Swing District Republicans & GOP Senators Are A Little Nervous
Next up for the House Freedom Caucus nihilists and fascists: a government shutdown to create the kind of chaos their leader thrives on and needs for his presidential campaign. One Virginia neo-Nazi, Bob Good, went so far as to boast “We shouldn’t fear a government shutdown. If we shut it down in order to try to bring fiscal stability and fiscal solvency, that will save the country from an economic and fiscal standpoint for our kids and grandkids.” One of his freshman class allies, Arizona fascist Eli Crane said he doesn’t care if the mainstream conservatives in the House GOP conference are angry; he accused them of all being corrupt. “The fact is that this place is like a big old grift and everybody’s in on it. If you’re not, you’re an outsider. Lots of people in this town won’t like you very much, and that’s okay. I didn’t come up here to be popular.” Ditto, said New York career criminal/drug dealer-bank-robber-turned-right-wing-Florida-congressman Byron Donalds: “I’m not afraid of shutdowns. American life doesn’t halt because government offices are closed … We have to be serious about spending.”
Early yesterday, Semafor’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig reported that the House extremists are fighting with the more mainstream conservative Republican senators over the budget. Because McCarthy is the weakest Speaker in the House and is at the mercy of a tiny handful of fanatics, the House is “writing budget bills for next year that on paper would spend almost $120 billion less than the amounts outlined in the debt ceiling deal Congress passed this month, setting the stage for another showdown with Democrats in the Senate and the White House that has already prompted speculation about a potential government shutdown in the fall. But Republicans on the Senate appropriations committee aren’t showing any interest in going along with the House’s effort.”
Conservative GOP Appropriators Susan Collins (R-ME) and John Kennedy (R-LA) don’t trust the fascists, their tactics or their abilities and vows resist them. They don’t want to be seen as welching on the deal they just made with Biden “I feel we struck an agreement that we will write to those numbers,” said West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito. Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski warned that the lower chamber’s efforts to lowball the debt deal could trip up Congress’s effort to reach an agreement on 12 separate budget bills, which lawmakers are attempting to do for the first time in 27 years. “It’s not going to be easy, given what we're seeing out of the House right now,” she said.
The Senate supported McCarthy’s efforts to avert a default— “a show of unity that gave Republicans more leeway in their fight with the White House”— but now that McCarthy is seen as pimping for the House Freedom Caucus’s nihilistic agenda (which plays so poorly with mainstream voters), the Senate is going its own way.
The fact that Senate Republicans are already distancing themselves from the House’s latest effort to cut the budget is yet another sign that the next chapter of Capitol Hill’s spending fight could look like a rehash of the debt limit brawl that sucked up so much oxygen in Washington the first half of the year.
House Republicans started that process by drafting what amounted to a messaging bill that stood little chance in the Democratic-led Senate. McCarthy and his top lieutenants then used them as a jumping off point to negotiate relatively mild compromise legislation that passed with heavy help from Democrats.
Already, some moderate Republicans are predicting a replay.
“We’ll produce conservative approps bills out of the House, but we’re in denial if we think the Senate or president won’t have a say,” Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska told Semafor. “It won’t be pretty, but we’ll eventually find a consensus bill and that will pass.”
Without backup from the Senate, Republicans in the lower chamber could find themselves with even less leverage in talks than last go-round, especially if they find themselves trying to make the public case for their position in the midst of a shutdown fight.
House hardliners say they aren’t particularly worried about their upper chamber colleagues, or the possibility of a government shutdown.
“I'm tired of ‘tomorrow we’ll cut.’ I'm tired of ‘the Senate won't pass it,’” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC). said earlier this week. “I'm not in the Senate, and today is a real day.”
Yesterday, Mike Lillis reported that the fascists from the Freedom Caucus like Andy Biggs, Matt Gaetz, Bob Good and Ken Buck are still whining that McCarthy and his team are “using budgetary ‘gimmicks’ to create the false impression that they’re cutting 2024 outlays back to 2022 levels, rather than adopting the fundamental budget changes to realize those reductions and rein in deficit spending over the long haul. The hard-liners are already threatening to oppose their own party’s spending bills when they hit the House floor later this year, undermining the Republicans’ leverage in the looming budget fight while heightening the chances of a government shutdown.
Don Bacon represents blue Omaha and its purple suburbs, a swing district that Biden won big against Trump. Trying to be seen as taking on the extremists in his own party— who he always winds up voting with in the end— he said “Republicans should not be standing for shutdown. We got to be honest, [the Houses’s appropriations bills are] not going to pass the Senate and the president. You’re going to get a compromise. I was talking with my Freedom Caucus friends yesterday and they’re so worried about getting an initial agreement in the House. That’s not going to be a problem. You guys will never agree to any compromise or any agreement with the Senate and the president.”
Republicans in swing districts like Bacon are in an unenviable situation. Trump and the MAGAts want a shutdown for political reasons. If swing district Republicans— especially vulnerable ones like Mike Lawler (R-NY), Brandon Williams (R-NY), John Duarte (R-CA), Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR), Anthony D’Esposito (R-NY), Tom Kean (R-NJ), Mike Garcia (R-CA), Marc Molinaro (R-NY), Michelle Steel (R-CA), etc— refuse to go along with the shutdown plans, they will lose GOP voters on their right flanks, especially if Trump starts screaming RINOs-- like he did yesterday...
On the other hand, independent and swing voters, who decide who wins and loses in these districts, have no interest in a government shutdown and if members who have tried to distinguish themselves from their own party’s extremists are seen to back the extremists on this, the center will have another reason to abandon them at the polls.