After House Speaker Kevin McCarthy ignored the Freedom Caucus’ wishes and struck a bipartisan budget deal with President Joe Biden, the far-right lawmakers weighed their options. Some in the faction raised the specter last week of retaliating against McCarthy by trying to take his gavel away.
That idea collapsed rather quickly. But as the public learned on Tuesday, the radical contingent managed to come up with a Plan B. NBC News reported:
A band of 11 House conservative rabble-rousers took the rare step Tuesday of joining all Democrats to block a pair of GOP bills to protect gas stoves to express their anger over the debt deal cut by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden.
Let’s briefly review how we arrived at this point, because what might seem like a dull procedural fight is proving to be surprisingly dramatic.
Circling back to our earlier coverage, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, pointing to research on public safety, indoor pollution, and childhood asthma, raised the prospect several months ago of new safeguards related to gas stoves. No one would be forced to replace their existing stoves, but a political backlash soon followed anyway — with far too many Republicans effectively telling the public that Biden was on his way to American kitchens with a wrench to take their appliances away.
GOP officials knew how foolish their talking points were, but the party saw political value in juvenile antics and rhetoric, so they embraced a silly “Democrats want to take your stove” campaign anyway.
It wasn’t long before Republicans pushed absurd legislation and hearings intended to “rescue” gas stoves from rascally Biden administration officials, and GOP leaders held a press conference yesterday morning, bragging about the bills the House would soon pass to combat the “extremist control freaks” in the federal government and undo a “ban” that does not exist in reality. It was, House Republican leaders boasted, going to be awesome.
At least, that was the idea.
What party leaders did not realize was that members of the House Freedom Caucus, still enraged that McCarthy didn’t push the United States closer to an economic catastrophe, had settled on a new strategy: They’d spite GOP leaders by derailing their own party’s legislative agenda.
For those who don’t follow Capitol Hill closely, the process of adopting a “rule” might be unfamiliar, but it’s a relatively straightforward step: Before a bill can be voted on, members adopt a measure to establish ground rules for the length of the debate, how it can be amended, etc. In nearly every instance, it’s little more than a procedural speed bump.
In fact, a House majority conference hasn’t lost a vote on adopting a rule in more than two decades.
But it happened yesterday afternoon as Freedom Caucus members blocked dumb legislation on gas stoves — a meaningless stunt bill that would’ve been ignored by the Senate anyway — to punish McCarthy. Eleven far-right members participated in the plot, which was more than enough given the GOP’s tiny majority in the chamber. (A 12th “no” vote came from House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who supported the underlying measure, but who voted with the rebels for procedural reasons.) What’s more, there’s no reason to see these developments as an example of Freedom Caucus members simply blowing off some steam: These far-right lawmakers told reporters after the vote that they intend to keep the retaliatory campaign going until the House speaker agrees to address their concerns. And as recent history suggests, this is not a group that is easily satisfied. The fact that McCarthy wanted to score a cheap political victory yesterday was a problem. The fact that he failed made the problem worse. But worse still is the fact that the House speaker was embarrassed: McCarthy apparently had no idea his own members were poised to block the party’s legislation. Can the Freedom Caucus oust the House speaker? Apparently not. Can they create some rather painful headaches for him? Clearly, yes.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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