The look inside of the House of Representatives yesterday was quite different from what we’d grown used to seeing over the past couple of months. After initially welding together his caucus after taking the gavel, Speaker McCarthy managed to use the GOP’s slim majority to hammer through one bill after another, culminating with the recent debt limit agreement. But yesterday, the debt limit passage prompted what’s being described as a “mini-revolt” in the majority, with a group of eleven members of the Freedom Caucus torpedoing routine procedural bills, along with their own gas stove bill, and basically shutting down the session. None of them have yet gone so far as to try to oust the Speaker, but they are demanding a meeting. To put it mildly, this isn’t a good look and the liberal media is having a field day with it. (AP)

House conservatives staged a mini-revolt Tuesday in retaliation for Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s leadership on last week’s vote to raise the debt ceiling, the right wing banding together to block progress on a mixture of bills and vent their frustration.

Led by outspoken members of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of 11 Republicans broke with their party on an otherwise routine procedural vote that threw the day’s schedule — and the rest of the week — into disarray. It’s the first such procedural rule vote to fail in nearly two decades.

The group is among some of the same conservative Republicans who tried to stop the debt ceiling bill from advancing last week and who then threatened to try to oust McCarthy after passage of the debt ceiling package that President Joe Biden signed into law.

Matt Gaetz of Florida seemed to be the leader of the revolt or at least one of the more outspoken members. He spoke to reporters about refusing to live in “the era of the Imperial Speaker.” He was joined by Dan Bishop of North Carolina who is calling for an immediate meeting between McCarthy and the Freedom Caucus members.

But it’s not entirely clear what it is that these members specifically want from McCarthy. Obviously, they were upset over how the debt ceiling deal played out, which is understandable. But Bishop is talking about the “deal” they had with McCarthy being broken and he wants to discuss “how the House will operate” going forward.

It’s not that I can’t understand some of their complaints. After working together to pass their own debt limit plan (which was doomed to fail and they knew it), McCarthy appeared to disappear into private meetings with Biden’s representatives. The members complained that they weren’t getting updates until the deal was finished and they did not care for the finished product at all.

Part of the blame for that can fairly be placed on the Speaker’s shoulders. He was making agreements that were significantly different from what the members had agreed to in the GOP bill. Some communication would have been nice. But at the same time, the Freedom Caucus would have rejected many of the compromise items even if he had come back to update them. What would have happened next? There’s a fairly good chance there wouldn’t have been a deal and we would have been back to the starting line with the clock ticking.

If there had been an actual red wave last year and the GOP wound up with a larger majority of just another dozen seats or so, this wouldn’t be happening. The reality is that we’re only talking about roughly one dozen Republicans who are currently shutting down the process. But with such a tiny majority, McCarthy doesn’t have a dozen spare votes, so some sort of accommodation will need to be found. What we do know is that the Democrats and their friends in the mainstream media are currently munching on popcorn and enjoying the show. So the Speaker needs to restore order in the caucus somehow, and that will probably require some compromises on his part.