WASHINGTON--Kevin McCarthy earned his stripes as Republican speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday, navigating fierce hardline opposition to pass a debt ceiling bill containing federal spending limits that President Joe Biden for months vowed to resist.
Six months after he endured 15 humiliating floor votes just to be elected speaker, McCarthy proved capable of dragging Biden into negotiations over spending and other Republican priorities, and then marshalling two-thirds of his often fractious House Republican majority to enact bipartisan legislation. "Keep underestimating us and we'll keep proving to the American public that we'll never give up," McCarthy told reporters after the vote. The bill, approved by a 314-117 margin, lifts the government's $31.4 trillion debt ceiling in exchange for cutting non-defense discretionary spending and stiffening work requirements in assistance programs. Yet it was a bruising victory for McCarthy. The bill gained 165 votes from Democrats, outnumbering the 149 from members of McCarthy's own Republican party.
The bill now goes to the narrowly Democratic-controlled Senate, which must enact it and get it to Biden's desk by June 5 to avoid a crippling U.S. default. The Senate was expected to pass the bill Thursday night. Republican Representative Dusty Johnson, a McCarthy ally who helped craft the Republican debt-ceiling legislation that buttressed the speaker in negotiations, said the vote proved wrong Democratic predications that the 58-year-old Californian would have little chance of holding his caucus together. "They said he would never become speaker, and of course they were wrong. They said he would never be able to manage the floor effectively and we haven't had a single bill fail," Johnson said in an interview. "They said he wouldn't be able to cut a deal with the president, and they were wrong about that." McCarthy has so far succeeded in passing the bill without drawing direct verbal attacks from former President Donald Trump, who urged Republicans to push for a default if they were not able to extract sufficient concessions from Democrats.
Trump, who is seeking a return to the White House in 2024, had blasted top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell for agreeing to raise the debt ceiling during Biden's first year in office. McConnell largely stayed in the background during these talks, which began to move forward after Biden agreed to one-on-one negotiations on May 9. Avoiding Trump's ire appears to have protected McCarthy's standing with Republican voters nationally, some 44% of whom told a Reuters/Ipsos poll in May that they approve of his job performance, notably higher than McConnell's 29% approval rate. The bill approved by the House on Wednesday would suspend the debt limit - essentially meaning that it no longer applies - through Jan. 1, 2025. That sets the stage for another showdown in the weeks following the 2024 presidential election. Republican lawmakers and analysts say McCarthy's masterstroke in getting Biden to the negotiating table was his decision to bring a debt ceiling bill to the floor and pass it in April with only the support of his own party members.
Up to that point, Biden had refused McCarthy's requests to negotiate over the debt ceiling, insisting that House Republicans enact their own budget for fiscal 2024 as a prerequisite for spending talks. But in getting the April measure passed, House Republicans became the only body in Washington that had acted to raise the debt ceiling. "Once the House passed a bill, 'no negotiations' was a clearly unsustainable place to be," said Rohit Kumar, a former top aide to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell who is now co-leader of PwC's national tax office in Washington. The White House, for its part, contends that the talks between Biden and McCarthy were not a negotiation on the debt ceiling. "The debt ceiling had to be lifted, and it had to be lifted for a long period of time," White House budget director Shalanda Young told a Tuesday press conference. "You see this bill lift the debt ceiling until 2025. You can call it a negotiation; I call it a declarative statement."
House Republicans say McCarthy has succeeded as speaker, because of an inclusive leadership style, cultivating support from a majority of caucus members by working through major party caucuses, known as the "Five Families," a reference to the warring organized crime clans of "The Godfather" movie. McCarthy also expanded his influence through trusted friends and longtime associates such as Representatives Patrick McHenry and Garret Graves, who became his lead negotiators with the White House.
