Remember back in January when Kevin McCarthy was running for Speaker of the House. You might also remember the historic fifteen rounds of voting it took for McCarthy to secure the Speaker's gavel.
You know, my father always told me, it's not how you start, it's how you finish, and now we need to finish strong for the American people.
Each time he fell short, McCarthy bargained more and more away to a small but vocal minority led by the House Freedom Caucus. These members are the furthest to the right on social issues and government spending. They held McCarthy's speakership in their hands until he agreed to their concessions.
Those of us who will not be voting for Kevin McCarthy today take no joy in this discomfort that this moment has brought. But if you want to drain the swamp, you cannot put the biggest alligator in charge of the exercise.
Now McCarthy's deal making has come back to bite him, and conservatives in the Freedom Caucus are creating headaches for both Republican moderates and Speaker McCarthy. I'm Craig Gordon in for West Ksova today on the big take who really controls the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy or the Freedom Caucus to give us more detail on just what's happening within the House GOP factions. I'm joined by Bloomberg's Congressional
editor Megan Scully and House reporter Billy House. Megan, give me the big picture here, who are the key Republican players in the House digging in on the Freedom Caucus side, and who are the more centrist members they're buting heads with.
McCarthy is getting it from both sides of his party, but as Billy has said recently, the House Freedom Caucus, which once worked as a forty vote block all in lockstep, now really has become more of a fractured entity where there's about ten who are fighting back against McCarthy and those who voted against his speakership all of those rounds
back in January. But that's enough votes to really wreak havoc in House majority where McCarthy only enjoys really a five seat advantage over Democrats, but he also has an addition to the Freedom Caucus, he has these more pragmatic moderate Republicans who are not really loving all the votes that they're having to take on abortion and other social issues that the House Freedom Caucus is really forcing their
hands on. So far, they haven't fought back, but we could see that change the closer we get to the election.
Billy, from John Bainner to Paul Ryan. We have certainly seen descent in the ranks among GOP factions in the past, but it feels like this is reaching a different level of acrimony. Put this in perspective for us. You know how much trouble is Kevin McCarthy in right now.
The Freedom Caucus actually emerged around late twenty fourteen twenty fifteen as a response to what they believed then Speaker Bayner's harsh treatment of some of the right wing members, trying to remove them from committees, also his manipulation of what was then the conservative group that was most prominent, the Republican Study Committee. They felt he was talking moderates
into joining that group and distorting their elections. About thirty members, led by Mark Meadows, Mick Mulvaaney, both who ended up in the Trump White House, and current Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, broke away and started their own group, and they created a lot of mischief for John Bayner, including Meadows filed ay and what has now been known as a motion to remove the speaker, but he never acted on that, but they created havoc with some votes for Bayner, so
much so that he eventually stepped down as Speaker.
It's become clear to me that this prolonged leadership turmoil would do irreparable harm to the institution. So this morning I informed my colleagues that I would resign from the speakership and resign from Congress at the end of October.
The next Speaker, Paul Ryan, who had been a vice presidential candidate, had to kind of cowtow to this group even before getting their backing to become speaker, and it seemed almost immediately that Ryan hated the job. He felt diminished by having to placate this group at thirty and he never had a happy relationship with them. They blocked even his attempt to undo Obamacare, and they also at
the time were fighting with Trump. But there came a relationship with Trump during his first impeachment when in many of these Meadows and others Freedom Caucus members were some of his biggest backers, and so they became a relationship there. This new group is different. Some of the original members are gone. Jim Jordan is still there, but they have something the previous versions never had a five vote swing in the House that they have the numbers to block
on almost everything they choose to do. So they also have that motion to vacate the way to force another vote to remove the speaker, but they've kind of set that on the back burner. Realized they can just mess things up on the floor for Kevin McCarthy if he doesn't cave in on what they want to do, and so that's what they've been doing so far. They haven't really submarined anything because they've gotten McCarthy to keep making
promises to get their votes here and there. But those promises are adding up, and on these spending bills that are coming up, they're going to be almost impossible to keep.
So, Billy, you talk about the difficulties that Kevin McCarthy faces, Now, how much of this including on the dead ceiling. Did you know? Maybe he won the battle, but he's about to lose the war.
