Rep. Dan Crenshaw: The holdouts ‘didn’t know what they wanted’
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Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas followed Roy’s interview on CNN shortly afterward, noting that he and a majority of other Republicans were frustrated by the holdouts in the caucus who didn’t appear to know what they wanted to negotiate for.
“The reason the 200 were so upset was because we felt we had already come to the agreement that we have now. This was not new. We had this stuff,” Crenshaw told Tapper on Sunday. “Early on in that week before we had taken a single vote, in a conference with everyone there, Kevin McCarthy asked one of the leaders of this group, ‘What else do you want? Let’s make this work. What else do you want?’ And they couldn’t answer in that moment, and that was a real turning point for a lot of people.”
Crenshaw added: “That was what created all of that animosity throughout the week because it’s not as if we were fighting over something. It wasn’t as if we were trying to stop them from getting something they wanted. It’s that we didn’t know what they wanted.”
—CNN (@CNN) January 8, 2023
When Gaetz caved after over a dozen rounds of voting and marked himself as “present” instead of backing a different conservative, he allowed McCarthy to seize victory by lowering the number of votes needed to win. When asked why he changed his strategy, Gaetz said he “ran out of things I could even imagine to ask for.”
“There’s not as much disagreement as everyone thinks on how that rules package went by and what some of the new changes needed to be,” Crenshaw said. “The only thing I’ll disagree with this group on is it could have been done earlier. So that’s what justifies the animosity that occurred all week. It seemed very, very pointless.”
