McCarthy seeks to mollify conservatives ahead of federal spending fight

With a two-week holiday break starting next week, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) gathered some of his most vocal conservative critics Friday for a meeting intended to ease the hard-liners’ deficit concerns ahead of the long summer fight over government spending. 

It’s been a rocky few weeks in the House. The Speaker’s conservative critics have been grumbling that he caved too quickly during debt ceiling negotiations with President Biden, and they’re seeking concrete assurances that McCarthy will hold a harder line — and demand deeper cuts — in the upcoming partisan battle over funding the government beyond September.

To mollify those gripes, the Speaker summoned a group of at least eight conservatives to his office in the Capitol on Friday afternoon, seeking to convince the skeptics that Republican leaders share their goals when it comes to spending cuts. Afterward, McCarthy characterized the discussion as a sort of primer on the goals GOP leaders aim to achieve in their appropriations bills.

“You have to think differently. We got to start at the beginning,” McCarthy said. “It’s walking people through what’s in the approps bills now, and what could be as the other ones get marked up. Greater input, greater conversations. And the more knowledge, the better off we are in the better chance we have at passing.”

With lawmakers leaving for a two-week recess on Friday, McCarthy said he did not want members to “just go away,” and that he is setting up more meetings on the matter over the break.

In an indication of the high stakes, some of the conservatives had delayed flights home in order to join Friday’s meeting, according to Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), who was among them. Higgins acknowledged that GOP leaders face an arduous task in rallying 218 votes behind their spending bills given the party’s slim majority — “The understatement of possibly the decade,” he said — but he also predicted they would meet that goal.

“We’re going to find a way to get to 218 on appropriations,” Higgins said. “We are united in that goal.” 

Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, also came away from the meeting with an optimistic tone. 

“I think there is a plan of action. I don’t know about a resolution, but a plan of action,” Perry said.

Others, though, emphasized the long road ahead in ironing out the details of the spending cuts conservatives are demanding. 

Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) said a big part of the discussion is “making sure that we’re all on the same page” with the appropriations figures, and that members are not operating with “different sets of numbers.” 

Conservatives have accused GOP leaders of using a budget “gimmick” — known as rescissions — to claim they’re setting next year’s spending at last year’s levels, while actually allocating much more. And several of them said they’re not yet satisfied with leadership’s response. 

“It’s a very much continued and unresolved question,” Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) said. 

“I think the disagreement right now amongst us [and], you know, our colleagues is they’re using that to help bring up the agency spending,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) said of the rescissions after the meeting. “And so my view is no, we shouldn’t be doing that. … The agencies need to justify why they even need the money to begin with. They have not done that.”

The House left Friday for a two-week Independence Day recess after an extended seven-week stretch in session; the debt ceiling legislation forced leaders to cancel a scheduled weeklong recess the week of Memorial Day. 

Tensions flared — and derailed leadership’s hold of the House floor — through the second half of that grueling stretch, forcing McCarthy to stomp out fires.

Eleven members of the House Freedom Caucus and their allies sunk a procedural rule in protest of the proposed cuts in the debt ceiling compromise not being steep enough, shutting down legislative action on the House floor for a week. Moderate Republicans lashed out, with one even proposing working with Democrats to get back control of the floor.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) forced a vote on a resolution to censure Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calf.), which failed last week but then succeeded this week after adjustments in language. And Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) forced action on her resolution to impeach Biden over his handling of the U.S.-Mexico border, angering colleagues and surprising leaders — who then punted on her impeachment articles by working out a vote to send them back to committee.

Conservatives still have major concerns with spending levels in appropriations bills that have started to move through the committee. While they have allowed floor action to continue, they warn that shutting down the floor again remains a possibility.

Yet McCarthy said Friday the House GOP has “been so successful for the last seven weeks.”

As the leaders’ outreach effort ramps up, Republican appropriators have already begun the long process of marking up their 2024 spending bills, with a goal of sending all 12 appropriations bills to the House floor as quickly as possible. 

“I think that what makes the most sense for us strategically is to be able to get these bills, get the numbers as low as we possibly can, and get them out of the House as quick as we can for negotiating purposes,” Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), a close McCarthy ally who was central to debt ceiling negotiations, told reporters after the meeting. “I think that’s what’s most strategic and in our interest.”

Behind Chairwoman Kay Granger (R-Texas), the Appropriations Committee has already marked up roughly half of those spending bills. But Graves emphasized that even those are not set in stone, and GOP leaders are reserving the right to alter those bills as needed to win over potential GOP holdouts — conservatives and moderates alike. 

“The Speaker committed in January to go through regular order. Regular order includes allowing amendments and changes to bills as we move forward,” Graves said. “And look, yeah, Freedom Caucus has ideas on what they want to do. But so do a lot of other people.”