As the McCarthy-Biden debt ceiling agreement comes to the floor of the House today, you can expect it to pass along bipartisan lines, with the loudest conservatives and progressives voting against it but not with nearly enough numbers to derail it.

But McCarthy has been in a delicate position with this bill, as one of the concessions to conservatives in order to be elected Speaker was allowing it to be easier to move to vacate the chair. Angering too many conservatives ends up being a calculated risk at times because anything like that could be the trigger for one of those motions. That appeared to be the case this week as multiple conservatives brought up the possibility of such a move.

This morning, however, things appear to be calmer for McCarthy, and while conservatives aren’t happy, the possibility of rebellion appears to be significantly lower than where it was in various media reports yesterday.

DEBT DEAL COMES IN FOR A LANDING — During a closed-door House GOP conference meeting last night, Rep. RANDY WEBER (R-Texas) stood up and delivered a message to some of his fellow conservative hard-liners.

“Cut it out,” he said, according to two people in the room.

It was a message directed squarely at a small group on the far right — members, like Weber, of the House Freedom Caucus — who earlier in the day had let their anger over the pending debt-ceiling deal morph into public threats against the man who had negotiated it, Speaker KEVIN McCARTHY.

[…]

The message was echoed inside and outside the room by other influential conservatives — including Rep. JIM JORDAN (R-Ohio), the Freedom Caucus co-founder and godfather of the hard right. Ousting McCarthy over the debt deal, Jordan told reporters, was “a terrible idea.”

It appeared to get through to the rabble-rousers: Bishop left the meeting and refused to discuss McCarthy’s future with reporters. “I’m not getting into that,” Roy told us as he jumped into an elevator. Another hard-liner who had joined in the saber-rattling, Rep. RALPH NORMAN (R-S.C.), told our Sarah Ferris that McCarthy was not actually at risk.

One of the loudest voices on this deal and McCarthy’s speakership has been Congressman Chip Roy, who is concerned with the push to get the deal through Congress without unanimous consent from all seven Republicans on the House Rules Committee. That, Roy says, was one of the agreements made with McCarthy when conservatives eventually voted for his Speakership.

Roy has also hinted that he may be open to a motion to vacate after posting to Twitter on Monday that a concession was made during speakership elections in January that nothing could pass the Rules Committee unless all seven Republicans were on board, a deal that had not been made public before this week.

“We will see,” Roy said when asked what action he would take if that agreement is broken. “I’m not going to go down that road right now, other than just to point out that a general part of the agreement … was that we would have unanimous support when we come out of the Rules Committee.”

He said similar in an interview with Glenn Beck.

“I think [McCarthy’s debt ceiling deal] is a betrayal of the power sharing arrangement we put in place that would protect the @HouseGOP to make sure we could advance the ball forward.” -Rep. Roy https://t.co/ZSL5geuy0g

— Rep. Chip Roy Press Office (@RepChipRoy) May 30, 2023

Based on those comments, I wouldn’t yet say that McCarthy’s position is safe, but that there isn’t a rebellion so much as there is a tally going. This is, after all, the first real major misstep of McCarthy’s since he got the Speaker’s gavel, and there may yet be opportunities to make it right. This particular deal, however, is just so rotten that it’s hard to stomach, and it’s making a lot of conservatives nervous about the direction of this Congress.

If it’s a running tally, however, and not an immediate call to remove McCarthy, then that’s different. It sounds like this is more the case than a knee-jerk reaction to get rid of him at all costs. When there are more strikes against McCarthy, then that may trigger a more serious response. Ultimately, however, the deal is still not sitting right with conservatives, and for very good reasons.