Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), currently the House Speaker, is embracing the possibility of a shutdown to much of the federal government in the expected event that Congress fails to assemble the necessary funding.
During a recent interview on CNBC, he told the host: “If we have to play into overtime to get it right, I will do just that,” though that description just isn’t how the situation actually works. There’s no “overtime” after which roughly the same result can be reached, because the longer that the government is shut down, the more that the pay for troops and other federal personnel could be indefinitely upended.
“Hey genius — this isn’t a game,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) commented on X (formerly Twitter) after McCarthy’s interview. “There’s no overtime. The troops get paid or they don’t. Cops get paid or they don’t. Border agents get paid or they don’t. For once in your life just put the jobs of others over your own.”
The House has approved several spending bills, but these measures are unlikely to pass the Senate in their current form, and with House Republicans sticking so closely to their extremist policy agenda in many areas, what exactly is the path forward here? The Senate already prepared and advanced a bipartisan framework that extends prior approvals for government funding on a short-term basis. And as that measure recently stood, McCarthy was refusing to even take it up, instead clamoring for action on the southern border, among other areas. House Republicans have introduced a bill that would jump-start southern border wall construction again, and now is when they’ve chosen to stick so incessantly to this!
McCarthy clamored Friday for action to be included in a short-term deal like evidently the restarting of the so-called remain in Mexico program, which compelled migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. to stay outside of the country in potentially dangerous conditions while their cases were processed. “Needless to say, the senate is probably not going to do this,” reporter Jake Sherman remarked.
