monday evening, those hard-liners said no firm agreement has been reached with the Speaker. But they’re encouraged by the direction of the talks and will release their stranglehold on the House this week while those discussions continue.

“We want to see this move forward as a body, but we’re concerned about the economic security of this country,” said Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.). 

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), another of the 11 detractors, delivered a similar message, saying the conservatives want to renegotiate the “power-sharing” arrangement they’d made with McCarthy as a condition of winning him the Speakership in January, and they would vote to approve rules this week as those talks evolve. He called the meeting with McCarthy “productive.”

“It has to be renegotiated in a way so that what happened on the debt limit vote would never happen again, where House conservatives would be left as the less desirable coalition partner than Democrats,” he said.

But Gaetz also signaled that the group of conservative rebels could hold the House floor hostage again as soon as next week if their requests of McCarthy are not adequately met.

“There’ll be more votes next week, and more rules, and if there’s not a renegotiated power-sharing agreement then perhaps we’ll be back here next week,” Gaetz said. “That’s not our goal; our goal is to continue to build off the momentum of this discussion we’ve just had.”

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, said there was a “framework” for an agreement with McCarthy but declined to elaborate on the details. 

The nascent agreement liberates the House to vote this week on the four GOP bills that were blocked last week, relating to gas stoves and regulatory reforms, as well as a fifth bill to prohibit a restriction on a controversial firearms accessory known as a pistol stabilizing brace.

That pistol brace legislation was at the center of outrage from conservatives that fueled last week’s floor rebellion. 

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), lead sponsor of the legislation, had accused leadership of threatening to keep the legislation from coming to the floor if he did not vote in favor or a procedural motion on the debt limit bill. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) later told reporters that the bill did not yet have enough support to pass, but that he was working to get it passed.

The conservative revolt had caught GOP leaders, and the rest of Washington, by surprise when it surfaced last week. While the detractors support the substance of all the bills in question, they blocked consideration of them to signal their deep disapproval of the McCarthy-Biden debt-ceiling agreement, which extended the government’s borrowing authority for much longer than conservatives wanted, cut spending much less sharply than a GOP proposal passed in April and excluded a number of policy reforms also included in the Republicans’ partisan bill. 

McCarthy’s detractors accused him of giving away too much to the Democrats and want assurances that he won’t do the same in the coming fights over the farm bill and 2024 government spending.  

Rep. Bob Good (R-Va) said Monday’s agreement to reopen the floor is just the start. 

“We’re also — there’s a larger discussion about how we sort of rebuild the conservative coalition within the Republican conference so that we can restore the unity that we had before the debt limit increase,” he added.   

But the conservatives who rebelled on the floor had also expressed frustration that the spending caps in the debt limit bill didn’t cut enough spending. They would like nondefense discretionary spending reverted to fiscal 2022 levels. While GOP leaders had said that the debt bill did revert that to those levels, conservatives said they wanted those cuts without any “budgetary gimmicks like rescissions as the way to get there,” as Gaetz put it.

After the meeting, McCarthy acknowledged that the Republicans’ slim majority empowers just a handful of detractors to shut down the GOP’s legislative agenda. But he said both sides share the same goal — to rally together behind lower federal spending — and signaled an openness to passing appropriations bills that fall below the caps set out in the debt limit bill.

“You always have to remember with appropriation levels — that’s your cap. You can always do less, which I’ve always tried to improve and do better,” McCarthy said earlier Monday. 

The conservatives are also energized by an idea from Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) to take a hard look at rescinding funding for programs that have not been reauthorized by Congress.

Updated at 7:23 p.m. EDT.