House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) once again failed to advance his party’s own short-term spending package after 21 hard-line Republicans broke ranks and voted with Democrats to tank the effort, just over a day before a government shutdown.
It was just the latest setback for McCarthy as he repeatedly tries—and fails—to tame the far-right in his caucus as they hold the party hostage and gear up for his removal.
With a shutdown imminent late Friday, McCarthy and his team were scrambling to gain support for a new short-term spending plan, with Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) claiming that several of the 21 holdouts would be more amenable to it, according to CNN.
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But things apparently got ugly in a closed meeting, with some House Republicans venting their frustrations at the holdouts, according to Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman, who quoted Rep. Greg Murphy as saying, “Instead of tweeting about how you dont [sic] like Republicans, come say it to our faces.”
The initial short-term spending plan would have kept the government open for 30 more days while imposing sweeping 30 percent cuts across hundreds of federal programs, crippling everything from federal safety net programs to NASA.
The symbolic bill—already dead on arrival in the Senate—was designed to build leverage in budget negotiations and present Republicans as having a unified front. Instead, it served as a bitter reminder of the all-out civil war among House Republicans and of McCarthy’s inability to rally consensus among his caucus.
McCarthy’s misfortune may turn into a win for the bipartisan Senate plan advanced earlier this week which would avoid such cuts and also include funding for Ukraine to the ire of far-right Republicans.
Earlier on Friday, McCarthy bristled at the idea of taking up the Senate’s package, likening the move to a “surrender to the liberals.”
“Why do you assume when the Senate has done nothing and the House continues to act, that I should do what the Senate does?” McCarthy huffed.
Now the speaker finds himself in an increasingly precarious position as he repeatedly fails to pass even party-line spending packages and faces mounting impatience from senators on both sides of the aisle, as well as politically vulnerable moderate House Republicans.
Some House Dems have extended an olive branch to moderate Republicans, suggesting that only six would need to break ranks with McCarthy to force a vote on a more moderate budget resolution that would put an end to the upcoming shutdown.
“These so-called moderate members of the Republican conference have been missing in action,” Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) said to reporters Friday. “There is a vehicle that is in front of us right now to come together with the Democratic members of the House to avoid a catastrophic government shutdown.”
It’s unlikely for such Republicans to break ranks and hand Democrats what could be viewed as a win, but the pressure is ratcheting up on members to avert a lengthy shutdown.
“I am really concerned that we're going to lapse and go into a shutdown,” leadership ally Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN) said, according to Politico. “We’ll take our votes, and then we'll just sit down and try to work things out.”
It remains to be seen how McCarthy may adjust his strategy after the string of defeats, as talk of cutting a deal with House Democrats ramps up and the question looms of how Republicans plan to dig themselves out of the shutdown of their own making.
Read it at POLITICO
