Here’s how Gaetz put himself in the driver’s seat — for now:
On Thursday, five House Republicans voted down the rule to advance the GOP’s Pentagon spending bill — the third rule defeat McCarthy has suffered this year.
Voting down a rule used to be a rare event (the last speaker to lose a rules vote was Dennis Hastert). But McCarthy believed he had the votes yesterday because Reps. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) and Ken Buck (R-Colo.), who both opposed the same rule on Tuesday, had changed their minds.
But what McCarthy and his whip team missed was that Reps. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who voted for the rule on Tuesday, opposed the rule on Thursday.
That’s when Gaetz went to McCarthy’s office with a plan.
In another closed-door meeting, Gaetz huddled with a larger group of Republicans, including some moderates, and pitched them on the same idea.
Gaetz had spent the week proving to McCarthy that the speaker could not pass a continuing resolution to keep the government temporarily open, no matter how much the speaker refashioned it to appease the hard right. “#NOCR” has become a rallying cry for Gaetz and his crew that has hardened as a government shutdown approaches.
Making things worse for McCarthy was the fact that the never-CR Republicans and the no-on-the-rule Republicans are actually slightly different groups (though the former has more members). In fact, Gaetz voted for the rule for the Defense bill on both Tuesday and Thursday.
But the rule votes increased McCarthy’s desperation and strengthened his chief antagonist.
“This opportunity has come to pass only because a handful of us had the stones to take down the defense approps rule today,” Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.) said last night.
Gaetz told his Republican colleagues that McCarthy should bring single subject appropriations bills to the floor one at a time. He dictated his list of the first four: Defense, Homeland Security, State-Foreign Operations, and the Agriculture-FDA bill.
A few hours later, the Rules Committee put out notice that it would be taking up four bills Friday at 1 p.m.: Defense, Homeland Security, State-Foreign Operations, and the Agriculture-FDA bill.
The premise of the Gaetz plan is to kill what he calls governing by CR. It assumes a government shutdown is inevitable. And instead of using a hard-right CR as the House’s opening move in negotiations with the Senate, the (lengthy) floor debates on the House GOP-crafted appropriations bills will serve that purpose.
Gaetz has a surprising partner in this plan: Rep. Marc Molinaro, a New York moderate who is one of the 18 House Republicans representing a district carried by Joe Biden. Molinaro has been involved in various attempts to solve the shutdown crisis this week, including the bipartisan effort to use a discharge petition to force a vote on a CR.
“It is absolutely an option,” he told NBC News yesterday even as he worked with Gaetz on the plan to kill the CR.
Now that his strategy has prevailed, Gaetz said last night that he sees one serious obstacle to keeping it on course and preventing a return to the CR.
“The threat is that five liberal or moderate Republicans say, ‘We don’t want to do the single subject bills,’” he said on the podcast last night. “So we’re just going to go sign what’s called a discharge petition and then just move that thing like shit through a goose.”
Since Gaetz’s strategy assumes a shutdown, that threat might start looking increasingly real. McCarthy himself noted this week that his rebels have already crossed two of the three major red lines for a member of the House majority: voting against the speaker candidate approved by a majority of the conference and voting against a rule.
He suggested that it may be inevitable that the third red line will soon be crossed: supporting a discharge petition.
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