House Freedom Caucus Republicans are pushing for a set of rules in the next Congress that would take some power away from the speaker — and they won’t commit to supporting House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (CA) for the job until they secure at least some of those changes.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), chairman of the Freedom Caucus, declined to commit to supporting McCarthy in his bid to lead a potential GOP majority next year. Instead, he said the caucus is focusing on ways to leverage its influence into procedural reforms for now.
“If you’re only committed to doing things the way they’ve always been done, I don’t think that’s going to be acceptable to the American people, and we’ve heard that message loud and clear when we go back to the districts,” Perry said.
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Members of the conservative voting bloc are pushing for some changes to House rules that align with those sought by leadership, such as ending the practice of proxy voting.
But other changes would empower rank-and-file Republicans in ways that McCarthy, the prohibitive favorite for speaker if the GOP takes control of the House in November, might find difficult to accept.
One would require a Speaker McCarthy to secure support from a majority of the Republican conference before bringing any bill to the floor — a “majority of the majority” rule that Perry and its proponents say would prevent the next speaker from cutting deals with Democrats to advance legislation.
But that approach could stymie opportunities that the emergence of a populist ideological realignment has created — for example, several top conservatives, including Reps. Ken Buck and Matt Gaetz, supported a package of antitrust bills aimed at Big Tech that ultimately passed the lower chamber with a majority of Democratic votes last week.
The House Freedom Caucus’s proposed rules changes also include efforts to diversify membership on the powerful Steering Committee, efforts to distribute committee assignments based on merit and expertise rather than favoritism, and a push to open up the amendment process so members can propose bill changes on the House floor.
One of the most potentially difficult demands from House conservatives is not the rules package itself but when members will vote on it.
House leadership elections typically occur before members hammer out their conference rules; however, Perry said Freedom Caucus members want to see that process reversed.
“Everything in Washington, D.C., is about leverage. Some people don’t want to admit that,” he said. “The reason that I think they put the leadership [vote] up front is, they want to take account of who voted a certain way, and then you can have this other stuff.”
“I think to empower members — to empower all members, it’s not just Freedom Caucus members — this empowers every member to not be leverage for a vote for leadership,” Perry added. “It’s the best thing to do to get a set of rules for everybody, as opposed to a set of rules that only works for a very small segment at the top, which is what it is now.”
Perry said the Freedom Caucus has already engaged with leadership regarding the order of events, despite Republicans’ overall focus on winning midterm elections.
“Well, we’ve had conversations about it, but it’s been a little disappointing that we haven’t gotten to a resolution on that yet,” he said.
House Republicans debated when to bring up rules changes recently in a closed-door conference meeting. A person familiar with the situation said McCarthy has urged members to stay focused on the election.
Perry said one particular element of the proposed rules changes — easing the ability of members to file a motion to vacate the chair, which challenges the speaker’s position — would grow in importance to the Freedom Caucus if leadership opposes other parts of the rules package.
“The less that we get of the broader package, the more that the motion to vacate the chair — which has been in existence for a very, very long time, only used once in my lifetime that I know of — but the more that becomes operative,” he said. “Because if you don’t get the rest of the package, or the vast majority of the rest of the package, where members can participate, then you have no way to hold leadership accountable if they go the wrong direction.”
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Former Rep. Mark Meadows used the motion to vacate the chair in 2015 to signal conservatives’ dissatisfaction with then-Speaker John Boehner, deploying the procedural tool for the first time in more than a century.
Republicans need to net just five seats to take control of the lower chamber, a margin that has sustained GOP hopes of a successful November despite summer polling that showed Democrats on stronger-than-expected footing.
McCarthy has worked to appeal broadly across the GOP conference as he prepares for the prospect of taking up the speaker’s gavel. No single challenger has emerged as a realistic obstacle to his ascent, and the dynamics of the coming fight over House rules and leadership will depend heavily on how many Republicans head to Washington after the midterm elections.
