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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is nothing if not a political survivor.

Underestimated from the start, the Republican who cruised around his California hometown of Bakersfield and stumbled into a career in Congress was never taken too seriously by the Washington establishment.

Monica Potts (Monica Potts, senior politics reporter): I was a bit surprised to see how much of the support for the deal came from Democrats: 165 Democrats voted for it, while only 149 Republicans did, and 71 Republicans opposed it (compared to 46 Democrats). It’s hard to see how it would have passed without Democratic support, and Kevin McCarthy’s leadership was already shaky. I wonder what this will mean within McCarthy’s own caucus, that he couldn’t get enough support from his own party to pass it without Democratic help.

geoffrey.skelley: The spin from all directions was interesting yesterday. You had a fair amount of press coverage — and many Republicans — casting the vote as proof that McCarthy can successfully lead a narrow House majority after he struggled to become speaker back in January. But then you had other right-wing voices suggesting the vote was proof that McCarthy is weak because the legislation passed with even more Democratic votes. I suspect it is too early to know for sure! A final judgment on this episode may rest on whether the party’s right flank attempts to force McCarthy out via a motion to vacate the chair, and if such an action receives significant support among the broader GOP caucus.

The House will vote on Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden’s debt-ceiling deal this evening and, by all accounts, the speaker has stuck the landing.

Having reached an agreement with the White House, McCarthy got his way in a crucial Rules Committee meeting yesterday, fought off a Freedom Caucus rebellion and looks set to win support for his deal from a majority of his conference.

After the debt limit deal passed, Republican Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado told CNN that House conservatives will be having discussions about ousting McCarthy “in the next week or two,” although he didn’t commit to following through with that threat.

A fired-up Buck, who opposed the debt limit deal, told reporters that he has received calls from constituents about removing McCarthy from the speakership. “My constituents are furious and you know what’s so interesting about the calls in the district? They are not only ‘vote against this bill,’ but they are ‘take McCarthy out.’ That’s what the calls are coming in,” he said.

House leaders are confident that the chamber today will approve the debt ceiling deal between President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — and move toward avoiding a disastrous government default.

Why it matters: Not all victory laps are the same. The number of votes the Fiscal Responsibility Act gets from each party could signal who made the better deal.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy bears a distinct chip on his shoulder, often suggesting that his political capabilities have been minimized by the media and his opponents. After suffering 15 rounds of votes to earn his gavel, his brief tenure has been characterized by a dogged persistence when pursuing his political goals. But the House passing the debt ceiling deal he and President Joe Biden crafted strengthened his position, his supporters say, even as some within his own party have threatened to move to unseat him.

The debt ceiling bill overwhelmingly passed the House on a bipartisan basis Wednesday night, with a 314–117 vote, earning support from 149 Republicans and 165 Democrats. Conservative critics may argue that more Democrats than Republicans supporting the bill shows it was a concession to Biden and congressional Democrats, but McCarthy has maintained a relatively firm grip on his conference throughout a trying process. And the speaker achieved the key “majority of the majority” in the vote—that is, most of the Republican conference supported it.

Just days after defying MAGA extremists to pass the debt-limit bill with a bipartisan majority, Speaker McCarthy returns to appeasing them.

President Biden signed the Fiscal Responsibility Act on Saturday June 3, finally bringing the debt ceiling drama to an end. And on Monday the MAGA minority faction was reacting with their usual tactic: extortion.

Kevin McCarthy emerged in January from his historically chaotic speakership election confident, he insisted, that the disagreements among House Republicans were actually a clue to their future success.

"We go from the Reagan philosophy of 'if we agree with people 80% of the time, we're all together.' I like the idea of having a party so large that you have a lot of beliefs inside it," he told reporters at the time. "But you have a foundation of our beliefs, and I think what we went through last week will only make us stronger in the long run."

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy appeared Monday to have resolved, for now, an impasse with some of the more conservative members of his caucus who had brought the chamber to a standstill last week.

McCarthy met with nearly a dozen lawmakers in his office in an effort to quell a revolt and jumpstart various priorities that had stalled last week amid the GOP infighting. He called it a productive meeting where "everybody’s attitude was, ‘How do we find where we all work together?’” McCarthy promised more meetings with last week’s holdouts and a focus on reducing federal spending in the weeks ahead.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) shrugged off the threat of a motion to vacate being weaponized against him amid backlash to the debt ceiling deal.

Back in January, when McCarthy struggled through a historically unprecedented 15 votes to claim the gavel, he agreed to lower the threshold for a motion to vacate down to a single vote in order to win over holdouts. This means that any member upset with the tentative debt limit deal could move to oust him.

Because the House GOP won only a narrow majority in 2022, with Republicans currently controlling 222 seats and Democrats holding 212, McCarthy relies on the far-right flank to keep power. In order to win his position as Speaker of the House, McCarthy was forced to strike a deal with Freedom Caucus members in January after 14 failed votes.

