The House minority leader backs his hard-liners’ threat to retaliate against any GOP senator who votes for the massive package if it passes.
The House minority leader backs his hard-liners’ threat to retaliate against any GOP senator who votes for the massive package if it passes.
C ongressional GOP leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are at odds over the 4,155-page, $1.7 trillion year-end omnibus spending bill that was released around 1:30 a.m on Tuesday.
McConnell announced support for the bill in Senate floor remarks later Tuesday. “The bipartisan government-funding bill that Senators Shelby and Leahy have finished negotiating does exactly the opposite of what the Biden administration first proposed,” he said. “This bill provides a substantial real-dollar increase to the defense baseline . . . and a substantial real-dollar cut to the non-defense, non-veterans baseline.”
With McConnell’s backing, the bill will very likely have enough GOP support in the Senate to overcome a filibuster. But it faces fierce opposition from members of the House Freedom Caucus, as well as House minority leader Kevin McCarthy.
A letter from 13 House Republicans released Monday night condemned the legislation, charging that, among other things, it failed to rein in runaway spending at a time of high inflation and to “stop Biden’s purposeful refusal to secure and defend our borders.” The letter also included an unusual threat:
We are obliged to inform you that if any omnibus passes in the remaining days of this Congress, we will oppose and whip opposition to any legislative priority of those senators who vote for this bill — including the Republican leader. We will oppose any rule, any consent request, suspension voice vote, or roll call vote of any such Senate bill, and will otherwise do everything in our power to thwart even the smallest legislative and policy efforts of those senators.
On Tuesday morning, McCarthy threw his support behind the letter-writers’ ultimatum:
Agreed. Except no need to whip—when I’m Speaker, their bills will be dead on arrival in the House if this nearly $2T monstrosity is allowed to move forward over our objections and the will of the American people. https://t.co/WCC477R4IM
— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) December 20, 2022
Of course, it’s not clear whether McCarthy would really follow through on the threat if he became speaker. (And make no mistake, that is very much still a matter of if rather than when; his embrace of the Freedom Caucus’s hard-line stance is another sign that he remains desperate to round up the votes he needs to win the post.) It’s also not entirely clear what the threat itself means. What counts as a “legislative priority” of GOP senators who vote for the omnibus bill is open to interpretation: If a bill is sponsored by Freedom Caucus members in the House and by Mitch McConnell in the Senate, is that a Freedom Caucus bill or a McConnell bill?
The Senate is scheduled to take its first procedural vote to begin debate on the omnibus bill Tuesday afternoon. Provided that motion gets the 60 votes it needs, the Senate should be on track to vote on the package’s final passage before the end of the week. As so often happens, Congress has waited until the last possible moment to pass the massive spending bill, thus compressing the process into the space of a few days — and many legislators aren’t happy about it.
“Does anyone know of anybody who can read 4,000 pages in less than 48 hours?” Representative Cliff Bentz (R., Ore.) wrote on Twitter Tuesday morning. “This is absolutely ridiculous in every way.”