House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said if members of the House Freedom Caucus decide to block or delay the appropriations bills from coming to the floor until all 12 were out of committee, they would be siding with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
At a press conference on Tuesday, members of the House Freedom Caucus demanded that leadership wait until all 12 appropriations bills are advanced out of committee before holding floor votes for any of them.
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But, as the Sep. 30 deadline to fund the government continues to creep up and with the House set to go on recess for the month of August, currently, two appropriations bills are scheduled to be heard on the floor this week while four still remain in committee.
Although the members of the Freedom Caucus did not directly threaten to vote against or block the bills from coming to the floor until all 12 were out of committee, they did urge leadership not to put them on the floor.
“I never say what I’m going to do ahead of time,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) said. “I’m just going to say, I look at what’s being presented, we’ll see what information we have, we see where we are in the other appropriations bills to get the 12, so we’ll have the total pie to look at, then we’ll make a judgment call.”
McCarthy said if the Freedom Caucus decided to block or slow-play any of the appropriations bills from coming to the floor, it would help the Democrats by locking in their priorities.
“What would really concern me, if the House Freedom Caucus did that, then they would be taking the same position that Pelosi would want,” McCarthy said. “Because Pelosi wants to lock in all of her policies of those Democratic policies before, and I would never support that.”
At the press conference, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) predicted leadership would pass a short-term continuing resolution until December and combine some of the appropriations bills into minibuses and vote on a number of them at a time.
Members of the Freedom Caucus said at the press conference that they would oppose any form of a continuing resolution or minibus if they were to be brought up to the floor for a vote.
On Tuesday, McCarthy did not rule out the possibility of the House passing a short-term continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown.
McCarthy said he would not support a long-term continuing resolution because it would “lock in all of Pelosi’s priorities that are already there. So we never want that to happen long term.”
But he did not directly answer whether or not he would support a short-term continuing resolution until December when asked.
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“I think we’ve got an ability to get our work done. I rather have the pressure to get our work done instead of seeing some omnibus coming through. You have watched me say before I’ll never bring an omnibus to the floor.”
As the Sep. 30 deadline to pass 12 appropriations bills inches closer and the House is yet to pass one off the floor, a continuing resolution — a stop-gap measure to fund the government at the previous year’s spending levels — seems more likely.
