McConnell faces heavy pressure from right on debt ceiling

Senate conservatives are putting pressure on Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) to hold the line with Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and demand that any bill to raise the debt ceiling also include major fiscal reforms.  

The effort is being led by Sens. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Mike Braun (R-Ind.), who have regularly met with House Freedom Caucus members at Scott’s house on Capitol Hill to build support for a debt-limit bill with significant fiscal reforms.  

They are now pressing McConnell to stick closely to McCarthy, despite efforts by Democrats to divide the two GOP leaders.  

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) did just that after Tuesday’s White House meeting between President Biden and congressional leaders, accusing McCarthy of being the “lone holdout” from an agreement to take the possibility of a federal default off the table.

During an interview in his office Wednesday, Scott said McConnell and other Senate GOP leaders need to be more vocal in demanding major fiscal reforms along the lines of what the House passed last month, as part of a bill to raise the debt limit. 

“If we want to get something done, we’ve got to support Kevin, and then we’ve got to be vocal in what we believe in. It has to come through the Senate; it’s got to take nine of us to pass,” Scott said.  

“We need to be very vocal. We expect there to be a path to a balanced budget. We expect that we get rid of this wasteful spending. We ought to be very vocal about what we believe in,” he said, emphasizing “that’s what our leadership should be supporting.”  

Scott predicted that Biden would try to get Republican leaders to agree to tax increases in exchange for some spending cuts.  

“I think they’re going to try. I think Biden’s all in to try to do it,” he said.  

Senate conservatives who opposed McConnell’s election to a ninth term as party leader are wary he may break from House conservatives at the last moment and agree to a deal with Democrats to prevent a default.

That was a motivating factor behind a letter circulated by Lee last week pledging that Republican senators would not support a clean debt limit increase.  

“We will not be voting for cloture on any bill that raises the debt ceiling without substantive spending and budget reforms,” the senators declared in a letter addressed to Schumer.  

In a victory for Senate conservatives, McConnell and his entire leadership team were among the 43 signatories.  

“It is now clear that Senate Republicans aren’t going to bail out Biden and Schumer, they have to negotiate. I thank my colleagues for joining my effort to emphasize this point in the clearest possible terms,” Lee said in a statement Saturday.  

One Republican senator who requested anonymity to comment on internal maneuvering said McConnell had been “laying in the weeds” earlier this year by leaving the negotiations over the debt limit entirely up to McCarthy and Biden.  

The senator suspected the GOP leader was waiting for those talks to fail before stepping in to broker a debt-limit deal with Democrats.  

Democratic senators say they have more faith in McConnell than McCarthy to put together a deal.  

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told reporters Wednesday that he felt “slightly better” about avoiding a national default because McConnell declared, after meeting with Biden and other congressional leaders, that crisis would be averted.  

McConnell told reporters outside the White House “the United States is not going to default, it never has and it never will.”  

Either way, conservatives think they are having an impact.

“I will give Rick Scott a great degree of credit for his tenacity of just holding dinners every week — whether we had something to talk to or not — where the core group of senators got together with the core group of House members and got everyone over the hump,” said the GOP senator who requested anonymity.  

Scott held a press conference with 21 other Senate Republicans last week to show support for McCarthy’s position, sending a signal to McConnell.  

The two have history: Scott challenged McConnell for his role as Senate Republican leader after the 2022 midterm election and had the support of Lee, Johnson, Cruz, and Braun.  

McConnell easily won the race 37-10, but Senate conservatives think that Scott’s challenge served as a warning to the Senate GOP leader that he had to pay closer attention to disillusioned conservatives.  

Some Republicans felt blindsided by a deal McConnell offered to Democrats in the fall of 2021, allowing them to move legislation to raise the debt limit through the Senate without facing a filibuster.  

McConnell at the time argued he wanted to create a one-time exception to the Senate’s filibuster rule so Democrats could raise the debt limit without any Republican votes and take sole ownership of the debt increase.  

GOP critics, however, argued that creating an exception to the filibuster helped Democrats add to the debt.  

Senate Republican Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) told The Hill on Wednesday that McConnell is well aware of the different views within his conference.  

“Obviously, the leader wants to be responsive to the caucus. We have different opinions in our caucus on some issues,” he said when asked if Senate conservatives are influencing McConnell’s approach to the negotiations.  

But Thune said the leader would ultimately do what he thinks is in the nation’s best interests on the debt limit. 

“When it comes to issues of national consequence like this, my impression is he’s going to do what he thinks is the right thing, informed by the views of the entire caucus. Sometimes that’s not a unanimous thing,” Thune said. “His views generally reflect the majority of Republicans in the Senate.”