Who could have imagined forging a speakership based on a mysterious handshake deal would cause problems?
We knew the House was liable to get messy when Republicans took it over and Kevin McCarthy needed to cut a mysterious agreement with the right-wing House Freedom Caucus to become speaker.
What we might not have fully appreciated at the time is how much that mess might result from not being able to agree on what the agreement was.
The first big hurdle for the debt ceiling deal McCarthy (R-Calif.) cut with President Biden over the weekend was the all-important House Rules Committee on Tuesday afternoon. This committee can make or break legislation, which is why the Freedom Caucus was keen to pry three seats from the speaker loyalists that usually inhabit it. That left McCarthy with only six such votes on a 13-member committee, shy of a majority of his allies.
But as the committee was about to take up the debt ceiling deal, one of its Freedom Caucus members lodged a remarkable claim about the January agreement: that GOP votes to advance bills on the committee effectively needed to be unanimous.
This is a little complicated, but Roy was basically claiming that he, fellow Freedom Caucus member Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) and a third non-McCarthy loyalist on the committee, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), each had veto power. So even if something like the debt ceiling deal got a majority of GOP members or the committee as a whole, they would be able to stop it.
There were real reasons to doubt this. CNN’s Manu Raju reports that senior GOP aides said the agreement did require seven GOP votes to advance a bill, but not all nine.
That seven-vote threshold, in itself, would be a pretty big deal, because it would mean the committee isn’t really a majoritarian one.
