Qevin's GQP - Time to create some chaos!
Inflation has calmed, the stock market is at its highest since 2021, illegal border crossings are down, unemployment remains at its lowest in decades, and GDP growth just came in better than expected.
So McCarthy and company must do something to stop this continued progress.
This is where the House Freedom Caucus comes in.
Members of the group of far-right Republican lawmakers gathered this week to outline their priorities for the House when it returns in September from its six-week recess. Their agenda can be summarized roughly as follows:
The first order of business is to shut down the federal government. The second order of business is to impeach President Biden — on charges TBD.
“We don’t fear a government shutdown,” proclaimed Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), who convened this past week’s Freedom Caucus news conference. Why not? “Most of what we do up here is bad anyway,” reasoned Good, and “most of the American people won’t even miss [it] if the government is shut down temporarily.” (Good, notably, wasn’t in Congress for any of the previous shutdowns.)
Specifically, members of the Freedom Caucus demanded that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy renege on the bipartisan budget-and-debt-ceiling deal he agreed to with Biden about two months ago. Instead, they insisted on cutting 2024 spending by an additional $200 billion or so — and McCarthy, as usual, appears to be surrendering to their demands. The speaker also acceded to the extremists’ insistence on adding an apothecary full of poison-pill amendments to the 2024 spending bills, blocking abortion access, LGBTQ+ rights and efforts to promote racial diversity.
McCarthy’s latest surrender to the Freedom Caucus puts House Republicans on a seemingly inevitable collision course not just with Biden, who has promised to veto the bills, but also with their fellow Republicans in the Senate, who want to set spending above the debt ceiling deal so that the military gets more funds.
On Thursday, the Senate Appropriations Committee completed passage of all 12 annual spending bills in overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion. In the House, by contrast, McCarthy’s attempts to placate the far right have turned the spending bills into partisan slugfests that even some Republicans can’t stomach; the House quit town a day early for its August recess, on Thursday, after failing to drum up enough GOP votes to pass one of its poison-pill-engorged bills.
The Freedom Caucus, cause of this chaos, is perfectly happy to shut down the government when the current fiscal year ends on Sept. 30. “We’re going to pass a good Republican bill out of the House and force the Senate and the White House to accept it or we’re not going to move forward,” Good argued. “We ought to use the leverage, if necessary, to force a government shutdown.”
This would likely mean national parks closed, airports snarled, food-safety inspections suspended, Social Security applications on hold, hundreds of thousands of federal workers furloughed, calls to the IRS unanswered, and courts, medical research, passports, small business loans, farm assistance and immigration proceedings all slowed. Then there’s the chance the shutdown would throw the economy into recession.
Good and his colleagues have a high pain tolerance. Though the heat has been oppressive in the capital, the six of them chose to hold their news conference outdoors, under a broiling midday sun. “Anybody got a sweater I can borrow?” joked Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.). But that was nothing compared with the hurt they are poised to inflict on the American public.
hat will all those furloughed federal workers do during the shutdown? And what about all those Americans who won’t be able to catch flights, run their businesses or visit national parks?
Luckily for them, the Freedom Caucus has a solution. They can all watch President Biden’s impeachment.
Various hard-liners clamored for impeachment. The Freedom Caucus’s Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) even brought it to the House floor. And (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) McCarthy surrendered. “This is rising to the level of impeachment inquiry,” McCarthy told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Monday, vowing to “follow this all the way to the end and this is going to rise to an impeachment inquiry.”
At the Freedom Caucus news conference, lawmakers exulted in McCarthy’s latest capitulation. Good said McCarthy’s statement to Hannity “has caused a paradigm shift.”
“The Biden regime is coming to an end!” said Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.).
There are still some wrinkles to be worked out, such as which high crime or misdemeanor Biden supposedly committed. Even those who level unsubstantiated charges of “bribery” against Biden’s kin admit they don’t have the goods on the president. “The only thing missing is direct evidence that Joe Biden knew and participated in these bribery schemes,” Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) admitted at a meeting of the House Oversight Committee last week.
To fish for any evidence (and to placate those few Republicans who are squeamish about impeaching Biden without any evidence), McCarthy told colleagues at their caucus meeting this week that the promised “impeachment inquiry” will be preceded by an impeachment “investigation.” McCarthy ally Don Bacon (R-Neb.), leaving the caucus meeting, explained this distinction-without-a-difference to a group of us. “We’re not ready for an inquiry,” he said. “We’re doing an investigation.”
No Intestinal Fortitude To Be Found:
A few Republicans object to their colleagues’ desire to “impeach everyone under the sun,” as Rep. Tony Gonzales (Tex.) put it.
Maybe sensible Republicans such as Bacon and Gonzales will finally push back against the extremists who are holding McCarthy hostage. Maybe they’ll reject Biden’s impeachment and oppose their colleagues’ pell-mell rush to shut down the government.
More likely they’ll do what they’ve always done in the past when hard-liners hijacked the House. Nothing.
