Ultraconservatives Hit Speaker McCarthy With New Demands as They Careen Toward Shutdown

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's right flank is at it again, posing new demands before they agree to support a bill necessary to avoid a government shutdown on Sunday.

More than two dozen members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus sent a letter to McCarthy Thursday with six questions they want him to answer about the party's appropriations strategy before they will vote for a provisional spending bill.

“No Member of Congress can or should be expected to consider supporting a stop-gap funding measure without answers to these reasonable questions," the 27 Republicans wrote.

McCarthy, unaware of the letter, said Thursday evening that he would "never" give up trying to win over the conservative holdouts, as he repeated his favorite mantra: "I never give up"

The House is expected to vote Friday on a stopgap bill that includes spending cuts and border security provisions, but it does not have enough votes to pass.

Three Freedom Caucus members who helped negotiate that plan — Scott Perry, the group's chair, Chip Roy and Byron Donalds — all signed the Thursday letter.

"We're not trying to pick fights with the speaker," Donalds later told reporters.

Freedom Caucus members are just "making sure we have a detailed working calendar at this point," he said, referring to a question in the letter about when the annual spending bills the House has yet to take up will come to the floor.

McCarthy, asked about the letter a few hours after it was released, had not seen it.

"If they send me a letter, it's not for me, it's for you," the California Republican said. "It's trying to make news."

McCarthy said he was confused by the demands as he has laid out a schedule for passing the appropriations bills during private GOP conference meetings.

Freedom Caucus members have been engaged in a back-and-forth with McCarthy on spending all year, starting with demands they made in exchange for supporting him for speaker. More than eight months later — less than three days away from a likely government shutdown — they're still trying to extract promises.

That first battle resulted in a commitment from McCarthy to pass the 12 individual appropriations bills with cuts that would curtail total spending back to a pre-COVID level of $1.47 trillion.

When McCarthy cut a deal with President Joe Biden on higher spending caps as part of a debt limit law, Freedom Caucus members were furious. They blocked some appropriations bills from coming to the floor as they tried to push the party toward deeper spending cuts.

The larger dispute had seemed to simmer in recent weeks after conference-wide discussions, even as some hardliners continued related objections. But now more than the usual defectors have banded together on this letter, showing a new force of strength.

The questions in the letter further similar complaints, mostly focused on the strategy for advancing the 12 full-year spending bills, only one of which the House has passed so far.

Freedom Caucus members want to know what McCarthy will do to resolve issues threatening final passage of the four appropriations bills the House is voting on this week. Those measures would fund the Defense, Homeland Security, State and Agriculture Departments. However, the four bills alone will do nothing to stop the government from shutting down at 12:01 a.m. Sunday.

They also want to know when the other seven bills will come to the House floor, including two that still need to go through the Appropriations Committee first.

"Will the House of Representatives remain in session to continue working until all 12 individual regular appropriations bills have passed?" they asked.

The House is scheduled to be on recess the first two weeks of October, but that would likely change if the government were to shut down Sunday.

The far right also wants McCarthy to explain his plan for slashing spending to achieve a total funding level of $1.526 trillion for all 12 bills, as the Republican Conference agreed to last week.

And finally, they want him to "publicly refute and reject" the Senate's bipartisan stopgap funding bill — which McCarthy has already done — and explain what he is "proactively" doing to defeat it.

The Freedom Caucus members said they remain ready to work in good faith to pass the full-year appropriations bills and they expect McCarthy to "take every step necessary" to ensure they pass.

"Mr. Speaker, we need leadership and a clear plan on spending to get to an end game here — most importantly, with wins for the American People," they concluded.

Notably, some of the 27 Freedom Caucus members who've signed the letter have previously said they would never vote for any stopgap funding bill no matter what it contains, including Reps. Dan Bishop of North Carolina, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Anna Paulina Luna of Florida and Andy Ogles of Tennessee.

Bishop, however, softened his opposition Thursday, telling reporters he remains opposed the current GOP plan for a stopgap but he left open the possibility of some currently nonexistent version that could win his support.

"I don't rule it out; it's possible," he said.

Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., who also signed the letter, said he expects to support the House stogap bill because it "makes sense to get something to the Senate."

But Norman said Freedom Caucus members do want to McCarthy to outline a plan for passing the remaining appropriations bills, especially with a shutdown looming.

"We know we can't do it by Saturday," Norman said. "So get us a plan, let us look it at, and we'll see what we can do."

McCarthy expressed frustration with the evolving door of complaints he has tried to addressed.

"Members say they only want to vote for individual bills, but they hold me up all summer and won't let me bring individual bills up," he said. "Then they say they won't vote for a stopgap measure that keeps government open. So I don't know where you're going in that scenario. Have you ever seen that?"

Warren Rojas contributed to this report.