Speaker Kevin McCarthy is rejecting GOP criticism of the debt limit deal he struck with President Joe Biden -- and pushed back on Senate Republican demands that Congress ramp up defense spending after the new law fell short of the levels sought by leading defense hawks.
McCarthy's comments foreshadow a battle within his own party as he faces pressure from his right-flank to hold the line on federal spending and demands from Republican senators to pour more money into the Pentagon. If McCarthy were to side with Senate Republicans, he would face backlash from elements of his hard-right already angry at the deal he cut to suspend the national debt limit until January 2025.
On Monday, the speaker signaled he would side with his right flank.
"That's part of the problem," he told CNN when asked if he'd be open to Senate GOP demands to spend more money on defense programs. "I think what we really need to do, we need to get the efficiencies in the Pentagon. Think about it, $886 billion. You don't think there's waste? They failed the last five audits. I consider myself a hawk, but I don't want to waste money. So I think we've got to find efficiencies."
In the new law, McCarthy and the White House agreed to set defense spending at $886 billion for fiscal 2024, which amounts to a slight bump and the same level that Biden proposed in his budget. But Republican critics have lambasted the funding level, saying it falls short of the rate of inflation and would leave the military unprepared to fend off growing threats to the United States.
After McCarthy and Biden cut the deal, a number of Senate Republicans were aghast and won assurances from Senate leaders that the new legislation would not prevent the chamber from pumping more money into Pentagon programs and to bolster Ukraine in future spending packages.
"This is really dumb," Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican of South Carolina, said of the McCarthy-Biden deal. "The people who negotiated this, I wouldn't let them buy me a car."
And others said that more funding was essential, despite the bipartisan agreement.
"The first problem of an inadequate defense budget could be addressed and remedied by having an emergency defense supplemental," said Maine Sen. Susan Collins, the top GOP appropriator. "That is what we need to do. That is what I would ask the administration and my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to commit to."
But they'll have to win over McCarthy in order to push more funding through the House -- and so far, he seems unmoved.
Indeed, in the interview with CNN on Monday, the speaker instead pointed to the Senate GOP complaints to make the case that the final legislation was more conservative than his critics have contended.
"We just proved we can govern in a conservative way, and we've proved it's more conservative than people really think because you got senators over there who want to spend more money as Republicans," McCarthy told CNN.
The final law, the product of intense talks for weeks to avoid a potential economic calamity, imposes enforceable budget caps on domestic spending over the next two years, rescinds money for unspent Covid relief aid, restarts paused student loan payments and imposes new work requirements on some social programs. Though the White House was forced to give into McCarthy's demands to attach conditions to the debt limit hike, more Democrats supported the final product than Republicans, with some saying the outcome could have been much worse for their party.
In the Senate, 46 members of the Democratic caucus backed the debt limit suspension compared to just 17 Republicans. In the House, 165 Democrats voted for the plan compared to 149 Republicans, with GOP critics arguing that the speaker should have held the line for far deeper spending cuts.
On Monday, McCarthy defended the vote count, arguing that typically far fewer Republicans back debt ceiling hikes under Democratic presidents while touting that well over half of his conference backed the plan this time.
"Republicans don't ever want to vote for debt ceiling, Democrats do," the speaker told CNN. "But when you analyze all the data in the past, this is overwhelmingly a much higher vote than you'd ever get."
The bipartisan deal also has prompted some Republicans to threaten to call for a vote ousting him as speaker, something that any single House member can do -- a threshold that was lowered as part of McCarthy's deal to win the speakership in January on the 15th ballot. All it takes is just five Republican votes to remove him from the speakership, assuming all Democrats vote to oust him and all members of the House are in attendance during the vote.
But McCarthy on Monday dismissed threats from his right flank, while also rejecting the claims by Republican critics that he privately agreed to only put legislation on the floor that would get more GOP votes than Democratic votes.
"How can you control that? Look at suspension votes every day, no one ever said that," he said, referring to non-controversial bills that often get a larger number of Democratic votes. "I've always said from the belief that I'd only want to put bills on the floor that have a majority of Republican votes. Well, we got two-thirds (of House Republicans) on this. ... I think if you had a secret ballot, that number would even get, their vote would even be higher."
McCarthy said if his critics want to push for his ouster, they should feel free to do so.
"Well, I'm not worried about a vacate vote. If they want to do it, they have all the right to do it," he said, while also downplaying critical comments made by Reps. Andy Biggs of Arizona and Ken Buck of Colorado, two GOP hardliners who had previously voted against the Republican's debt limit bill that passed the House in April but was ignored by the Senate.
"But if you look at Biggs and Buck, they never voted for Limit, Save, Grow," he said, referring to the House GOP's bill. "So they were never in this fight. I mean, I think either they wanted a clean debt ceiling and I'm not quite sure what they wanted out of here."