House Republicans Face Daunting Task: Crafting Debt Ceiling Deal And Meeting Demands

Republican leaders in the United States House of Representatives returned from a two-week break Tuesday to a daunting task: finalize in the next three weeks a 2024 spending plan that lives up to the deal cut with President Biden to lift the debt ceiling, but also satisfies the increasingly bold demands of the conference’s most conservative members.

21 members of the Freedom Caucus, well aware of the leverage they have in a majority as slim as the one House Republicans have, sent a letter to Speaker McCarthy Monday, detailing the conditions that have to be met for them to support any eventual spending package. 

The group's central demand harkens back to one of the key conditions they gave during the series of fraught Speaker votes in January -- that total spending for Fiscal Year 2024 be at, or very close to, the FY 2022 spending levels.

"We [ ] write to inform you that we cannot support appropriations bills that will produce a top-line discretionary spending level barely below the bloated FY 2023 level," the letter reads, "and effectively in line with the cap set by the debt ceiling deal that we opposed..."

Within days of passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Act (aka, debt ceiling bill), it became clear that, at the urging of the Freedom Caucus and the House's most conservative members, the goal would be, not to simply avoid exceeding the $1.586 trillion cap on discretionary spending, but to go well below the cap.

"It was a ceiling, not a floor," Rep. Josh Brecheen (R-OK2) said in an interview last month.

Congressman Brecheen is a member of the Freedom Caucus and said that even with the passage of the debt ceiling deal (he opposed it), Congress still has a responsibility to carefully scrutinize the proposals in the 12 spending bills.

"My hope is that we will make sure that we have a strong defense bill," Brecheen said, "and that we can make sure that we can extract a lot of savings out of the non-defense discretionary spending element."

The letter that Brecheen and other Freedom Caucus members sent to Speaker McCarthy clearly spelled out that sentiment is more than a 'hope', it is a requirement, if the Speaker wants their votes:

“We plan to vote against any appropriations bills designed to achieve the approximately $1.586 trillion top-line spending level – roughly equal to the spending caps agreed to with President Biden in the debt ceiling deal…”

Among the other demands set out in the letter, the group is insisting Speaker McCarthy publicly reject the idea of passing a supplemental appropriations bill in support of Ukraine.

Asked about the letter today, McCarthy downplayed it, saying he gets lots of letters about lots of things from different groups and that, ultimately, face-to-face discussion will matter most.

Beyond that, it will matter what happens with regard to spending bills over in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

"There will be a different set of top lines for the United States Senate," Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK4) said in an interview last month. "We will all live within the overall number set in the debt ceiling bill."