As part of the compromise to gain the House Speakership, McCarthy agreed to a change in House rules that allows any single member of the House Republicans to make a motion to vacate, which would immediately trigger a vote to remove McCarthy as speaker. There's no indication any member is currently considering using this, but it's a sword constantly hanging over McCarthy's head as he negotiates with his own party.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is safe in his position after reaching a debt-ceiling deal with President Joe Biden that almost a third of his Republican caucus voted against, a key GOP negotiator said.

Representative Garret Graves, who was part of McCarthy’s negotiating team with the White House, was asked about comments last week by fellow Republican Ken Buck that the speaker should be concerned about his political future.

Who won the debt ceiling showdown between President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy?

And the answer is everyone's a winner. President Biden, first and foremost, avoided a default, which would have been a terrible consequence for Biden politically and the US and world economy. Very happy that didn't happen. Biden can now spin the modest spending reductions in the bill that increased the debt ceiling as a bipartisan victory, which should potentially help in his reelection campaign as he tries to campaign as a quasi-moderate, which is what brought him to office in 2020 and he put the debt ceiling issue behind us for another two years until at least January of 2025, which is going to be after the next presidential election. And the US is likely to revisit a lot of these fiscal issues once again, using the debt ceiling as a point of leverage to achieve further spending cuts and potentially an extension of the Trump tax cuts that expire in 2026.

The speaker cast his seemingly inexhaustible persistence as proof of his strength as a leader. “My last statement, to everyone in America: I will never give up on you,” McCarthy said. The implicit message: Don’t give up on him, either.

Republicans hold a mere four-seat majority in the House after a relatively disappointing showing in the recent midterm elections. Critics doubted that McCarthy would be able to hold his conference in line, particularly in light of his arduous trek to the speakership and the promises he made to the more conservative factions of the party. But rather than causing him to lose respect from many of his members, the multitude of speaker votes in early January may have instead earned him goodwill from conservatives who have felt marginalized by previous party leaders.

House Republicans have temporarily overcome an impasse after roughly a dozen far-right lawmakers defied their leadership and blocked a key procedural hurdle that effectively froze the House floor from considering any business for almost a week.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., and several of the protesting members emerged after an hour-long meeting Monday evening to separately announce that the House will vote on five pieces of legislation this week, including a key demand by the far-right group on a resolution denouncing a Biden administration gun regulation.

If House Speaker Kevin McCarthy fails to stand up to the extreme right-wing members of the Republican Party, it is likely the United States will default on its debt on June 1. That’s the date the federal government runs out of money if Congress doesn’t raise the statutory cap on the amount the federal government can borrow. Negotiators have a week to strike a deal and every day without an agreement makes default more likely.

In 2011, when I was part of the last major debt ceiling negotiations, most Republicans understood the dangers of default and the need to avoid it. But even then, the talks were so prolonged and difficult, the nation avoided default by only 48 hours. As a result, the US bond rating was downgraded and interest rates soared, which cost taxpayers about $1.3 billion.

In January 2019, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report on the projected cost of U.S. strategic forces from 2019 to 2028 and forecasted a price tag of $494 billion. That is half a trillion dollars over ten years to maintain and modernize portions of the U.S. strategic deterrent apparatus—a staggering figure for most people to comprehend. However, the United States should continue to fund the maintenance and modernization of its strategic forces, particularly because China and Russia continue to develop and improve their own strategic forces. For the United States, the expense is a necessary investment that will preserve global stability and help deter potential great power adversaries in the future.

The world has relied on nuclear deterrence to avoid major power war for three-quarters of a century. This protection should not be taken for granted. Furthermore, the top priority of the U.S. National Defense Strategy is to be ready for great power competition with China and Russia. This is where U.S. funding and readiness efforts should be focused, and deterrence should be the centerpiece of this strategy.

Does nuclear modernization promote international security? All the major powers are currently modernizing their strategic nuclear arsenals, and scholars and policymakers are debating the effect of such modernization on international politics. Some argue that nuclear weapons deter a great power war and, therefore, nuclear modernization will contribute to international stability.1 Others claim that modernization programs are fundamentally destabilizing; nuclear weapons are the deadliest weapons ever invented and their continued possession will eventually result in a catastrophic nuclear attack.2

This chapter introduces a third answer to the above question: it depends.

A debt limit compromise that would cap defense spending for the next two years is aggravating congressional defense hawks who want the Pentagon to get a significant funding boost.

Many Republicans in particular have spent months arguing that the Biden administration’s proposed $842 billion for the Defense Department in fiscal 2024 shortchanges the Pentagon at a time of widespread concern about China’s military ambitions.

A $120 billion disagreement over federal spending threatens to send Washington hurtling toward a government shutdown later this year, even as lawmakers race to pass their annual appropriations bills.

For a moment, it seemed as though Congress might avoid the kind of last-minute stalemates that have come to define the appropriations process. Lawmakers had pledged to move the 12 annual bills individually after years of catchall packages that often included extraneous measures and what critics consider bloated federal spending.