Seats on the Rules Committee is a key demand for McCarthy’s detractors, but resolving that dispute wouldn’t necessarily secure the votes for the speakership.
Seats on the Rules Committee is a key demand for McCarthy’s detractors, but resolving that dispute wouldn’t necessarily secure the votes for the speakership.
O ne of the key demands of the House Republicans refusing to support Kevin McCarthy for speaker is that they want more power on the influential Rules Committee, the last stop for any piece of legislation before it hits the House floor.
As I noted earlier, Texas GOP congressman Chip Roy, one of the leaders of the House GOP rebels, has been somewhat vague in public about the changes he wants on the committee, but Bloomberg’s Billy House and Erik Wasson report that “hard-line conservatives want to claim four of the nine [Republican] seats on the House Rules Committee, which would give them outsized influence on what does — and what does not — get debated on the House floor.”
After the House adjourned late Wednesday afternoon, National Review briefly caught up with Congressman Roy in the Capitol and asked if it’s accurate that he and other anti-McCarthy Republicans are demanding four seats on the Rules Committee. “I’m not going to specify a number,” Roy replied. “That number has been floated in some previous conversations.” There are 13 seats in total on the committee — nine for the majority and four for the minority — and the minority party routinely votes against any bill the speaker wants to bring to the floor.
Resolving the dispute might not be easy. “This is the speaker’s committee, and it doesn’t matter who’s speaker,” Oklahoma GOP congressman Tom Cole told National Review on Wednesday. Cole, who served as the ranking Republican member of the Rules Committee when Democrats controlled Congress, pointed to members of the Freedom Caucus who have served on the committee in the past, and he said his ongoing discussions with McCarthy’s opponents have been “productive” and “sincere.” But Cole emphasized the Rules Committee is “an instrument of the speaker and of the majority to get their agenda through and to the floor.”
Roy, on the other hand, seems to want to turn it into a potential choke point. “My perspective is just one of wanting to make sure that we’ve got the ability through the Rules Committee to stop the kind of bill that we saw the Senate just jam through,” Roy added. “The number [of seats on the committee] is probably most important. But there would also be certain understandings about how things would pass out of Rules. . . . There’s all sorts of other things that you can set in place with respect to how we expect spending bills to be orchestrated, points of order, other stuff — there are things to sort of constrain the sort of machine from spending the money we don’t have.”
If the committee dispute could be resolved, would that be enough for Roy to vote for McCarthy to be speaker? “I’m not going to negotiate this in the press,” Roy replied. “My view is that we’ve got to figure out how to stop this spending machine here, in all respects, and so that’s a priority for me. But there’s a number of things, and we’ve got a whole group of folks [opposing McCarthy], that we’re all talking about.” In other words, even if a deal over the Rules Committee could be reached, it wouldn’t necessarily be enough to secure the votes to make McCarthy speaker.
At least a couple House Republicans have now vowed to vote against McCarthy no matter what. Florida Republican Matt Gaetz said Wednesday night that McCarthy apologized to him for allegedly misrepresenting their discussions but said he wouldn’t do so publicly. “I’m ready to vote all night, all week and never for that person,” Gaetz said, referring to McCarthy. And Gaetz isn’t alone. Semafor reports: “One holdout, Montana Rep. Matt Rosendale, has said he’d oppose any speaker nominee who was part of House GOP leadership in the last 10 years.” McCarthy can only afford to lose the votes of four GOP members and still be elected speaker with only Republican votes.