House Republicans approved their rules package for the next Congress on Thursday afternoon in a closed-door meeting, salvaging an agreement that was drafted earlier this week but was in peril just hours before the conference voted on it.
GOP lawmakers finalized their conference rules, which dictate how the House Republican Conference can operate in the next Congress, after two days of negotiations. Negotiations between lawmakers in the centrist Main Street Caucus and the conservative Freedom Caucus resulted in Republicans dropping rule proposals to punish members who threaten to disrupt legislative business.
Republicans dropped the proposals from consideration in the Thursday meeting in exchange for an agreement to raise the threshold to call for a vote to oust the speaker to nine members, up from the current one-member minimum. That vote wouldn’t come until the House votes on its full rules package in January.
Still, it’s unclear if the informal agreement will survive the House floor. Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) told reporters there was a general agreement for raising the threshold, and he believes it will “probably carry out.”
The deal came together after Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) of the Freedom Caucus helped organize a meeting between Johnson and the two caucuses on Wednesday, a source familiar with the conversations told the Washington Examiner.
In that meeting, centrist lawmakers agreed to drop proposed amendments to punish House rabble-rousers in exchange for raising the threshold for the motion to vacate, a procedure that allows members to vote on removing the House speaker. The number they settled on was nine members, just one more than the eight lawmakers who successfully ousted Kevin McCarthy as speaker last year.
“They worked together collaboratively to work with members across the conference with very different ideas and perspectives and come to an agreement about what all that would entail,” Johnson said of the talks on Wednesday.
Republicans held another closed-door meeting on Thursday morning ahead of the vote to debate the new rules package, which prompted some pushback from members of the Main Street Caucus. That pushback resulted in continued talks between Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris (R-MD) and members of the Main Street Caucus, which Harris said was ironed out ahead of the vote.
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“It’s going to take us to bring along some of our House members in unity and to unify. Then that’s our objective,” Harris told the Washington Examiner ahead of the vote. “I think that’s exactly what we did yesterday and what will be brought to fulfillment today.”
When asked about intraparty opposition to the deal, Harris simply said, “It’s all over.”