EXCLUSIVE — House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) said on Tuesday he was not expecting to see members of his own conference sabotage measures House Republicans had been working on to protect gas stoves.
Twelve Republicans, most of them members of the House Freedom Caucus, moved to block two GOP bills concerning gas stoves in a Tuesday procedural vote. The Republicans joined 208 Democrats, preventing the bills from moving forward.
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The Republicans voted against advancing the legislation as a rebuke to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and House GOP leadership over the recent debt ceiling agreement, which the Freedom Caucus opposed for not including enough spending cuts.
Asked if he was expecting this type of blowback from members of his conference after McCarthy’s deal with President Joe Biden, Scalise said he wasn’t.
“No, but you know, we’re having conversations with members that, you know, there’s a lot of complicated issues that we’ve been working through,” he explained in an exclusive interview with the Washington Examiner.
“We’ve got a small majority. We’ve got a five-seat majority, you know, and so they’ve had a number of issues over these last five months that have taken a long time to work through,” he added, noting the difficulties associated with the House GOP’s slim margin.
Scalise then pointed to what the House Republicans have been able to accomplish despite their razor-thin majority. “We delivered big on a strong energy bill, the Lower Energy Costs Act. We’ve delivered really big on a border security bill. First time that we’ve seen Congress pass a strong border security bill,” he said.
“We’re working on, of course, getting the appropriations process started where we can continue pushing back on the overreach and the radical extremism of the Biden administration,” the majority leader added.
However, he said, “we also are going to continue having conversations with members in every level of our conference. We have a lot of different opinions within the Republican conference, but we’re in the majority and we’ve been delivering good wins. We’ve got a lot more to do.”
Despite the protest of his fellow conference members over the debt ceiling deal, Scalise explained that “this is the first time we’ve ever had real spending cuts in a debt ceiling deal in over a decade. And that’s rare.”
“We actually were able to get real cuts, billions in cuts,” he said of the deal.
“There’s more we wanted to do, and I understand the frustration. I’ve talked to a lot of those members because there were a lot of things that we passed out of the House in a bill that most of those members that opposed the bill last week were supportive of that didn’t make it into the final product, and it was a negotiation with the president and the Democratic Senate,” he added.
Tuesday’s rule advance failure is a relatively rare event in the House, last occurring in November 2002.
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“Today, we took down the rule because we’re frustrated at the way this place is operating,” one of the defecting Republicans, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), said afterward. “We took a stand in January to end the era of the imperial speakership. We’re concerned that the fundamental commitments that allowed Kevin McCarthy to assume the speakership have been violated as a consequence of the debt limit deal.”
“We warned them not to cut that deal without coming down and sit down and talk to us. So this is all about restoring a process that will fundamentally change things back to what was working,” fellow defector Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) said.
