Leading Republicans are expressing confidence in House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's (R-CA) hold on his conference after 12 GOP lawmakers voted down a rule to block the Biden administration from instituting a gas stove ban.
Twelve Republicans, largely made up of House Freedom Caucus members, blocked two GOP measures concerning gas stoves in a Tuesday afternoon procedural vote, marking the first time a rule had failed since 2002. The dissenting Republicans joined 208 Democrats in preventing the bills from moving forward, despite the measures having broad party support.
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It is widely believed that a majority of those GOP ‘nay’ votes came from members who were retaliating against leadership for reaching a debt ceiling deal with the White House.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) told the Washington Examiner from BakerHostetler’s annual legislative seminar on Wednesday morning, “I just think it’s something that will work out. I’m not too worried about it. When you’ve got a four-seat majority, you’ve got family squabbles that will happen sometimes.”
“I think we’ll come together because we realize where the Left, which controls the Democratic Party, where they want to take the country is not good,” he continued, referencing his speech on the House floor nominating McCarthy as speaker in January. “So that's what we’ve got to focus on, and I'll continue to try to encourage that to happen, and I think it will. It was happening, it was going fine. We got the immigration bill passed, which no other Republican Congress has been able to get done. We got it done. That's the kind of focus and attitude we’ve got to have.”
Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), who chairs the powerful House Rules Committee where the Tuesday incident occurred, said to the Washington Examiner that he was “blindsided” by the dissent and was still working to find out the reason behind it.
“There's pretty wide unanimity [on the gas stoves issue],” Cole said from the policy breakfast. “This is regulatory reform stuff. This is red meat for Republicans. So, you know, there's another issue at stake here, and I'm not exactly sure what it is. We didn't get any warning that this was happening. The whips team didn't pick anything up. None of the members that voted no bothered to tell any of us that they were going to vote no.”
“For God's sake, I don't care if you're at the moderate end or the conservative end of our political spectrum, there's not a Republican who doesn’t support this stuff,” he continued. “And again, there was no complaint about the bill. So that's when you're using one thing to do something else. I don't know what the other thing was, but I know this was not the appropriate way to handle it.”
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Asked if House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) or others in leadership were to blame, Cole replied with a definitive no.
"You're responsible for your own votes. Members know better than this," he said. "So, it's the members' fault who voted no on a Republican measure that they support and will tell you they support. They have to explain to us what this was about."