House Speaker John Boehner’s surprise resignation Friday will not necessarily help House conservatives pass their agenda, but it will enable Boehner to garner the Democrat votes he needs to pass legislation that is deeply unpopular with the Republican base, House conservatives told the Washington Examiner.
In a Friday meeting, Boehner told loyalists that he wants to move a transportation bill, Ex-Im Bank legislation, and maybe a “broader budget deal” before he leaves, according to media reports.
Spending bills that are usually ignored by the press until just before Christmas have received deeper scrutiny this year, thanks in part to the ascendancy of outsider presidential candidates and media reports. Those reports put pressure on GOP members who were previously happy to pass budget-busting continuing resolutions.
Many of them, like Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., who ousted House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a 2014 primary, had promised voters to do something about the $500 billion dollar deficits, $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities and $19 trillion in debt, he told the Examiner.
The “true tension” over Boehner’s leadership was not due to pressure from the 40-odd member of the House Freedom Caucus, Brat said, but instead “the result of being at the losing end of opinion with the American people.”
“The American people are finally seeing what’s happening with this tricky budget process,” Brat told the Examiner.
The plan to “break the budget caps … and to bypass the entire budget process” had already been underway “for four or five months,” said Brat, a member of the House budget committee. “That is the key point,” he said, adding that earlier this year, they’d finished work on a budget that balanced in 10 years, but the GOP started passing spending bills that ignored the budget they’d passed.
Boehner will likely receive 100 to 150 Democrat votes to pass a clean continuing resolution (CR) next week, which would have caused around 100 Republicans to pressure for the passage of Rep. Mark Meadows’ “Vacate the Chair” motion, had he not resigned Friday, said Brat.
“Ordinarily the American people aren’t paying attention and ordinarily you don’t have four presidential outsiders that are going to be commenting on and publicizing this budget process to the American people,” Brat told the Examiner. “So normally, you can just hide all this [and] Politico blames it on conservatives. Well that’s just nonsense; it’s not true; and I expect the press to be ethical.”
He said that he experienced first-hand the traditional “circus … [that] blows up every week before Christmas” last year when Cantor unexpectedly resigned.
“I was there last time on the CRomnibus — 800 pages to read in 2 days, and I saw the logic there very clearly, and I said it in townhalls ever since,” said Brat, who said he’d anticipated the “exact same thing happening this year, and low and behold, it’s happening again.”
“To get members to bust the budget caps, they have to threaten a Christmas-vacation shutdown for members of Congress,” said Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., who was removed from the Rules committee last year after opposing Boehner. “Heaven help the speaker who replaces John Boehner and goes along with that charade.”
Reports that members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, of which Brat is a member, are responsible for Boehner’s downfall are part of “a false narrative,” he said, adding that the 30 or so votes of the Freedom caucus “aren’t going to bring down the Speaker … [that only happens] when you start getting near 100 or 150 who can no longer vote for a budget.”
GOP leadership likes the “false narrative” that the Freedom Caucus is responsible “because they don’t want to own the budget process,” said Brat. On Wednesday “you’ll get a bigger sense of what was really in play and what may have led to the speaker stepping down … [because there are] a large number of folks that cannot go along with” the budget-busting process.
Conservatives have repeatedly cautioned that a change in leadership will not necessarily help them.
“A simple reshuffling of leadership doesn’t help our party or regular Americans,” Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., also a member of the caucus, told the Examiner. He cautioned last week, before Boehner’s resignation, that “it’s possible that someone within current leadership makes a move.”
Boehner’s resignation should boost the chances of Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who is heavily favored by the GOP.
In response to reports that Boehner will use his remaining time to pass deeply unpopular bills, Amash tweeted Saturday: “Any member of GOP leadership who facilitates more deficit spending or corporate welfare must be held accountable.”
“What we don’t want to do now is reshuffle the deck chairs on the Titanic while it’s going down,” said Brat. “We have to stick to the principles that we name and articulate out in public and give to the people … Are we following [our] principles, or … are we looking out for K Street and the big check writers and following some other agenda?”
