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A week after House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy gambled he could unify his caucus by ousting a prominent critic of former President Donald Trump, a new Trump-inspired rift has raised questions about his leadership.

Thirty-five Republican representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives - or one out of every six - joined the 219 majority Democrats in voting to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot, when hundreds of Trump supporters stormed the building, fighting with police and leaving five people dead.

That was more than three times as many Republicans as voted in January to hold Trump's second impeachment trial, on a charge of inciting insurrection.

The vote followed a series of gyrations in which McCarthy gave Representative John Katko the go-ahead to negotiate the bipartisan deal, then rejected it after it became public and tried to persuade his fellow Republicans to vote against it.

The vote would appear to weaken McCarthy, a California lawmaker who hopes to become speaker of the 435-member House if his party can assemble a majority with just five more seats in the November 2022 congressional election.

Loyal to Trump, McCarthy, 56, with 14 years in Washington, last week led his party in ousting Representative Liz Cheney from a House leadership role for denouncing Trump's false claim his election defeat was the result of fraud.

"Representative McCarthy may have put his own ambition above loyalty to our Constitution," said party strategist Kevin Kellems. "It eventually will harm him and his followers."

McCarthy himself denied any loss to his leadership. When asked where the Cheney ouster and commission vote left him, he said: "Just stronger."

He told reporters that he had expected a larger number of Republicans to break ranks.

Several Republicans who spoke on condition of anonymity said they had not expected a commission deal that would reach the House floor.

Some lamented that the deal between Katko and Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Democrat, had not been put to a party conference vote before a final agreement.

"It would have been good for us to have voted on it," Representative Thomas Massie, a staunch conservative, said without mentioning McCarthy.

Republican hopes of blocking the bipartisan commission now rest with McCarthy's Senate counterpart, Mitch McConnell, who has also come out against it. McConnell has the easier job, as that 100-member chamber's rules require 60 votes to advance most legislation, meaning 10 Senate Republicans would have to break with their party to pass it.

U.S. President Donald Trump, flanked by House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), participates in a roundtable discussion about trade in Duluth, Minnesota, U.S. June 20, 2018. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

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Republicans worry the commission would keep public attention on the violence that played out in the Capitol after a fiery speech by Trump filled with falsehoods, and could reveal new details about Trump's handling of the response that might sour voters on Republicans.

EYES ON SPEAKER'S GAVEL

With a Democrat in the White House, history favors Republican chances of breaking Democrats' 219-211 majority in the House in the 2022 midterm election.

McCarthy, who has spent a decade in the upper echelon of House Republican leadership, has been sharply criticized for voting to block Democratic President Joe Biden's election, reversing course after saying Trump bore responsibility for the Capitol attack and visiting the former president at his Florida resort in a move seen as helping to rehabilitate Trump's image in the aftermath of the violence.

He justified the ouster of Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, as an effort to forge party unity.

Multiple Republicans defended McCarthy's position.

"Kevin puts the team first. This is a difficult and stressful time. I think he's making the best decisions that anyone could make in a super-charged atmosphere," said Representative Tom Cole.

But Republicans who oppose Trump criticized the action, saying it cemented the former president's hold over the caucus.

They voiced concern that the vote could undermine hopes of capturing the House majority in 2022, if it leads Trump-inspired primary challengers to unseat incumbents in swing districts where many voters dislike the former president.

Republicans who voted for the commission included lawmakers such as Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, who won a contested election by just six votes, and Don Bacon, whose Nebraska district chose Biden over Trump in November by 52% to 46%.

"What it really boils down to is how President Trump is going to react to Republicans supporting this measure," said Republican strategist Ron Bonjean. "If they don't show Trump that they're against this, there's potentially going to be issues for many Republicans in their primaries."

Trump in a Thursday statement lashed out at what he called "35 wayward Republicans."

Sometimes there are consequences to being ineffective and weak, Trump said. The voters understand!

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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House Republican votes for U.S. Capitol riot plan a blow to Kevin McCarthy - Reuters

Millions of unemployed workers face hardship after a wave of Republican governors announced they will seek to cancel federal extended unemployment benefits of $300 a week in response to claims from the restaurant, food service and hospitality industries that they are experiencing difficulties in hiring workers.

At least 22 Republican-led states have announced plans to cancel the extended benefits, including Montana, South Carolina, Alabama, Iowa, Idaho, Missouri, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Indiana, New Hampshire, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Ohio, Utah, Alaska, Georgia, West Virginia, Texas and Arizona.

