House Republicans Mull New Spending Cuts as McCarthy Tries to Restart Votes

Scheduled votes include legislation to repeal a Biden administration regulation on pistol braces, which is expected to come down to the wire, as well as a bill forbidding the administration from banning gas stoves. 

The dissidents complain they were cut out of debt-ceiling negotiations and that the deal ultimately cut with President Biden didn’t sufficiently pare back federal spending. 

In their first meeting back in Washington, Republican lawmakers traded barbs and used profanity, according to people in the room. Some members were upset over the week of gridlock, while conservatives who held up the votes remained mad about the debt ceiling deal and defended their stance. 

“Teams aren’t built on the first day of practice…as with every team, the Republican House majority has had to learn to work together,” said Whip Tom Emmer (R., Minn.). 

The detente between McCarthy and dissenters came after House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Kay Granger (R., Texas) indicated she would aim to advance bills that cut fiscal 2024 discretionary spending to 2022 levels by deeply cutting many domestic programs while preserving funding for national defense, veterans and the border. 

The debt-ceiling bill struck with Biden effectively kept 2024 nonmilitary discretionary spending even with 2023 levels. 

The appropriations process involves allotting funds for 12 different bills within the limits established by the debt-ceiling deal. The first step is to give instructions to each relevant subcommittee about how much it can spend; after that, appropriators wrangle over how much to give to various agencies and programs.

In a chart circulated among committee members ahead of the first full-committee markup on Tuesday, the GOP-led committee proposed increases to three appropriations bills that fund defense priorities—the defense, homeland security, and military construction and Veterans Affairs bills—but cuts to the nine bills that fund domestic priorities such as spending on housing assistance. That is consistent with the approach that House Republican leaders told many rank-and-file members they would take when they were lining up support for McCarthy’s speakership. 

Democrats cried foul, saying that Republicans had reneged on a debt-ceiling deal that McCarthy had reached with President Biden to limit spending in exchange for extending the country’s borrowing capacity. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Patty Murray (D., Wash.) said that approach wouldn’t fly in the Senate, as did Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D., Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.

“They are disregarding the letter and the spirit of the agreement between the president and the speaker of the House,” DeLauro said.  

Neither the pistol brace bill nor the legislation on gas stoves are expected to become law due to Democratic opposition, but the votes are seen as important messaging bills for House Republicans.

Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R., La.) said Republicans were still working to get enough votes to pass the bill overturning the restrictions on pistol braces. The regulation was set by Biden after a 21-year-old gunman used an AR-15 style pistol equipped with a brace to kill 10 people at a Boulder, Colo. supermarket in March 2021. 

“This bill has always had less than 218 commitments,” Mr. Scalise said. 

Pistol braces were designed to make it easier to aim and fire unwieldy guns like AR-15 style pistols, which are compact versions of AR-15 style rifles. But they can also be used as shoulder stocks, effectively transforming the large pistols into short-barreled rifles, which have been heavily regulated under federal law since the 1930s, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Current owners must now register their weapons with the federal government and pay $200, or remove and destroy the brace, the ATF says. The agency offered tax-free registration until the end of May and received 255,000 applications, an ATF spokesman said. 

The ATF estimates that between 3 and 7 million braces have been sold while the Congressional Research Service puts the number between 10 to 40 million. 

“Does it seem a little extreme to get 10 years in prison for owning a piece of plastic that the ATF for 10 years maintained was legal?” said Rep. Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) in the Rules Committee debate on the bill. Under the new Biden regulation, violators can face fines and up to 10 years in prison. 

Democrats, for their part, have introduced a series of discharge petitions aimed at curbing gun violence in the country, as a way to push back on House Republican efforts. The petitions, should they receive 218 signatures, would call up legislation to expand background checks for all gun purchases and ban assault weapons. They are unlikely to move forward. 

Before the Boulder massacre, a gunman who killed nine and wounded 17 in the 2019 Dayton, Ohio, attack used an AR-style pistol with a brace. Attorney General Merrick Garland said that the braces make “high powered pistols more stable and accurate while concealable” when Biden ordered the new rules in April 2021. 

Gun-rights groups are fighting the new rule in court. They argue that such braces were designed to help disabled veterans shoot at the range and complain that the new rule has unfairly turned millions of brace owners into criminals. 

Last month, the Firearms Policy Coalition persuaded the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to temporarily block the new regulation from going into effect for the plaintiffs in that case, which included members of the gun-rights group. 

—Siobhan Hughes contributed to this article.

Write to Natalie Andrews at [email protected] and Zusha Elinson at [email protected]