In the ongoing battle between House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and conservatives in his caucus, the supposed “adult in the room” tack of approving a spending plan for 45 days to avoid a government shut down was McCarthy’s solution.
McCarthy has, as is much reported, been met with vehement disagreement from Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz. Gaetz is seeking to remove McCarthy, and McCarthy’s allies in turn are seeking to remove Gaetz.
Over at The American Spectator, columnist Dan Flynn puts the problem this way: https://spectator.org/big-
Shutdown: Big Government Wins Again
And conservatives lost.
Says Flynn:
“By averting a government shutdown, Democrats and more moderate Republicans ensured bigger government, further indebtedness, a greater percentage of the federal budget allocated toward paying interest, and inflation worse than otherwise.
….This simple solution requires not real political skill but instead an amount of will that few conservatives on the hill possess.”
This problem is not new. As a young aide to a Pennsylvania Republican congressman who sat on the House Budget Committee at the dawn of the Reagan era the problem was evident then. Lots of Republicans talk a good game on limited government. But when push comes to shove, as just seen, they cave.
No surprise. And no, it is not the “adult in the room” thing to cave on what presumably is your central governing principle.