McCarthy proved he’s a stronger House speaker than many expected. But GOP is split over cutting government

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy celebrated victory with a smiling jab at the Capitol Hill press corps Wednesday night.

Now that the House had passed the debt ceiling bill, reporters would no longer gather outside his office every day, the Republican from Bakersfield predicted.

But “I’ll still look forward when you come back. And you know what? You’ll still ask the same questions each week: ‘Do you think you can pass the bill this week?’ ‘Do you think you’ll still be speaker this week?’

“Keep underestimating us.”

The retort was hard-earned: The bill McCarthy had negotiated with the White House was well on its way toward becoming law. Thursday night, the Senate voted down a string of amendments en route to a final vote that sent the measure to President Biden for his signature.

When he won the gavel after a record 15 ballots in January, many in Washington predicted McCarthy would be a weak speaker.

To secure his job, he had agreed to give up some of the power his predecessors had amassed. The widespread belief, including in the White House, was that without that clout, McCarthy would never be able to direct the deeply factionalized Republican majority, especially on legislation to raise the debt ceiling.

The 314-117 vote Wednesday night proved the doubters wrong. Up to a point.

A win, but with limits

By parceling out significant authority to each of the major factions in the House majority — the “five families,” as Republicans have taken to calling them — McCarthy gave them a stake in succeeding, and “a sense that if we fail, it’s bad for everyone,” said Liam Donovan, a Republican lobbyist with ties to the party leadership.

That sense of a shared fate was a marked change from previous years in which factions on the right felt little compunction about defeating leadership-backed bills.

But McCarthy didn’t entirely unify Republicans: 71 lawmakers, roughly a third of the GOP conference, voted against the debt bill, and he needed considerable help from Democrats to get it passed.

Anger on the party’s right flank probably doesn’t threaten McCarthy’s speakership anytime soon. Few, even in the hard-right Freedom Caucus, have said they back a motion to “vacate the chair” — the parliamentary process to remove a speaker. A vote to unseat McCarthy remains highly unlikely in large part because there’s no likely candidate to replace him.

But the number of Democrats willing to vote for the debt ceiling bill highlighted the limits of what McCarthy accomplished: For all the heat it has generated, the agreement, which suspends the debt ceiling until after the next presidential election, doesn’t do much to limit federal spending.

At his news conference Wednesday night, McCarthy hailed the bill as the “largest deficit reduction package in American history.” That sounds grander than it is.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the next 10 years, the bill would reduce federal red ink by $1.5 trillion. That means the federal debt would increase by $18.7 trillion over the decade, rather than the $20.2 trillion the office had expected. Even that fairly modest— 7% — reduction in accumulated deficits depends on the assumption that future Congresses won’t ramp up spending: The spending caps in the deal are binding only in its first two years.

Because the deal allows congressional appropriators and Biden to use savings in some areas to bolster spending in others, the White House estimates that the reduction in those two years will come to about $136 billion, considerably less than McCarthy and Republicans project.

The modest size of the deficit cut highlights an issue that goes far beyond what any speaker can control: Republicans no longer agree on the size of government and how to control federal spending.

For nearly half a century, the two parties had a clearly defined difference on that issue: Democrats favored a bigger social safety net even if that meant persistent deficits. Republicans favored cutting deficits even if that meant poking holes in the net.

That GOP belief in less government underlay President George W. Bush‘s proposal in 2004 to privatize parts of Social Security, Speaker John A. Boehner‘s effort in 2011 to strike a “grand bargain” with President Obama on federal spending and Rep. Paul D. Ryan‘s effort to cut the costs of Medicare and other entitlement programs, which made him one of the party’s most important leaders and Boehner’s successor.

Donald Trump changed all that.

In his 2016 campaign, Trump opposed cuts in Social Security and Medicare. This spring, he has attacked his primary rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for having backed Ryan’s budget when he was in Congress. His support for entitlement spending — at least the money that goes to elder Americans, which is the lion’s share — has fundamentally changed Republican politics.

No support for entitlement cuts

“There’s a debate within the party between the populists and the conservatives” over entitlement spending, said Republican strategist Alex Conant. Currently, the populist faction clearly has the upper hand.

“It’s an old party,” Conant said. “A lot of Republican voters depend on Social Security and Medicare.”

Add Medicaid, which now pays for a majority of nursing home bills and other long-term care in the U.S., and suddenly half of federal spending is off the table. Throw in spending on the military and veterans’ care, which a majority of Republicans want to increase, and interest payments on the federal debt, and well over three-quarters of federal spending is accounted for.

Republicans can agree to cut programs that favor younger, more Democratic, constituencies. They’re united in opposing Biden’s plan to forgive student loan debt, for example. And they can generally agree on cutting aid to mass transit, housing subsidies and other urban programs.

But even if Democrats couldn’t be counted on to defend those programs, which they do, cutting them wouldn’t make a major dent in federal spending.

And, of course, Republicans continue to oppose any move to increase federal revenue — even measures to collect more of the taxes that people owe under existing laws.

At the start of the year, Republicans said they wanted a 10-year plan that would balance the federal budget. After Biden challenged them on Medicare and Social Security cuts during his State of the Union speech in February, that goal disappeared.

In its place, McCarthy came up with the bill he got through the House in late April, which would have tied an increase in the debt limit to steep reductions in domestic spending. That victory came about in part because the bill did not specify which programs would get the ax, but also because many Republican lawmakers expected, correctly, that much of the bill’s spending cuts would be bargained away in talks with the White House.

Republican leaders have been unable to proceed with annual appropriation bills because aligning them with the GOP budget made them impossible to pass. It’s clear that many Republican lawmakers couldn’t stomach some of the cuts their bill would have called for.

Now that the compromise with the White House has put much less dramatic restraints on spending, the annual spending bills can proceed with goals that are “not unrealistic,” Donovan said.

Republican leaders may still employ the small-government language they’ve used since the Reagan era, but the U.S. no longer has a party that puts a priority on smaller government. For both parties, major cuts in federal spending are now largely off the table.

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