It's kind of gravy for Kevin McCarthy, who tried to be speaker once before. And was blocked, and then he ran this time and was almost blocked. So he had to make a lot of promises and he became speaker barely, and he loves it. He spends the day walking around the Capitol, shaking hands with tourists, showing them where Abraham Lincoln sat. He has a great time. So on one level, you know, he's achieved what he wanted to be he's
a speaker now. On a different level, sure, he's a political animal and he wants to stay speaker, and that's certainly true, and he's fought very hard to do so. He brags that he's one that the media wakes up every week and tells him he has a challenge that he can't meet, and he's met everyone so far. That's absolutely true. To achieve the agreement with Biden on the government spending limits and the deficit, he had to make promises.
Then he had to make promises to get a rule passed to even do another bill, and he keeps making promises and they're piling up, and they're going to pile up on these spending bills. So on one hand, yeah, he's loving it he's speaker. On the other hand, he's got to know that clock's ticking perhaps, and he's not going to be able to solve everything on this particular battleground that's spending, and so the upshot is a potential government shut down, and he's still sort of whistling past
the cemetery. But his promises are going to come do on this.
So, Billy, you talked about the whole pile of promises that Kevin McCarthy has made in concessions he made to both win the speakership and to win some of these key votes. Tell us what some of the checks he's written that are going to come do here?
Well, even the spending level on the depsit Reduction bill, he made a promise for two years on capping the spending, which Democrats helped pass but were never on board with really, and even some of the moderates in his own conference don't believe are doable. He's promised to go through certain procedures that involve a House Freedom Caucus members sitting on
committees approving things before they go to the floor. He's placed Marjorie Taylor Green in fact, on a conference committee to hammer out a final agreement with the Senate on a defense authorization Bill.
Marjorie Taylor Green, of course, being one of the most conservative sort of House members there, someone who is in headline is quite a lot for her very conservative positions. Didn't he also essentially give them an easier way to fire him as speaker if they so choose.
Down the road, was that motion to vacate that? Nancy Pelosi fearing such a thing that she became speaker again and immediately changed the rules to three to five members had to sign on on a motion to force a floor vote on whether a speaker can stand the job. She changed it back to five members now. McCarthy, in discussing how to become speaker with the right wingers, promised them that only one member could force a vote on that. The thing is, that's a promise that they haven't seized upon yet.
We're not at that point.
They seem to be getting more of what they want with a speaker like McCarthy than they would with trying to find a replacement.
When we come back, we dive into the issues dividing Republicans on the Hill. Let's talk about some of the very specific issues at play here, a lot of which do have to do with the question of spending in the federal debt and the federal deficit megan. Everyone was kind of cheering the Infrastructure Plan when it went through a couple of years ago because it sent a lot of projects to House districts for both Republicans and Democrats.
But all of a sudden, House Republicans are proposing a new infrastructure spending limits that are far below what had been agreed upon before, would really cut deep into some of these popular projects. Talk to us a little bit about what they are trying to accomplish with that bill.
So what we saw in the deal between McCarthy and with President Biden on the debt limit and suspending that for two years was an agreement to cut some spending, to cut domestic spending in particular, not as deep as
these conservative Republicans, these ultra conservatives wanted to go. And now there's concern among this group of hardliners that not only did the bill not meet their expectations, but that there are efforts underway to undo these cuts or to get around these cuts, to be able to pad these bills with these homegrown projects that people have learned to love. It gets into the whole everything is pork right unless
it's in your backyard. What these lawmakers are saying is these domestic programs, whether it be transportation or infrastructure programs or social programs, they want to see them get these deep cuts. They want to see them be targeted for deficit reduction. And they're not trusting that the bills as they come out of the appropriation's committees are doing that.
Are there any signature projects that have become sort of the poster trials for this fight. It's kind of hard to tell. At this point.
Not all the twelve annual spending bills have even been written yet or unveiled. What we do know is that the deficit reduction deal between McCarthy and the president capped the spending at about one point five trillion, and the Freedom Caucus and some other conservatives want to go below that, and so only the first couple of bills have trickled
out most recently. Freedom Caucus members are saying they want to see all twelve bills first before they announce what they want, their game plan, their blueprint, and so that's where things stand now, but they are promising that they will fight for they see that the agreement of one point five trillion is a ceiling, so they're going to be fighting on that level, just the overall spending levels, but also on all these individual programs that they don't like.
And what we're seeing a little bit is McCarthy dipping his toe in the water here with some bills that usually get broad bipartisan support, such as military construction and agriculture appropriations, but there's been even food fights on those bills. The big ones that we expect probably after the August recess is the Labor, Health, and Human Services Bill, where we see conservatives really wanting to make deep cuts, and also to education programs as well.