The cancellations will affect more than 3.6 million workers currently relying on unemployment benefits by either wiping out or severely cutting their pay.

The American Rescue Plan signed by Joe Biden authorized federal pandemic unemployment benefits until 6 September, but these states are opting to end benefits early, beginning in June.

Nequia Nichole Fugate worked in childcare in Jefferson county, Tennessee, before the coronavirus shutdowns hit last March. She has relied on pandemic unemployment assistance as the parents she provided childcare for cannot afford childcare services at the moment.

Im really anxious and in a panic since the announcement from the governor. I cant believe this would happen during a pandemic, these benefits were the only thing helping me get by, said Fugate.

She added: Im going to be without a phone, a car, gas, groceries and money to pay for my medication. Im currently in between housing as well. Everyone has just been surviving the best they can. A majority of us dont have medical insurance, let alone a safety net of savings to fall back on. Stimulus checks have been spent on necessities, funds are lower than when the pandemic started. The struggle is real out here.

Republicans have blamed the perceived labor shortages on unemployment benefits, despite economists dismissing the benefits as a driving factor, with data showing labor shortages are confined to the leisure and hospitality sector and show no signs of spilling over to other industries or reducing growth within the leisure and hospitality sector, according to a recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

Based on the most recent job opening data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there remains a significant job deficit in several industries such as construction, arts, entertainment and recreation, with two unemployed workers for every one job opening.

Many Americans still relying on unemployment benefits are facing issues with coronavirus safety protections, lack of paid sick leave, long delays and backlogs from broken unemployment systems, a lack of jobs in their industries, and scarce childcare options.

I have a child who needs help with schooling, a mother I am taking care of with heart conditions, and also pure anxiety about getting sick, said Mary Lanier, a former restaurant manager in Charleston, South Carolina, who moved to Pennsylvania to take care of her mother during the pandemic after losing her job, but now faces losing federal extended unemployment benefits.

Jessica Calvedt worked for a grocery retail store in Waterloo, Iowa, but was terminated along with her boyfriend for taking two weeks of leave due to contracting Covid-19 in March. It took over a month for their unemployment benefits to begin, and her boyfriend still hasnt received back pay for the missed weeks.

Weve been applying and going to interviews almost daily, and still havent found a job, said Calvedt. The impact of not having those federal unemployment benefits is causing so much stress due to bills stacking up and medical issues Ive been having since I got Covid. I was depending on those funds to live and now Im worried about becoming homeless and losing everything.

Several unemployed workers in states where federal extended unemployment benefits are scheduled to be cancelled in a few weeks have circulated online petitions calling for their governors to rescind their decisions.

Senator Bernie Sanders wrote a letter to the Department of Labor to ensure federal benefits are delivered to the jobless in states where governors have announced plans to cancel them, citing federal requirements under the Cares Act.

Organizations such as the National Employment Law Project are calling on the Biden administration to ensure federal benefits are paid out to all eligible workers in every state, as many workers are relying on unemployment benefits as a lifeline as they are not able to return to work or have the opportunity to do so.

Jen Kennedy of Clinton, Iowa, a single, self-employed mother, hasnt been able to return to working in sales because the programs for her daughter with Downs syndrome have been shut down throughout the pandemic.

I cannot leave my daughter home alone. What the heck am I supposed to do now? We will lose everything, said Kennedy.

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Millions of unemployed in US face hardship under Republican benefit cuts - The Guardian

To the Editor:

Re Elise Stefanik Is Playing a Dangerous Game With Her Career, by Elizabeth Benjamin (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, May 14):

By elevating Elise Stefanik to a high post, the Republican Party is trying to move forward by having the party not focus on whether it is pro- or anti-Trump, but rather on what it needs to do to defeat enough Democrats to flip the House and get rid of Nancy Pelosi as speaker.

Ms. Stefanik has proved herself to be not only a remarkable fund-raiser for Republican candidates, but also someone who can organize campaigns and get Republicans elected. Although Liz Cheney was a loyal conservative, she kept dwelling on the past and was tearing the party apart a very counterproductive move. That the Democrats fear a reinvigorated Republican Party is only too evident in the spate of nasty and critical articles that have come out against Ms. Stefanik.

I never thought I would hear the liberal media praising the likes of Liz Cheney, the archconservative from Wyoming, but lo and behold, she gets accolades on a regular basis now as they are desperate to denounce the Republican rising star, Elise Stefanik.

Mary SykesRye, N.Y.

