John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy are plagued by a divided conference. A House in chaos

Less than two weeks ago, House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy walked upstairs to Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s Capitol office to discuss a sensitive issue: Why did Cantor schedule a vote before McCarthy had the chance to survey Republican support?

The meeting — described as “tense” by several people familiar with it — ended with McCarthy abruptly standing up and storming out of the room. Aides downplayed the exchange. But a week later, it turned out that McCarthy’s pique was merited: The health care-related bill was suddenly pulled from the floor in what was the most recent stumble for House Republicans.


The GOP leadership is dealing with an unprecedented level of frustration in running the House, according to conversations with more than a dozen aides and lawmakers in and around leadership. Leadership is talking past each other. The conference is split by warring factions. And influential outside groups are fighting them.

The chaos has led to a sense of stalemate for House Republicans, who have been in the majority since 2011.

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“There’s so much stuff happening up here that sometimes, you don’t pay attention to some of the more intricate details of something until it comes right to you,” said Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, a GOP whip from Georgia.

Speaker John Boehner, Cantor and McCarthy are plagued by a conference split into two groups. In one camp are stiff ideologues who didn’t extract any lesson from Mitt Romney’s loss and are only looking to slash spending and defund President Barack Obama’s health care law at every turn. In the other are lawmakers who are aligned with Cantor, who is almost singularly driving an agenda which is zeroed in on family issues.

Boehner seems more focused on passing big pieces of legislation like hiking the debt ceiling and extending government funding, sometimes drawing flak for having to rely on Democrats to move these bills over the finish line.

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The House simply isn’t interested in the agendas being pushed by the president and Democratic Senate. Most Republicans aren’t looking for a big legislative push on gun control. GOP leaders are skeptical that they can arrive at a framework to negotiate a budget agreement with Senate Democrats. And tax reform and an immigration overhaul, while broadly supported, are still seen as long shots.

Members of leadership have trouble staying on the same page. Cantor is anxious to move on his agenda, but McCarthy needs to gather support in a House Republican Conference that’s filled with lawmakers constantly divided on leadership’s priorities.

Much to the chagrin of GOP leadership, outside groups — Club for Growth and Heritage Action — oppose top Republicans at every turn. Those groups claim they don’t ever hear from Boehner, Cantor and McCarthy. The conservative groups — natural allies who could give cover to the House Republican Conference — feel they have no buy-in to their agenda from the House GOP leadership.

“I get asked a lot, ‘Do you guys talk to leadership?’” said Chris Chocola, a former House Republican lawmaker who now heads the Club for Growth. “The fact is we don’t. I don’t know that that’s good or bad, but we just don’t. So if I were them, I’d probably try to at least survey the conservative outside groups and how they do things before I do something like that.”

The inability to find unifying principles is sometimes in plain view: House Republicans spent two days last week passing legislation that extended the authority of the government’s helium reserves, which Democrats would’ve allowed them to pass by unanimous voice vote.

“It’s almost a frivolous use of the congressional schedule,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said last week.

For the past two years, the House was the fast-moving bull in a China shop, sending bills to the Senate in rapid succession. This year, examples of the House’s suddenly slow-moving nature abound.

The House’s immigration group, which has been working for four years, hasn’t released a stitch of paper, let alone an actual bill. A half-dozen Republican aides say the House won’t pass an immigration reform bill until year’s end, if at all.

Republicans spent much of the past few years hammering the Senate to pass a budget. Now that the Senate did so, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) are struggling to craft an agreement on a framework for a compromise between the House and Senate versions. They’re unlikely to move into a formal conference process, sources say.

House Republicans have had worse days — they had to abandon a tax plan pushed by Boehner in December, which was followed by a gaggle of rank-and-file members trying to prevent Boehner from serving a second term as speaker.

But the continued internal struggles illustrate a miniature picture of chaos. Despite all of House Republicans’ efforts to plot, plan and strategize to shift a divided Washington in their favor, hurdles have been difficult to avoid.

House leadership aides will tell you they’re winning. They forced Senate Democrats to release a budget, and Cantor is holding out hope that their family-focused agenda will attract Democratic support or jam them politically.

But in a practical sense, the House is even more isolated than ever. Obama is wooing Republican senators on issues ranging from immigration to a potential budget compromise. Obama said Tuesday he’s had “some good conversations with Republican senators so far.”

There’s been next to no outreach to the House.

It’s come to the point that top House aides say simply that they‘re not taking into consideration Obama’s priorities when they plan their debt ceiling moves.

The uncertainty extends to closed meetings of top GOP aides. In these closed-door strategy sessions, Republicans are looking to move beyond a rough few weeks onto more solid ground.

Over this recess, House Republican leadership staff is meeting to try to coalesce around a thorny issue: how to handle the debt ceiling. The original plan was to spend the early part of the summer crafting a solution since it seemed that the nation would hit its borrowing limit in September. The nearly monthlong August recess would have provided a perfect backstop.

Now, the whole timeline is thrown into flux. First, House Republicans want to pass a bill next week that prioritizes debt payments in the case of default.

Several options are being eyed to ride alongside the debt ceiling. One is tax reform — a strategy vocally supported by Ryan, sources say. This method would include passing a framework for tax reform, which would allow Congress to lift the debt ceiling, alongside a plan to allow tax-writing committees to figure out how to write the difficult details of reform.

Another option under discussion, according to aides, is moving a package including some spending cuts, elements of entitlement reforms and piecemeal tax-reform measures.

With all the moving pieces, flubs on the floor and leadership intrigue, Chocola says he wonders why there are no challenges to the current leadership structure.

“I just think that the more kind of interesting thing to me is that even though there’s been some hiccups, there’s been violations of the Hastert rule, pulling things like [Boehner’s tax plan], to this, there’s like no opposition,” he said. “There’s no one that you hear about that will challenge current leadership. It’s assumed everyone will go up a step with Cantor and McCarthy. I’m not instigating it — you never hear of any rumblings to the leadership.”