“We got our ass kicked. It’s just that simple,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.). “Looks to me like we got rinky-doo’d. That’s a Louisiana word for ‘screwed.’ And we got our ass kicked. That’s the way my people back home see it.”
As the GOP heads into the midterms, McCarthy and McConnell are operating in different galaxies. While the House GOP leader navigates a tricky path as he tries to take the speaker’s gavel next year, voting against all those big bipartisan deals to avoid losing any edge with his conference’s conservatives, the Senate minority leader has offered surprising support for a decent portion of President Joe Biden’s agenda.
The dynamic could pose serious challenges, given the two men hope to lead a Republican Congress together next year. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said simply that any Senate Republicans who work with Democrats on Biden-backed legislation are “wrong. I wish they wouldn’t.”
While he didn’t criticize McConnell directly, Jordan praised McCarthy as being “on the side of the American people” and claimed that voters detest the Senate’s recent bipartisan legislation: “Look at all the pushback.”
But across the Capitol, GOP senators have their own concerns about McCarthy’s approach. Some worry he’s reflexively rejecting good bills — ones that help the broader GOP combat Democrats’ push to paint it as obstructionist.
“I wish [McCarthy] would take a deeper policy look at some of these issues that we’ve come together on, understanding they may want to make changes,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who has supported much of the Senate’s bipartisan agenda. “Just unilaterally being against? I’d rather get things done, put it that way.”
Democrats are staying out of it. Asked if he outmaneuvered McConnell, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer demurred: “We’re just doing what we have to do.” And if Democrats lose control of Congress, they probably will lose much of their leverage to split the two GOP leaders next year.
That’s not to say McCarthy and McConnell are necessarily at odds. Continuing a tradition among congressional Republican leaders, they meet and talk frequently, roughly every other week. They switch off going to each other’s offices and occasionally speak by phone. In their latest conversation, McCarthy recalled warning McConnell “to stop putting in” any bills that involve more mandatory spending, an issue he has also privately raised with his own members on other pieces of legislation.
After the news of a Schumer-Manchin deal broke Wednesday, McCarthy opted to whip against the manufacturing bill that McConnell had supported one day earlier and vowed Thursday to “be the first no vote on the board.” But despite those House GOP efforts to encourage a no vote, 24 Republicans still voted in favor.
McConnell responded diplomatically to the shade from the other chamber. He described his relationship with McCarthy as “great” and said: “No one is [pulling] harder than I am for him to win back the House so we can stop the Biden administration’s liberal agenda.”
Still, the Senate GOP leader’s threat to derail a version of the microchips legislation if Democrats tried to pass a party-line spending, tax and health care bill — followed by his vote for that same microchips bill hours before Democrats revived their deal with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) — caused a major stir in the congressional GOP.
Asked if Democrats had duped him into helping them on the microchip bill while they secretly finalized legislation he loathes, McConnell said that “what they’ve produced is an absolute monstrosity, and we’re going to be really aggressively in opposition.”
Other Republicans say the Schumer-Manchin deal wouldn’t have changed their vote on the microchips…
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