One key sticking point is that they want more power on the powerful Rules Committee, but the details aren’t clear.
One key sticking point is that they want more power on the powerful Rules Committee, but the details aren’t clear.
O n Tuesday, 19 House Republicans repeatedly refused to vote to make House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy the speaker of the House. On the third and final inconclusive vote for speaker of the day, the 19 anti-McCarthy Republicans picked up a 20th vote, Byron Donalds of Florida.
But what exactly do the these Republican holdouts want?
Texas’s Chip Roy, one of the original 19 rebels, offered this answer on the House floor yesterday: “I want the tools or I want the leadership to stop the swamp from running over the average American every single day.”
The statement is somewhat vague — the “leadership” Roy wants would be a speaker such as Jim Jordan of Ohio, but it’s not clear what “the tools” are that Roy could be given in exchange for a “yes” vote for McCarthy.
Roy elaborated somewhat in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Tuesday. “I need to make sure that the Rules Committee is structured in such a way that those of us who are what I would call fiscal conservatives” are able “to stop the sort of train of the swamp,” Roy said.
The Rules Committee governs how many amendments, if any, members will be allowed to propose to a given bill. It is the last stop before the House floor for any piece of legislation, and in recent years congressional leaders have increasingly bypassed the normal committee process to make it the first stop, too.
Arizona Republican Andy Biggs, another one of the original 19 anti-McCarthy Republicans, told National Review on Tuesday that the group wanted to ensure no more omnibus bills land on the House floor. “You’ve got to have a bill dealing with a single subject. You can’t go beyond it. Germaneness would mean you can’t have these massive omnibus Build Back Better bills, those types of things,” Biggs said. Asked whether that meant there couldn’t be any more “continuing resolutions” in which Congress passes a bill to continue funding all of government at existing levels, he replied that short-term continuing resolutions, funding government for a matter of weeks, would be acceptable in his view while a six-month continuing resolution would not be.
National Review reached out to Roy’s office asking if there are a specific number of seats the anti-McCarthy Republicans want on the Rules Committee, but did not receive any comment beyond what Roy has said publicly.
McCarthy made clear on Tuesday morning that he found the specific requests made by the holdouts unacceptable. “Last night, I was presented: The only way to have 218 votes [to be elected speaker was] if I provided certain members with certain positions, certain gavels to take over certain committees to have certain budgets. . . . They want a gavel that they can’t earn by the conference and themselves,” he said.
The fact that the 19 holdouts haven’t issued any precise ultimatums in public leaves room for negotiation behind the scenes and allows either side, or both, to settle for a face-saving deal. But for now, the battle over the speakership remains a stalemate, and the lack of clarity about the hard-liners’ demands makes it hard for both insiders and outside observers to guess at what such a deal might look like.