Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his vote-counting lieutenants are telling fellow Republicans they will not change their $1.5 trillion debt-ceiling proposal, despite rank-and-file GOP demands for alterations.
(Bloomberg) — Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his vote-counting lieutenants are telling fellow Republicans they will not change their $1.5 trillion debt-ceiling proposal, despite rank-and-file GOP demands for alterations.
The plan, according to people familiar, is to send the bill as-is to the House floor for a vote later this week under a rule that does not permit amendments.
That strategy comes as passage of a Republican debt plan looms as the biggest test of McCarthy’s hold on the House GOP conference since January, when it took 15 ballots for him to win the speaker’s gavel.
McCarthy acknowledges there remain a number of holdouts demanding changes in the bill in return for their support. As few as five House Republicans opposing it — combined with what is expected to be unified Democratic opposition — would defeat the bill.
McCarthy said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” “We will hold a vote this week, and we will pass it.” But a person familiar with the vote count said the Republican nose-counting still leaves them short of the support needed for passage.
The bill is set Tuesday to go before the Rules Committee, which will set the floor procedures. A person said that will include a rule preventing any effort to force votes to amend the measure.
McCarthy’s proposal — coming amid President Joe Biden’s demands for House Republicans to present a plan — would increase the nation’s debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion, to stave off a US payments default until March 31, 2024 at the latest.
It aims to trim $4.5 trillion in spending over a decade, in part by cutting discretionary spending by $130 billion next year and capping its growth at 1%.
The bill, a grab-bag of conservative measures, would ease energy regulations, end clean-energy tax breaks, rescind unspent Covid-19 funds and impose new work requirements on adults without children who receive Medicaid and food stamps.
But as McCarthy aides — led by House Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota — seek to lock down enough votes, some moderates in the conference were refusing to commit, while some conservatives were angling to further increase new work requirements on Medicaid recipients. Midwestern lawmakers were looking to shield biofuels tax breaks from elimination.
How their issues would be resolved without altering the bill is unclear. But making some of the sought-after changes create new headaches as other lawmakers seek their own revisions.
“You have to be careful in these kinds of negotiations that you are not playing a game of whack-a-mole,” Arkansas Representative Steve Womack, a McCarthy ally, said late last week. “It’s a very delicate and very sensitive tightrope that the speaker is walking.”
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.