Will Kevin McCarthy’s “Crazy Bastards” Bring the Economy to the Brink—Again?

A familiar scene is expected to play out in the GOP-controlled House this week: Kevin McCarthy, with a tenuous grip on his conference, will begin working to try to pass the first of the party’s spending bills, ahead of an anticipated September budget fight with Democrats. But the hardline right—which he’s coddled in an effort to stay in their good graces—is once again threatening to exploit the situation for their own gain, indicating that they’ll seek to force through extreme wishlist items via the appropriations process.

“If it takes a rider on an appropriation bill or language in an appropriation bill to stop the federal funding for transgender therapy for minors,” as right-wing Representative Andy Harris, of the House appropriations committee, told Politico, “then maybe that’s what it will take.”

It’s unclear what, exactly, the hardliners will be able to extract from McCarthy, let alone the Democratically-controlled Senate. But in once again asserting themselves, the right flank of the House GOP could continue to cause headaches for the speaker—and could put the country at risk of a government shutdown this fall. “Hopefully we can avoid a government shutdown and all the craziness that those crazy bastards are going to do over there,” Democratic Senator Jon Tester told Politico.

Indeed, there’s good reason to believe that craziness is in the offing: This is, after all, a House GOP that brought the nation to the brink of a catastrophic default, and has only seemed to grow more insubordinate to McCarthy since his debt ceiling deal with President Joe Biden. The speaker has mostly managed to hold his fractured caucus together—but in no small part by indulging the extremists, as seen earlier this month when he allowed the Freedom Caucus to target so-called “woke” military policies in amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act. Now, McCarthy is facing another test: Can his appeasement strategy work again, in the face of what one GOP lawmaker described as a coming “World War III” over spending? “Kevin survives hour by hour,” as a top Republican told Axios. “He’s done a good job and he’s surprised even his detractors.” 

“But his strategy is to survive the day, so there’s a conflict that is inevitable,” the Republican added. “The trains are going to go off the tracks—we just don’t know whether it’ll happen this week, three weeks, three months or whatever.”

McCarthy may have at least a little breathing room: Chip Roy, a leading voice in the Freedom Caucus, has suggested that the hardliners are willing to work with the speaker, as long as the budget levels in this week’s appropriations bills are close to their targets. “At some point, we can figure those out a little bit on the fly,” Roy told Politico. “We’re trying to work in good faith.” But as Politico notes, the proposed budget cuts, including to measures aimed at helping veterans and farmers, could be politically perilous for many Republicans, who could also be forced by their hardline colleagues to wade deeper into culture-war issues like abortion. “It is going to be very problematic for many of them to have this record of supporting the far-right extremist agenda,” as Democratic Representative Mikie Sherrill observed recently.

And of course, there’s a much greater danger here, beyond the potential political cost to McCarthy and vulnerable Republicans: What is sure to begin as a mess could, in the coming weeks, snowball into a full-blown crisis. “We’re gonna have a government shutdown because we’re gonna fight between the House and Senate about appropriations. Maybe. I sure hope not. We keep coming right up close,” Democratic Senator Chris Coons warned at the Aspen Security Forum on Friday. “We are going to scare the hell out of you,” he added. “We’re really good at that.”