Conservative House floor blockade ends but GOP tensions persist

By Clare Foran, Melanie Zanona, Annie Grayer, Haley Talbot and Lauren Fox, CNN

(CNN) — The House advanced a slate of bills Tuesday afternoon, bringing a floor blockade to an end after a tentative agreement was reached between Speaker Kevin McCarthy and hardline conservatives who had brought the chamber floor to a halt in retaliation over how GOP leadership handled the debt ceiling deal.

The stalemate is at an end for now, but tensions continue to erupt in the House Republican conference, including from moderates frustrated and angry at conservatives for halting floor action.

The floor blockade also showed how a relatively small faction of conservatives can derail or hold hostage McCarthy’s agenda – and the hardliners have made clear they reserve the right to use every tool available to them to potentially make life harder for GOP leadership in the future.

With the stalemate over at least for now, the House held votes Tuesday evening, including passing a measure to block a pistol brace regulation and failing to override a presidential veto on a measure to overturn a DC policing bill aimed at accountability and reform.

Multiple members leaving the speaker’s office on Monday said the hardline conservatives agreed to end the blockade while they continue discussions with McCarthy about future spending decisions and a new “power-sharing agreement,” though they said the exact details are still being worked out and did not say whether they would ever be made public or put into a written statement.

But even with the news that House action will proceed, frustration among moderates over the blockade was on full display Tuesday morning during a closed-door GOP conference meeting.

GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden of Minnesota slammed the House Freedom Caucus blockade of the House floor in a heated, expletive-laden speech during the closed-door meeting, according to multiple sources in the room.

Orden got up at the mics and said his daughter is dying of cancer, and yet he still “shows up to work every f—ing day,” and complained that he has been trying to introduce bills to save lives, specifically a train bill, but “it’s not shit that gets on Fox News.”

Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas then responded and said he also has constituents he represents and that he came to Washington to shrink government. Roy declined to comment on the interaction after the meeting, but did defend his efforts to hold up the floor in exchange for more concessions from McCarthy.

Some members were happy Van Orden spoke up during the meeting, as they have been frustrated that a small band of hardliners have been able to hold things up.

Reps. Mike Lawler of New York and Tom McClintock of California also stood up to blast the hardliners for holding the floor hostage and warned that the House GOP cannot be controlled by a small faction.

House GOP leadership has attempted to downplay the issues within the conference.

McCarthy was asked by CNN about the drama inside the meeting and he called it “a little bit of fun.”

When CNN pressed House GOP Whip Tom Emmer on internal conference dynamics given the House has not voted in a week following the action by House Freedom Caucus, he said that “communication and respect” are key to moving forward with a unified conference.

The hardline conservatives who have held up legislative action have done so in protest of the deal McCarthy struck with President Joe Biden to raise the nation’s borrowing limit last month. Conservatives wanted the debt ceiling deal to cut more federal spending than it did, and several far-right members of McCarthy’s conference accused him of reneging on commitments he made to them in private in order to win the speakership in January.

After the meeting, Roy wouldn’t comment on the specific comments Van Orden made, but when asked by CNN to respond to frustrations from his colleagues over the floor standstill said, “Well, my experience in life is that the more Congress is open more than American people should be nervous. But the first five months this year we were united doing good things, and it’s my aim to get us back into that row boat.”

Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon said, “there was a little bit of slugging going on,” as he exited the meeting, but noted that 95% of the conference is on McCarthy’s side.

House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar and Vice Chair Ted Lieu blasted House Republicans for shepherding through what they called a week of “chaos” in the lower chamber.

“We haven’t voted for about a week because the Republicans lost control of the House floor,” Lieu said. “So we had all this chaos, the forced shut down.”

This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.

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CNN’s Manu Raju and Kristin Wilson contributed to this report.