Republicans find an antidote to the madness. Will they take it?
The MAGA Republicans’ opposition was categorical. It was also scatological.
Many of the same House GOP extremists who nearly denied Kevin McCarthy the speakership did their utmost this week to tank the bipartisan debt and budget agreement he struck with President Biden.
Rep. Chip Roy (Tex.) wanted colleagues to know “what a turd-sandwich this ‘deal’ is.”
Rep. Dan Bishop (N.C.) told me and other reporters that the hard-liners needed “to fix this s--- sandwich.”
Rep. Byron Donalds (Fla.), at a news conference, declared it “crap.”
And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) said she needed sides and a dessert in order “to eat [this] s--- sandwich.”
But this time, McCarthy didn’t cower and cave. He made these vulgarians clean their plates. He told the right-wing hooligans to stuff it, and he took his debt compromise to the House floor — where something remarkable happened Wednesday night.
More than two thirds of Republicans stuck with McCarthy, leaving the 71 GOP holdouts isolated. At the same time, nearly 80 percent of Democrats voted for the package, putting more D’s than R’s in the yes column and lifting the bill to passage by a lopsided 314-117.
Watching from the gallery, I felt more hopeful about our politics than I had in some time. For a brief, glorious (and probably fleeting) moment, the madness had stopped.
McCarthy discovered that, if he’s willing to be reasonable, Democrats will lend him their support. He also proved that the Trumpian forces within his party can be sidelined — if sensible Republicans would only show some courage.
All of the usual forces of destruction on the right were aligned against the debt-and-budget deal and, by logical extension, in favor of default: Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and the rest of the Fox Industrial Complex; Ron DeSantis; the House Freedom Caucus; Heritage Action; and the Club for Growth; former Trump aides Stephen Bannon, Peter Navarro and Russell Vought. Donald Trump himself, though he went quiet as the vote neared, told Republicans they should default rather than budge from their original absurd demands for $4.8 trillion in deficit reduction and the repeal of much of Biden’s agenda.
Instead, McCarthy accepted a modest $1.5 trillion in projected savings over 10 years and left Biden’s agenda intact while agreeing that there would be no more debt limit hostage-taking before the next elections. Most Republicans tolerated the compromise, and Democrats leaped at it.
“This is fabulous,” McCarthy replied at a post-vote news conference when The Post’s Leigh Ann Caldwell asked him to square the overwhelming Democratic support with his claims that Democrats got “nothing” in the negotiations. “This is one of the best nights I’ve ever been here,” he went on with exaggerated cheer. “I thought it would be hard. I thought it would be almost impossible just to get to 218 [votes]. Now, I found there’s a whole new day here.”
Of course, there’s an obvious explanation for why Democrats, who had been quiet about their intentions, voted en masse for the bill. As Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) told Bloomberg’s Erik Wasson after the vote: “Now we are allowed to say it: We rolled them.”
That was the view of the House Freedom Caucus, whose members gathered outside the Capitol on Tuesday to denounce the accord as an “insult,” a “violation” and “un-American,” in the views of Rep. Ralph Norman (S.C.).
“Trillions and trillions of dollars in debt for crumbs,” protested Rep. Scott Perry (Pa.), chair of the Freedom Caucus.
Added Rep. Andrew Clyde (Ga.), wearing an AR-15 pin on his tie with the barrel pointed at his head: “It’s a win for Washington.”
The assembled murmured their agreement when Donalds complained that “this bill keeps all of Joe Biden’s policy, all of Joe Biden’s spending intact.”
McCarthy faced a choice in the debt ceiling negotiations: save the country from economic calamity or protect his own job. It’s not clear whether he made a conscious decision or whether, as Democrats and House Freedom Caucus members suspect, he simply got bested in the negotiations. Whatever the motive, he did the right thing for the country.
And now, sure enough, the MAGA crowd wants to hobble, if not terminate, his speakership.
They were asked at the news conference whether they would consider a “motion to vacate” to depose the speaker — one of the concessions McCarthy granted hard-liners during his struggle for the speakership. Bishop’s hand shot up. He accused McCarthy of “lying,” of “total betrayal,” and he said his confidence in the speaker is “none — zero.”
Another dissident, Rep. Ken Buck (Colo.), told reporters Wednesday to “stay tuned” for a “discussion on the motion to vacate.”
But the renegades start in a weak position. Only 11 of the Freedom Caucus’s 50-odd members joined the event where they tried, in vain, to rally opposition to the deal. They looked like street protesters, not lawmakers. Immediately behind them, two ambulances and a paramedic van, lights on and beeping, attended to a stricken tourist. A pro-Trump demonstrator dressed as a Hasidic Jew and carrying a bullhorn wandered around in the background with a banner proclaiming “Traitor Kevin McCarthy. Shame on you!”
The hard-liners called for reinforcements, but the cavalry never came. Freedom Caucus founder Jim Jordan (Ohio), co-opted by McCarthy with a pair of committee chairmanships, threw his support behind the “darn good deal.” Provocateur Greene, now embraced by McCarthy as an ally, willingly devoured the fecal sandwich under the rationale that Republicans could then move on to more important matters, such as impeaching Biden.