Megan, We've talked a lot about domestic issues here, but certainly there's a very big foreign policy is you that's also kind of roiling the House Republican caucus, and that is the funding for the war in Ukraine. There's a small but hardy group that is trying to lock that and tell us a little bit about that.
Sure, well, you mentioned Marjorie Taylor Green earlier. She's certainly one of the hardline conservatives who don't want to be funding anymore weaponry to Ukraine.
To be against funding for war is not pro Russia, it's pro America and pro Americans and pro our own American border.
And this is causing some headaches, some more headaches for McCarthy. It's generally the same people that he's trying to keep happy to get these appropriations bills to the floor, So it's just another area where they could attempt to extract compromises. Now, if a Ukraine spending bill came to the floor on its own, it would likely get wide bipartisan support in
both the House and the Senate. The issue, though, is angering this right flank that we keep talking about and needing to keep them in the fold to get all of his other legislative priorities through. So it's this delicate dance that he needs to continue to do on nearly every issue.
Why does this group of pose further assistance to Ukraine?
Several of them have talked about concerns about how Ukraine is spending the money, several have talked about our involvement in the war, and others have reached for their fiscal conservative routs, saying we shouldn't be spending these billions of dollars on weaponry for a country that is thousands of miles from here. Hearkening back to the basically America First roots of the Freedom Caucus.
There's even now some talk about possibly expunging the record of one or both of Trump's impeachment votes in the House. Can you even expunge a vote like that?
It's important to remember that while Trump was in I peached twice by the House, he was never convicted by the Senate, so he hasn't suffered any consequences. So essentially he's a twice impeached president, but that doesn't impede him from, for instance, as we're seeing now run for office again. This would certainly be the first time that we ever encountered this, and sure it's something that McCarthy can make up and send to the floor. You can't unimpeach the president.
We all saw him get impeached not once but twice. But this would essentially be a asterix without really any teeth.
Billy, speaking of impeachments speaking, McCarthy has talked about bringing an impeachment investigation against the sitting president. Joe Biden tell us what charges he is looking at and what concerns he wants to investigate.
McCarthy himself hasn't been overly specific on charges, but His banter about that comes after several members have already put forward impeachment resolutions.
We've only followed where the information has taken us, but it is rising to the level of impeachment inquiry, which provides Congress the strongest power to get the rest of the knowledge and information needed.
McCarthy has now embraced this sentiment by at least expressing that perhaps congressional impeachment inquiry is the apex of the congressional power to investigate, and maybe that's the way to go to look into things such as the Biden families overseas business interests, the involvement if there was any or knowledge of the then Vice president at that time, who benefited, whether the then Vice president lied about his knowledge of
what his son, Hunter Biden was doing overseas. They go down to the investigation of Hunter Biden by the IRS, and whether there was Justice Department pressure to slow walk
or alter the results. That now, an impeachment by the US House of Joe Biden might pacify the right wing members in non competitive districts like I said in Arizona, Texas, Indiana, but for moderate members such as in New York, just in the suburban New York City districts and in other places in New York, it would seem that an impeachment
vote against Joe Biden would be really troublesome. So that's what macarthy's really got to contemplate and why he seems to vacillate on saying, yeah, that impeachment inquiry would be very the best way to do this, But he hasn't gone all the way to say we would impeach, So he's kind of like trying to play both sides on that one within his caucus.
But you're pointing out a really important point here, which is that there's political divides inside the party, there's geographic device inside the party, and kem McCarthy's trying to stand astride all of it. Magan, I want to come back to one other bill that is getting some attention from these very conservative and that's known in the parlance as the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act, essentially defense spending.
Some of the members of the House passed a version of the bill that includes some restrictions on related to abortion in the military. Help us understand what they did there.
So right now, due to abortion restrictions throughout the country, the military will pay and provide leave for women in the military who choose to seek an abortion. This would essentially roll that back, and it was a difficult vote for many of these Republicans who Billy just mentioned, including those in the Hudson Valley and north and west of there in New York and in other districts like in southern California where the voters aren't as driven by these
social issues. But the amendment did make it through and it is included in the House version of the bill. Now, the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats, has its own version of the measure, and the two chambers need to negotiate a final bill. And this bill touches basically every policy area of the Pentagon, So this is a very narrow issue in a much much broader bill. And the bill itself has been enacted every year for sixty plus years.
