At a press conference Tuesday morning, House Republican leaders criticized their Democrat counterparts as being irresponsible for not backing the continuing resolution to fund the federal government through the end of the current fiscal year.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., told reporters, “We [Republicans] have a responsibility to deliver for the American people, and we’re going to do it, with or without the Democrat Party.”
Scalise argued that congressional Democrats were being hypocritical if they voted to shut down the government and thereby furlough federal workers after criticizing the Republican Party for cutting the size of the federal workforce.
“You saw a lot of Democrats over the last few weeks show up at federal buildings with some federal employees who haven’t been able to find their federal headquarters to go to work for the last three years, using COVID as an excuse, but they showed up to protest, to rally against weeding out waste, fraud, and abuse in government,” Scalise said, adding:
But ironically, those same Democrats who claim to care about federal workers today, almost all of them will vote to furlough those federal workers that they claim to care about.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., pointed out that congressional Democrats had announced their opposition to the continuing resolution bill before even reading it. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., had released a press statement on Friday before the bill had been released opposing the continuing resolution.
“We filed the CR, the continuing resolution, on Saturday, and as was noted, they had already come out, panning the bill that literally had not yet been seen,” the speaker said.
Johnson also highlighted the Democrats’ flip-flop in favor of a government shutdown. “It’s a striking new posture for Democrats who have always said they’ve just been apoplectic
about the prospect of government shutdown,” he said.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., emphasized that the government shutdown would lead to unnecessary hardship for everyday Americans.
“Remember: A vote against our CR is a vote to shut down the government and strip resources from service members, veterans, vulnerable children, the elderly, and many more Americans,” Emmer reporters on Tuesday.
A surprising addition to the House leadership press conference was Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md., who chairs the conservative House Freedom Caucus. Historically, the Freedom Caucus has opposed continuing resolutions that are viewed as insufficiently fiscally conservative, but Harris struck a different tone.
“This is not your grandfather’s continuing resolution,” the physician congressman asserted.
The Maryland lawmaker told The Daily Signal that he thinks at least a few Democrats will ultimately break party ranks to pass the continuing resolution.
“The president will win the rhetoric on this, because the president has said repeatedly in the past week, ‘Let’s keep the government running.’ The Republicans, almost to a person, are going to vote to keep the government running, and it will be the Democrats who obviously stand in the way of that,” Harris said.
This article was originally published at www.dailysignal.com
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