The GOP Is Hopelessly Divided As the Caucus Blows up Over Spending Bill

It seems more and more likely that come January 2025, there won’t be a Republican majority — at least in the House.

There are not only divisions in the Republican Party between moderates and conservatives, but the conservatives are also hopelessly fractured with traditional conservatives being opposed by Freedom Caucus members and the Freedom Caucus itself divided.

This leaves House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in an impossible and untenable position. He’s going to have to find a way to unite his caucus or he will have to ask the Democrats for help in passing a short-term spending bill.

For many members of the Freedom Caucus, that’s an invitation to go to Defcon 1 against McCarthy. With the new House rules, it only takes one member offering a motion to “vacate the chair” that would force McCarthy to resign and hold another election for Speaker of the House.

Last time, it took 15 ballots to elect McCarthy. How many it would take to elect a speaker this time is anyone’s guess. But it’s a dead certainty that McCarthy will be kicked out as speaker and that much of the government of the United States will be forced to shut down.

Reps. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), who represented centrists, and Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), who negotiated for conservatives crafted the stopgap spending bill. It failed when Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and other bomb throwers made so many objections that it became clear that McCarthy would be unable to get the votes to pass it.

CNN:

Rep. Byron Donalds, also a Florida Republican, shot back at Gaetz’s criticism of the plan, writing on social media: “Matt, tell the people the truth. … What’s your plan to get the votes to defund Jack Smith? You’ll need more than tweets and hot takes!!”

Rep. Chip Roy, a conservative from Texas who helped reach the deal, also slammed hardliners’ opposition, saying on a conservative radio show: “I don’t know whether we’ll have the votes or not, because I’ve got a lot of conservative friends who like to beat their chests and thump around going, ‘Oh, this isn’t pure enough.’ “

“Fine. Let the rabble-rousing Freedom Caucus wage their war,” McCarthy told his leadership group at dinner. It was time, to borrow a G-rated version of the military idiom, to f**k around and find out: “There’s a limit to what we can do, but this is a fight they wanted,” he said. “Let them have the fight. Then maybe they’ll learn their lesson.”

“Learning their lesson” means getting hammered in 2024. And the more Gaetz and his radical friends keep making impossible demands that even many Senate Republicans will never vote for in a million years, the more the gleeful Democrats will be able to paint the “MAGA Republicans” as extremists.

The messy infighting shows the challenge McCarthy is facing as he works to wrangle the votes to avoid a government shutdown, protect his speakership, and deal with the tricky optics of Ukraine funding while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visits Capitol Hill this week.

Rep. Steve Womack, a Republican from Arkansas, summed up the situation on NBC’s “MTP Daily” on Monday: “It’s an unmitigated disaster right now on the majority side.”

Gaetz and his Freedom Caucus friends will have a very difficult time getting one of their own elected Speaker. Gaetz covets the job but wouldn’t get more than 70 or 80 votes according to GOP insiders. It’s this kind of gamesmanship by Gaetz and other bomb throwers that will turn off voters in purple districts and once again give Democrats control of the House.