Yahoo Finance It Could Be a Difficult July for McCarthy
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy faces a daunting task when lawmakers return from their Independence Day recess next week: passing a dozen appropriations bills for 2024 with a small and fractious House majority, while under threat of yet another government shutdown at the end of September if he fails to do so.
Conservative House Republicans are pushing for McCarthy to take a harder line in the budget process. They want to see spending in 2024 rolled back to 2022 levels, as McCarthy originally sought during the negotiations over spending and the debt ceiling in the spring. As The Hill’s Mike Lillis, Mychael Schnell and Aris Folley report Wednesday, conservative hard-liners have made it clear that they are willing to use hardball tactics such as paralyzing the House floor to get what they want – and they don’t much care if the government shuts down this fall as part of the effort.
Rep. Clay Higgins, an extreme hardliner from Louisiana, told The Hill that is an “understatement” to say that McCarthy’s job will be difficult. “But difficult is not impossible,” he added, citing the potential for agreement among Republicans. “We’re more united than perhaps the mainstream media would give us credit for,” he said.
Still, conservatives say they want McCarthy to stand firm against compromises and to reject deals that achieve their goals in name only through budgetary gimmicks such as using recissions to top up spending, thereby avoiding the full force of cuts.
“We had an agreement on fiscal year 2022 discretionary spending levels,” Rep. Dan Bishop said. “I’m not persuaded by the notion that starting there and then buying those up with rescissions amounts to the performance of that objective.”
The bottom line: Lawmakers have a lot of budgetary work to do for 2024, and much depends on how much they can accomplish before the long summer break starts in August. It’s a fair bet that whatever the temperature in Washington, McCarthy will be feeling the heat as GOP hardliners push toward their goal of winning substantial spending cuts next year.
