WASHINGTON — Ralph Norman says he will not support leader Kevin McCarthy’s bid to become speaker without firm assurances that House Republicans will enact spending cuts and move to balance the federal budget. The Republican from South Carolina isn’t optimistic that he will get there, adding in an interview that McCarthy doesn’t have “a track record of being a fiscal conservative able to tackle the issues we have here.”

Scott Perry is pushing for procedural changes and immediate votes on issues such as term limits that he says will help to fix a “completely broken” Washington. This is not, the Republican from Pennsylvania has insisted, about “personalities. It’s about the policies that come out of here.”

But for lawmakers Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Matt Gaetz of Florida, it’s personal. They said McCarthy is a product of the establishment Washington that needs to be excised. Boebert said she feels that McCarthy cannot be trusted and said that there is nothing McCarthy could do to win her over. On Wednesday evening, as the House sat adjourned as negotiations happened behind closed doors, Gaetz called McCarthy “a desperate guy” and said, “I’m ready to vote all night, all week, all month and never for that person.”

Republican Reps.-elect Bob Good, Va., Lauren Boebert, Colo., and Matt Gaetz, Fla., talk on the House floor on Wednesday, the second day of the 118th Congress. Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post

These hard-right House Republicans belong to a group of 20 that for three straight days has stood between McCarthy and the speaker’s gavel. The impasse has ground the new Congress to a halt and exposed extraordinary divisions within GOP ranks. It has left open the question of who will lead the new and narrow Republican majority and what it will be able to accomplish if it continues to be plagued by such fierce infighting.

Overnight Wednesday into Thursday, McCarthy made concessions to the group that he’d previously rejected, offering to lower from five to one the threshold of members required to sponsor a resolution to force a vote to oust the speaker, seat more members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus on the powerful Rules Committee, which dictates what legislation and amendments are debated on the floor, and allow votes on term limits for members of Congress. But the 20 remained steadfast in their opposition to McCarthy as voting continued Thursday.

“We’re working on it,” McCarthy said as he headed back to the floor for the House’s ninth round of voting.

Many members of the anti-McCarthy faction met for several hours Thursday morning at a conservative nonprofit organization away from Capitol Hill, almost all leaving afterward without saying a word. But Bob Good of Virginia emerged defiant in his opposition.

“You don’t ever have to ask me again if I’m a no,” he said “I will never vote for Kevin McCarthy.”

A review of the comments and statements from the members and their aides show the GOP holdouts have made a broad range of demands that have been vague at times, making it difficult to resolve and negotiate disagreements and adding to the chaos and confusion of the first days of the new House Republican majority. Critics, including more-moderate Republican members, have accused them of being inconsistent and unclear about what they want.

McCarthy allies grew increasingly frustrated Wednesday as the 20 holdouts refused to budge, with one member earlier in the week referring to them as the “Taliban 20” and others questioning their motives.

“They want to pull the pins on the grenades and lock the doors,” Dan Crenshaw of Texas said of the defectors. “They need to be men and adults and say what they want, instead of playing these little games; that’s what we’re asking.”

He added, “I’m tired of your stupid platitudes that some consultant told you to say on the campaign trail, all right. Behind closed doors, tell us what you actually want, or shut the f— up.”

The group is ideologically aligned, with 19 members part of the House Freedom Caucus, a group of hard-line Republicans that was created eight years ago, born out of the tea party movement that challenged the GOP establishment and sought to disrupt Washington. All but two of the 20 baselessly denied the results of the 2020 presidential election, and 14 of them voted not to certify Joe Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021.

Some of the McCarthy critics played a role in unsuccessful efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. Perry was actively engaged with the White House in the move to decertify Biden’s electoral college votes, and the FBI seized his phone as part of its investigation into the use of fake electors to try to overturn Biden’s victory.

Andrew Clyde of Georgia, another McCarthy defector, said during a May 2021 hearing examining security lapses during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob that the rioters resembled a “normal tourist visit.”

Most of McCarthy’s foes hail from deeply conservative districts and won their elections handily, although Boebert held her seat by just over 500 votes in a surprisingly close race. Five are newly elected freshman Republicans who, because of the speakership stalemate, are still waiting to be sworn in for the first time.

