GOP moderates strike back after conservative revolt paralyzes House

Frustrations among moderate House Republicans are bubbling over. 

A week after a group of mutinous conservatives shut down the chamber floor, GOP moderates struck back, accusing the rebels of fracturing the conference and threatening to tank the party’s legislative agenda heading into the summer’s tough policy fights with President Biden.  

Frustrations reached a boiling point during a closed-door meeting of House Republicans on Tuesday morning. There, in the basement of the Capitol, a handful of moderate Republicans aired their grievances over last week’s revolt directly at the conservatives who had orchestrated it. 

Others in the conference quickly hailed the spirited pushback, saying the moderates had vented the frustrations of a vast majority of the GOP conference. 

“The three or four guys who spoke today spoke for 95 percent of us,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) told The Hill Tuesday afternoon.

“Ninety-five percent of us were pissed about it,” he said of the nearly week-long deadlock in the House. “It wasn’t right, it hurt the team.”

“What Republicans need to do is recognize that when you have an opportunity to take yes for an answer, go with it,” Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), an Appropriations subcommittee chair, said later in the day. 

He expressed frustration that the caps set out in the debt limit compromise are “being rejected by people in our conference that chose last week to demonstrate their angst by denying us an opportunity to have votes.”

That stance, Womack said, makes it difficult for the House to have any negotiating credibility with the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Tuesday morning’s conference meeting came hours after House conservatives said they would retreat from their days-long revolt — at least temporarily — and allow legislative business to move forward on the floor as they continue discussions with Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) about reining in deficit spending. 

The chamber advanced four pieces of legislation on the floor on Tuesday, including one that conservatives blocked last week when they kicked off the blockade.

The conservatives were protesting the Speaker’s handling of the debt ceiling negotiations with President Biden, and want to send the message that they expect him to hold a tougher line in the coming battle over government spending.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), one of the 11 GOP rabble-rousers, warned that the rebels could revive their floor blockade if McCarthy fails to meet their still-undefined requests.

The combination of last week’s revolt and the threat of another has infuriated the moderates.

Reps. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) castigated the hardliners during Tuesday’s meeting, according to a number of lawmakers in the room, in an exchange largely focused on the legislation that the conservatives had stalled. Reps. Austin Scott (R-Ga.) and Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) also spoke out with similar concerns, according to a GOP lawmaker in the room.

A second GOP lawmaker, who spoke anonymously to discuss internal conversations, described the meeting as a “catharsis” and said it included cursing.

“A little spicy in there,” the lawmaker added.

Van Orden “dropped an f-bomb,” which elicited applause from other Republicans in the room, according to a third GOP member.

“He was just frustrated about being up here last week and not legislating any bills on the floor,” the second GOP lawmaker said of Van Orden.

Van Orden declined to comment on what he said in the conference meeting, but noted that he filed a bill on Tuesday to add additional rail investigators to more quickly assess train derailments.

“I didn't come here for attention. I came here to work,” Van Orden said.

Lawler also declined to comment specifically about the exchange, but took a shot at the conservatives for defying the wishes of a vast majority of the GOP conference.  

"Matt Gaetz, Chip Roy — they're not in charge. They weren't elected to lead the conference," Lawler said after the meeting. “You have a conference of 222 people. And they would all be well-advised to remember that they are one vote. .... The power of the conference resides in the fact that we have a majority. The majority was delivered by people in swing districts."

The conservatives, for their part, aren’t apologizing for their rebellion. Instead, they fired back at the moderates for what they characterized as a soft approach to cutting spending and reducing deficits.

“Some of our colleagues are getting bent out of shape. You know what I say to that? I don’t give a damn, because the American people that I work for, they’re thanking me. And I’d rather be thanked at home than by some schlepp on the House floor,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said on Steve Deace’s BlazeTV show later on Tuesday.

Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) also said he was not concerned with members angry about the confrontational tactics. 

“They need to go back to drinking,” Buck said.

As GOP members express alarm about the hardline conservatives arm-twisting the rest of the conference, McCarthy is pushing back on their description of the talks — particularly Gaetz’s assertion that they were renegotiating a “power sharing agreement.”

“I don't know any power sharing agreement that came out of that meeting from yesterday other than the idea that we would move forward this week, and then we would all come together and keep working,” McCarthy said Tuesday, adding that if he had an agreement with every slim faction in the House GOP, he would have “410 million different agreements.”

Members of the House Freedom Caucus, appropriators, and members of other influential caucuses met in McCarthy’s office on Tuesday afternoon to discuss how appropriations will work going forward.

The growing frustrations come as Congress suits up for a number of high-stakes legislative undertakings that will require bipartisan cooperation — including funding the government, which tops the list.

House Appropriations Committee Chair Kay Granger (R-Texas) said Monday night that House appropriators will “limit new spending to the fiscal year 2022 topline level,” below the caps set out in the debt limit compromise – welcome news to the Freedom Caucus and their allies, but a development that forecasts even more tension with the Senate.

After last week’s revolt, and with a high-profile agenda on the horizon, some moderates are considering cutting conservatives out of the process and working with Democrats instead.

“I’m of the position that at some point we gotta just do coalition government with the Democrats and cut these guys out,” Bacon said of the conservatives. “If they continue to do that, we got to make them irrelevant.”

He said he is “not yet” at the moment of needing to box out conservatives — ”hopefully they’ll wisen up” — but said “at some point we just gotta work across the aisle and tune these guys out.”