To the Editor:

Re G.O.P. Replaces a Trump Critic With a Trump Convert (news article, May 15):

I am a moderate Republican who has traditionally voted for my partys line of candidates. I now fear that our party is in trouble. With the removal of Liz Cheney our party has shown that it cares more for the hard right of Republican voters than it does for the truth. This is going to disenfranchise a substantial number of traditional Republican voters like me.

I cannot support a party that feels that it must curry favor with a past president for fear of losing the support of his radical legions. Our party will lose the midterm elections when moderate conservative voters either cross over and vote for Democrats or, what is more likely, simply dont vote.

In every candidate debate in the coming elections, I expect that Republicans are going to be asked, Do you believe that the election was stolen from Donald Trump? Our former president must announce not only that he legitimately lost, but also that he is no longer considering returning to the political arena.

Donald Trump, this is your chance to do the right thing and save our party. Please get the big lie behind us.

Michael D. GreenbaumParadise Valley, Ariz.

To the Editor:

The coverage of Elise Stefaniks elevation to the House Republican caucuss leadership has focused on her support for President Trump, but we must not ignore a very important point. Ms. Stefanik has a 44 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, one of the lowest among Republicans in the House. In other words, she is not a dogmatic ideologue.

This is a good thing, because the American people want bipartisanship in Washington, and that will never happen if ideologues rule the day. If the Democrats would follow suit and put a moderate in their leadership, maybe some good things would follow.

Rob GrienWest Stockbridge, Mass.

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Opinion | The Rise of Elise Stefanik in the Republican Ranks - The New York Times

Somehow, after everything, there remain creatures in Washington, D.C. obsessed with bipartisan compromise. One of our two major political parties has lined up in opposition to renewing what's left of the Voting Rights Act, which swept through Congress on a strong bipartisan basis in the Bush years, when it actually still had some teeth. The same party's Arizona affiliate is engaged in a circus "audit" of that state's election results because they didn't like who won. They've also responded to the 2020 election, which many Republicans continue to Just Ask Questions about, by passing hundreds of restrictive voter laws in state legislatures across the country. Through this and gerrymandering and court-packing and the undemocratic features of the Senate and the Electoral College, the party has devoted itself, root and branch, to clinging to power without crafting an agenda that actually appeals to a majority of citizens.

But even beyond any of that, they just submarined their own shared Bipartisan Bill to establish a commission to look into an attack on their own place of work earlier this year. If a mob broke into your company's offices and ransacked the place, chanting that they wanted to hang the vice president of the firm, would the VP's putative friendsand brother!shut down an inquiry into what happened? This is not normal behavior, and it's not the behavior of an organization whose members can be reasoned with. (As David Freedlander pointed out, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy used to back a Commission as a desperate escape from impeaching Donald Trump for his crimes against the republic. Now he's against this, too. It's almost like he's not actually interested in any kind of accountability.) There will be no Bipartisan Compromise so long as the Republican Party clings to the increasingly kaleidoscopic fever dreams blasting out of the right-wing infotainment vortex. As my colleague, Charles P. Pierce, wrote, the Democrats will need to go it alone on a January 6 commission. In truth, they'll have to go it alone on everything.

Drew AngererGetty Images

This ought to have been obvious before. In the Senate, Mitch McConnell has proven to be the most cynical operator that Washington, D.C. has seen in some time, and that's saying something. McCarthy, in the House, is as craven as he is dense. And the party has a track record, going back to the Obama years, of demanding bipartisan consultation, extracting concessions and watering down bills, then voting against them anyway. This is what happened with the January 6 commission: Republicans got pretty much everything they wanted, and they still shut it down. They will do the same with the American Jobs Plan. As Catherine Rampell brilliantly laid out in the Washington Post, the initial lowball counterproposal they offered was actually vastly inflated. Their aim is to hack away at the bill, then vote against it. And you can probably forget about even that level of commitment to the American Families Plan. Josh Hawley might have some family-benefits proposals, and so might Mitt Romney on the party's other wing, but when it gets to crunch time, you can expect at least the former (and very possibly the latter) to vote against the plan and fist-pump at the faithful.

This is an American political ecosystem where shame has ceased to function as a social force and, in fact, shamelessness has become a political superpower. To survive and thrive in the entirely degraded post-Trump Republican Partythe culmination of 40-plus years of self-replicating insanityyou cannot have any compunction about lying your ass off and acting in continual, ceaseless bad faith. There are people in this party who voted against the American Rescue Plan and then went bragging to their constituents about all the relief they'd brought home. Flip-flopping is pass. You now have to be able to juggle multiple contradictory positions at once. John Katko made the mistake Wednesday of thinking any principleeven that an attack on their own workplace should be investigated by Congresswas durable enough to survive the gauntlet of self-serving nonsense. Democrats should do their own commission, and then they should do their own bills. This will require Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema coming back to reality, and seeing all of the above for it is before signing off on filibuster reform. You cannot negotiate with the void.

