The House of Representatives avoided a government shutdown Thursday night, but Rep. Tom McClintock says it came at the cost of letting the outgoing Senate Democratic majority have control over government spending for nine months after they lose power and he says Republicans relinquished their strongest weapon for confronting President Obama’s immigration actions in the new Congress.
“This was a huge surrender of the prerogatives of the Congress to bring this administration under control, which is what the American people clearly voted for us to do when we saw a nine seat shift toward the Republicans in the U.S. Senate,” said McClintock.
On Thursday night, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted 219-206 to approve a $1.1 trillion spending package that funds most of the federal government until the end of September 2015. However, it only extends funding for the Department of Homeland Security until February. The combination of an omnibus bill and a continuing resolution was tagged as a “cromnibus” bill. Nearly seventy conservatives voted against the plan. Fifty votes from Democrats put supporters over the top after heavy lobbying from President Obama and the decision of House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) to back it.
McClintock says the “cromnibus” strategy never made any sense to him. He and other conservatives preferred a short continuing resolution into next year so Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress could lead the way on spending.
“Instead of negotiating with the new Republican Senate that has has the imprimatur of approval of the American people, they decided they’d get a better deal, I don’t know why, by negotiating with Harry Reid, (outgoing Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman) Barbara Mikulski and the Democratic Senate that voters just thoroughly repudiated,” said McClintock, who says those rejected leaders have largely handcuffed Republicans for most of 2015.
“So now, the cold, dead hand of Harry Reid and the Democratic Senate will be steering the new Republican Congress’ spending priorities for the first nine months of the new Republican Congress,” he said.
According to McClintock, the rationale for the “cromnibus” strategy offered to him by GOP leaders was that they didn’t want “fiscal distractions” interfering with policy priorities like approving the Keystone XL Pipeline in January.
“First of all, these are not fiscal distractions. This is the entire spending plan of the United States government. There’s nothing more fundamental than that. Secondly, there’s no reason why you couldn’t take up issues like Keystone at the same time,” said McClintock.
Leadership has argued that passing all funding for the rest of the fiscal year except for the Department of Homeland Security will allow Republicans to fight tooth and nail against what they see as Obama’s unconstitutional amnesty afforded to some five million people in the country illegally. McClintock says that’s unlikely to work either.
“The problem is Homeland Security funds the entire border security programs such as it is. That’s a hostage we’re not going to shoot, so why would we want to choose a strategy that would require us to shoot a hostage that we’re not going to shoot,” he said, arguing that this approach only makes it harder to thwart Obama’s actions.
“It makes no sense. Had we maintained the choice over all of the budget we would have been in a much stronger bargaining position. I think this has greatly weakened out bargaining position going into that discussion in February,” said McClintock.
The congressman says the Republican approach should have been a simple continuing resolution lasting only a few weeks until the Republican majority takes hold in the Senate.
“The better way to go was simply to adopt a three or four-week continuing resolution to keep the government open, put all the appropriations questions into the new Senate that’s just been freshly approved by voters so that their priorities can be accurately reflected in the spending plan that will be locked in until October 1 of next year,” said McClintock.
Some of the greatest drama in the House played out during the vote for the rule allowing debate on the spending package. Normally just a formality, the vote dragged on as GOP leaders lobbied members to vote for the rule. The procedural hurdle was cleared after Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-Michigan) switched his vote and Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Indiana) finally cast his ballot with leadership.
However, Stutzman later claimed he supported the rule only after leadership vowed to pull the “cromnibus” and put forward a simple short-term continuing resolution. The congressman alleges leaders reneged on that promise once Obama supported the plan and leadership concluded it could get the votes for passage from Democrats.
McClintock says he knows nothing about that squabble, but he does admit to supporting the rule, noting his general approach is to support rules to protect the power of the majority to set the agenda. But Thursday’s vote is one he’d like to have back.
“In retrospect, I think the bill raised such important fiscal and constitutional issues that it shouldn’t have been brought to the floor in its current form. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Every now and then I make a bad vote. That was a bad vote and I regret it,” said McClintock.
Several conservative members were seething over the tactics used by House Speaker John Boehner and his leadership team to get the bill passed and made it clear they’d prefer that he wasn’t speaker in the next Congress. McClintock is not happy with leadership but says making a change is easier said than done.
“The problem with replacing John Boehner as speaker is you have to have a replacement that is competent to take that role. The problem is the people who were competent to replace Boehner were not willing to do so and the people willing to replace Boehner were not competent to do so,” said McClintock.
The congressman noted that no one inside the House GOP Conference challenged Boehner for the post last month. McClintock believes any challenge to Boehner going forward should play out in the conference and not on the House floor during the vote for Speaker of the House next month.