Some of the hard-right members started voicing dissatisfaction with McCarthy last year. On New Year’s Day, nine Republicans signed a letter opposing McCarthy. “The times call for radical departure from the status quo – not a continuation of past, and ongoing, Republican failures,” read the letter, posted on Twitter by Perry.

A group of 19 rejected McCarthy in two consecutive votes Tuesday. During the third round of voting, Byron Donalds of Florida joined the defectors. They all voted for Jim Jordan of Ohio, a founding Freedom Caucus member, although Jordan has voiced support for McCarthy.

On Wednesday, the 20 coalesced around Donalds, one of two Black Republicans in the House, to challenge McCarthy’s bid. After multiple rounds of votes, the only change was that a 21st member, Victoria Spartz of Indiana, switched her vote to “present” in protest of the process but said she would support McCarthy if he secured enough votes.

When reporters asked Donalds, who had voted for himself, whether he wanted to be speaker, he said, “No, not really.”

On Thursday, Donalds continued to receive votes from most of the 20 anti-McCarthy crowd, but Boebert and Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma shifted their support to Kevin Hern, also of Oklahoma.

“We aren’t gaining any momentum with Donalds,” Boebert said in an interview. “We need a true consensus candidate that can unite the Republican Party.”

Gaetz also switched his vote, nominating former president Donald Trump as his pick to be speaker.

Although most of the 20 were endorsed by Trump in 2022 and align themselves with his MAGA movement, they were unmoved when Trump weighed in on social media with a tepid endorsement of McCarthy on Wednesday morning. “Sad!” Gaetz said in a statement to Fox News, adding that Trump’s opinion “changes neither my view of McCarthy nor Trump nor my vote.”

“We love Mr. Trump, but we also appreciate the moment. We also appreciate that Mr. McCarthy has a history that has been off-putting to some, and we don’t think he’s the guy,” said Arizona Republican Andy Biggs, who had originally offered himself as an alternative to McCarthy. “He’s just not the guy.”

Biggs sent out a fundraising appeal on Tuesday, asking supporters to make a donation to his campaign if they “agree a CONSERVATIVE should lead us in Washington. . . not another RINO Establishment hack like McCarthy.” A link to a donation page says, “BREAK THE ESTABLISHMENT ONCE AND FOR ALL. EVERY DOLLAR HELPS SECURE THE SPEAKER POSITION.”

On Thursday morning he tweeted, “Hold the line!”

Tom Cole of Oklahoma, who supports McCarthy, said that there have been constant conversations between different groups of people trying to reach a deal for the past several days but that it’s been hard to determine exactly what the 20 naysayers want other than to prevent McCarthy from becoming speaker.

“I don’t see a lot of policy differences here. Clearly, we’ve got 20 people who don’t trust the current leader. We’ve got a lot of other members that are losing their trust in those 20 members,” Cole said. “And so that’s a personal problem, but it’s not a political or a policy one.”

A common complaint from the 20 was McCarthy’s failure to engage with them over the summer, when many in the party thought the GOP would retake the House by larger margins than it did in the midterms. Instead, the GOP’s narrow hold on the majority meant that to get to the 218 needed to win the speaker job if all members voted for a candidate, McCarthy could afford to lose only four votes.

“He thought it was going to be a red wave; he didn’t need us. That’s not good faith,” Norman said.

After the sixth round of voting resulted in no change Wednesday, the House adjourned for several hours. Several McCarthy allies and foes gathered in an office to continue discussions. “Of course we’ll get to 218,” Chip Roy of Texas said before heading into the meeting. “We just have to find the right person.”

Roy, one of the holdouts, has been deeply involved in the negotiations, pushing to decentralize power and ensure dissenters have more influence over legislation and debate.

“It’s all about the ability in the empowering us to stop the machine in this town from doing what it does. Exhibit A was the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill. It’s absolutely absurd. That bill is just exactly what is wrong with this place,” Roy told reporters, referring to a spending package to fund the federal government that passed last month.

The Washington Post’s Paul Kane, Marianna Sotomayor, Liz Goodwin and Jacqueline Alemany contributed to this report.