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Once More For the People in the Back: You Cannot Negotiate or Compromise With the Republican Party - Esquire

Michigan legislative Republican leaders and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said Thursday theyd reached an understanding on future pandemic-related orders, signaling a possible end to a stalemate thats complicated budget talks and held up billions of dollars worth of COVID-19 aid.

House Speaker Jason Wentworth, R-Clare, and Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, R-Clarklake, said in separate statements issued late Thursday afternoon that theyd reached an agreement with the governor to work on a plan to include the Legislature in future pandemic-related orders. They also said the governor agreed to end an effort to make COVID-19 workplace rules permanent.

In exchange, Wentworth and Shirkey said Whitmers administration will be looped into ongoing budget negotiations.

Both the House and Senate last week passed initial plans for the budget year that begins Oct. 2, although neither plan was negotiated with the administration. On Friday, financial experts in the House, Senate, and state Department of Treasury are expected to announce a multibillion-dollar increase to previous state revenue projections, and the state still has billions of dollars available in federal funding to allocate from the CARES Act and the American Rescue Act.

Related: Despite pandemic, Michigan projected to see multibillion-dollar budget surplus

Ive consistently said I believe the budget process is better with the governor involved, and the states pandemic management is better with the Legislature involved, Wentworth said. The critical issues facing our state are simply too big and are hurting too many people for us to waste any more time. The people we represent are tired of disagreement and just want results. This agreement is a good first step in getting us to that point.

Whitmer said in a statement the agreement shows how we can unite around investing in our schools, small businesses, and communities to help them thrive.

I look forward to working with the legislature to invest the billions in federal resources sent to us by both the Trump and Biden administrations and pass a budget that makes lasting investments in our shared priorities, she continued.

The Republican-led Legislature and the Whitmer administration have been at odds for months over the states handling of COVID-19, particularly when it came to mask-wearing requirements and restrictions on in-person business or events.

A key factor in the apparent thaw was an agreement from Whitmer to end an effort to make permanent workplace COVID-19 rules, enforced through the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Shirkey called the proposed permanent MIOSHA rules a foolish political game that should have ended the minute the CDC updated its guidelines and said he considered the decision to pull back a good faith gesture that she is willing to work with the Legislature.

A news release from the governors office stated rising vaccination rates, falling case numbers and recent updates from the CDC indicate permanent rules will no longer be necessary. MIOSHA will also remove the requirement that employers create a policy prohibiting in-person work for employees to the extent that their work activities can feasibly be completed remotely and update emergency rules to reflect recent guidance from the CDC and MDHHS.

Related: Michigan to lift outdoor COVID-19 restrictions June 1, indoor capacity limits July 1

The news comes hours after Whitmer announced a new timeline for the state to lift COVID-19 restrictions on businesses by July 1, a shift from her initial plan to lift remaining restrictions on a timeline based on vaccination rates.

Beginning Tuesday, June 1, all outdoor capacity limits will be removed, including at sporting events. Indoor settings, including event spaces, gyms and casinos, will increase capacity from 30% to 50%, while other indoor settings already at 50% will stay there for another month. Then on July 1, all broad restrictions will be lifted.

Michigan pivoted its mask mandate on May 15 to require face coverings indoors for only individuals who arent fully vaccinated, following CDC recommendations that fully vaccinated individuals no longer need to wear a mask indoors in most situations. However, businesses and other venues can still require all staff and visitors to wear masks, and people who arent fully vaccinated are required to wear a mask indoors until July 1.

As of Wednesday, May 19, Michigan had administered nearly 7.9 million doses of the Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines. About 56.8% of the 16 and older population has gotten a first dose, or about 4.6 million residents, and more than 3.7 million residents are fully vaccinated.

COVID-19 cases have declined for five weeks in Michigan, and hospitalizations are down for three weeks. Over the last seven days, the state has averaged 1,435 cases and 55 deaths per day. A month ago, Michigan averaged more than 6,000 cases and 57 deaths per day.

Vaccine appointments, including walk-ins, are available through local health departments, pharmacies and health care providers across the state. For more information, visit the states COVID-19 vaccine website.

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Republican lawmakers agree to negotiate budget, pandemic-related orders with Whitmer - MLive.com