As part of his deal to keep the speakership, Kevin McCarthy put three hardliners on the Rules Committee. At Puck, David Dreier told Tina Nguyen that it was a big mistake:
“What McCarthy did was just so unfortunate and just so wrong,” David Dreier, a former Republican Congressman who chaired the Rules Committee for over a decade, told me. “They joined the Rules Committee, in large part, with an agenda of blocking the leadership.”
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In happier times, Dreier told me, a functioning Rules Committee allows leadership to hear out unhappy members and adjust bills accordingly before scooting them onto the floor—all without their intraparty mess spilling into full view on C-SPAN. But this only works if members of the Rules Committee are aligned with the speaker’s interests. “From the very get-go, the notion of appointing people who undermine the nine-to-four majority-minority ratio on the Rules Committee is something that I just find to be very, very, very unfortunate,” he told me. “And I put that mildly. I mean, I was horrified when that decision was made.”
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The next flashpoint might be the reauthorization of the FY 2025 appropriations, which is slated for September—another fight where Johnson will be forced to cede items to the Democrats, setting up the triumvirate to retake control of the voting process, or, if all else fails, to threaten a shutdown once again. And as long as the trio remains on the committee, Dreier noted, they’ll be fated to clash over and over again—just as they’d planned. “They knew that if they could get on to the Rules Committee, that they would be able to be in a position to defeat the leadership,” he said. “And to me, it’s just absolutely insane.”