Self-proclaimed debt hawk Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) could have used his seat on the Rules Committee (won as a concession during the speakership battle) to kill the bill before it got to the floor. Instead, Massie (perhaps to protect the subcommittee chairmanship he also secured during the speakership battle) cast the deciding vote for it — after some grandstanding. “I’m reluctant to disclose how I might vote on this rule at this moment because then all the cameras leave,” he said. “Dramatic pause,” he narrated before announcing his support.
The two other hard-liners who had won seats on the Rules panel during the speakership flailed uselessly against the bill. Norman, revealing his true motive, suggested deeper budget cuts were needed to “punish” the government — and those that rely on it. Likening government to a corporation, he asked: “Is that really a punishment if you tell the business, 'We’re going to really punish you, we’re going to cut your business income 1 percent, but we’re going to leave 99 percent intact’?”
Roy, the other dissident on the panel, denounced the deal as a “$4 trillion increase” in the federal debt with “no teeth” to cut spending.
Republicans unsuccessfully came to the panel with more than 60 amendments to toughen the legislation. Rep. Lauren Boebert (Colo.), who attempted to insert 15 poison pills, demanded Congress “stop spending money we don’t have.” Added Boebert, who just filed for divorce: “It has been an argument my husband and I often had.”
The right-wingers expressed many irreconcilable differences with McCarthy’s deal. The deal didn’t make much of a dent in Biden’s IRS expansion or his clean energy incentives. The work requirements for government programs had so many exemptions that the government would wind up spending more money on them, the Congressional Budget Office forecast. The package had no provision to enforce spending discipline after the first two years. And the deal narrows or eliminates all of their hostage-taking opportunities until 2025.
To answer his critics, McCarthy had a ready approach: He would make stuff up.
He gathered the rank and file for a closed-door caucus meeting Tuesday night, fed them cartloads of We the Pizza pies, and told them, “I’m going to go on record and vote for the biggest spending cuts in history!”
This wasn’t remotely true, but McCarthy repeated it endlessly over the following days.
“Tonight we are going to vote for the largest savings in American history,” he said (wrong), “over $2.1 trillion” (also wrong).
“We capped the ability of growth, of spending and government for the next six years,” he said (wrong).
“History will write this is the largest cut in American history,” he continued (still wrong).
But if McCarthy didn’t have the facts, he did have the votes.
n Wednesday afternoon, the zealots used a parliamentary maneuver on the House floor, attempting to derail the package by voting against the “rule” that allowed the debate to begin. Such rules routinely pass on strictly party-line votes, but this time 29 GOP holdouts cast no votes — enough to kill the bill if Democrats hadn’t intervened. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries let McCarthy squirm for about 45 minutes (it was supposed to have been a 15-minute vote) before he raised a green card to allow Democrats to break rank and vote for the GOP-written rule. Fifty-two of them did, bailing out McCarthy — and the debt deal.
During Wednesday night’s debate, Jeffries gloated a bit about saving McCarthy from his MAGA hard-liners. “Earlier today, 29 House Republicans voted to default on our nation’s debt and against an agreement that you negotiated,” he needled, later adding: “Extreme MAGA Republicans attempted to take control of the House floor. Democrats took it back for the American people, and we will continue to do what is necessary.”
McCarthy’s allies evidently didn’t appreciate the taunt. The presiding officer, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (Ohio), took the extraordinary step of gaveling down the Democratic leader midspeech — on dubious grounds. But in the end, Democrats bailed out McCarthy again. In the final tally, most of the no votes came from Republicans; most of the yes votes came from Democrats.
There’s nothing to celebrate in the way the debt agreement came about. Republicans manufactured a crisis and played a(nother) reckless game with the full faith and credit of the United States. They took tax revenue, entitlement programs, defense and veterans benefits off the table, requiring all cuts to come from a small sliver — less than 15 percent — of the federal budget. This made substantial debt-reduction impossible, and the two sides struck a deal that was necessarily small-bore.
Some real good could come of this moment if McCarthy learns from it that he has the power to defeat the MAGA wing nuts, who now appear fewer and less powerful than they once did. During the speaker’s 40-minute, celebratory news conference in the Capitol’s Rayburn Room on Wednesday night, PBS’s Lisa Desjardins asked if the bipartisan debt deal could be a “template for other issues.”
Unfortunately, McCarthy sounded more interested in patching things up with the extremists. “I watched Congress divided today; I watched my own conference,” he said. “I’ll work to make sure everybody comes back.”
And, as usual, he had no appetite to antagonize Trump, who had just criticized the bill on Iowa radio. In the final question of the night, a reporter asked McCarthy about his dealings with Trump on the debt bill. The speaker brushed off the question (“we didn’t talk much about the bill”) before adding: “We don’t want to end on that question. Let’s end on something else.”
But when it comes to the future of the party, and therefore of the country, the Trump question is the only question. This week provided Republicans with a road map to escape from Trumpism. The only excuse not to use it is cowardice — or complicity.
Opinion by Dana Milbank
