Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will meet Tuesday afternoon with the board of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of congressional conservatives who pushed John Boehner to resign as speaker.
The meeting “grew out of” casual conversations between McConnell and HFC members during the GOP retreat in Baltimore this year. “There were a lot of hallway conversations,” a senior GOP Senate aide told the Washington Examiner. “They enjoyed talking to him and he enjoyed talking to them and he said sure. And I think the Supreme Court fight is probably a natural topic for him to discuss.” The meeting was first reported by Politico.
McConnell and the nine leaders of the Freedom Caucus are also likely to discuss the upcoming budget fight. Many HFC members believe McConnell yielded too quickly last year, when Democrats pledged to filibuster the House-passed appropriations bills. Some of the lawmakers want him to use the “nuclear option” to eliminate the 60-vote threshold for debating legislation.
“The filibuster rule … is not constitutional,” Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., a member of the HFC board, said at a Heritage Action summit this month.
McConnell has been loathe to eliminate the legislative filibuster, and he has some support even among the conservative senators who often disagree with his tactics. “The filibuster has helped us stop a lot of bad legislation, and if we got rid of it, it would then be used as a vehicle for passing … bad legislation that we would dislike,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said at the same Heritage Action event.
The disagreement over the filibuster rule will likely grow through the summer if the Freedom Caucus succeeds in pushing House Republicans to walk away from the spending deal that Boehner negotiated at the end of this speakership. Senate Democrats are expected to filibuster any appropriations bill that spends less money than that deal authorized, which is $30 billion more than anticipated.
House Speaker Paul Ryan believes that the Freedom Caucus plan will force Congress to abandon the entire appropriations process and pass another continuing resolution to fund the government at the end of the year. He made that prediction following Freedom Caucus chairman Jim Jordan’s remarks at a recent GOP conference meeting.
“[Jordan] called for less dollars and trying to do what their plan is,” one House Republican, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Examiner. “Paul stood up after and said, ‘in reality, we’re looking at a [continuing resolution] situation then,’ because we just can’t do appropriations bills that don’t match up with a budget that’s not in agreement with the [Boehner deal].”
McConnell will have a chance to address that fight and potentially build goodwill with lawmakers who have predicted his fall. “Next guy in the crosshairs will probably be McConnell,” Ariz. Rep. Matt Salmon, who is also on the HFC board, said after Boehner stepped down from the speakership.