It's really the only non spending bill to have that claim, and it gives the Armed Services committees a tremendous amount of oversight of the Pentagon. So there's a lot of push to get this bill done before the end of the year, but something like this abortion amendment could be enough to really gum up the works at the last
minute and potentially sideline it. I think some of these moderate House Republicans who went along with this amendment and voted for the bill passage did so banking on the fact that Senate Democrats would never agree to including it in the final bill. The problem we're going to see, though, is as these votes pile up as abortion votes on
other appropriations bills. And it's not just abortion. You're talking about transgender rights and book bands and all of the areas that the conservative right has targeted in their races that are really difficult votes for these pragmatic Republicans. You take one of these votes and maybe no one notices. You take six or seven of these votes, and it really starts to become a trend and potentially a problem in these districts.
With a twenty twenty four election just around the corner, how are Americans feeling about the Republican infighting in Congress? That's after the break. Looking forward, Congress is about to go on a recess and they will be back in the fall. In September, we have a presidential election not
that far over the horizon. So Billy, looking to the fall, all of these bills with all these contentious provisions in them that might survive the House and not survive the Senate could lead to a partial government shut down when the federal budget year ends on September thirtieth. How likely is that scenario if the House conservatives really do dig in on some of these provisions and vote no on a lot of things that again probably would not pass. Muster in the Senate.
Looks very possible, especially since some of the same far right or conservative members forcing these issues also say they would not back a continuing resolution or a temporary spending bill. Again, McCarthy says, well, you guys have said I can't solve things before, and I've sold everything before, so he at least puts on a public happy face. Also, keep in mind that it is part of the deficit reduction agreement.
If they go to a continuing resolution, which is an agreement to do a temporary extension of current funding levels for whatever period come next to April, they've agreed that as a result of that, there would be an additional one percent cut in funding. So things are looking very bleak right now, and it's hard to see how lawmakers going home for August is going to help speed up.
A solution, Megan, Are there any other upcoming issues that are coming before Congress that may further show the divides inside the Republican Party.
I think in September it's going to be focused primarily on appropriations. But one thing that we're going to be seeing as we get closer to the election is looking at primaries and whether some of these Republicans, particularly the moderates, are going to be primaried from the right, and whether the party itself is going to continue its evolution into a much more ultra conservative party focused on social issues.
So that's something we're going to be certainly on the lookout for beyond September and going through you know, the primaries into twenty twenty four, and then certainly ahead of the election itself.
Billy, we've talked a lot about the twenty twenty four election. Of course, we all know there's a presidential election, but all four hundred and thirty five members of the House
Representatives will be on a ballot as well. Could these fights and this internal squabbling among the Republicans lead to losses on the Republican side, as some of these members that have taken tough votes that Megan was talking about now faced voters who really don't want to talk about abortion and relation to military policy, or could you see, you know, the Republicans be strengthened by the fact more conservative members come forward voters in certain districts like that.
How do you see this playing out in terms of control of the House, which, as you say, is, you know, hangs on a balance of just five votes right now.
Well, I'll tell you how the strategists for both parties see it, and that's that these are very harmful potentially for those moderate Republicans and those moderate Republicans in important swing districts that could very well decide who controls the House majority in areas. For instance, in New York, there are six freshmen Republicans holding seats that Biden won in
twenty twenty. Already, the d Triple C, which is essentially top Democratic leader Jefferson's political arm, has been attacking these six Republicans endlessly on every single vote almost that the House has taken that they could spin as far right or even extremists, and that will continue to occur and only rev up as the spinning bills raise more issues for these lawmakers. Those lawmakers and I did visit some of them in their districts are trying not to even
mention some of these hot button issues. They're trying to focus on local constituent desires needs Once it's going to be hard, though, once the airwaves start heating up to totally ignore this. Recently, one of those lawmakers, Mike Lawler, for instance, was asked by a bunch of reporters at the Capitol his response to McCarthy's suggesting impeachment could occur, and he just walked by and didn't even acknowledge they were asking him. And that's kind of how he's been
handling things back in the district. Constituents haven't been raising these issues as much, but again, the airwaves and the Democratic full court press on these issues hasn't really hit locally as much as they will.
Billy House, Bloomberg's Congress reporter, and Megan Scully, Bloomber's Congress editor. We thank you so much for joining us today. Happy to be here, Craig, Thanks thanks for listening to us here at the Big Take, a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments at Big Take at Bloomberg dot Net. Our supervising producer is
Vicky Vergalina. Our senior producer is Katherine Fink. Our producer is Rebecca Shassan. Our associate producer is Sam Gebauer. Hilde Garcia is our engineer. Original music by Leo Sidrin. I'm Craig Gordon in today for West Kosova. We'll be back tomorrow with another Big Take. Do Do Do, Dre