Morning Joe and George Conway bash GOP 'clown show' over looming shutdown
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and guest George Conway lambasted House Republicans for their inability to pass a bill to fund the government.
The "Morning Joe" host echoed the criticism of Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), who bashed the hardliners in his caucus as "lunatics" and a "clown show," and Scarborough said today's Republicans were a far cry from those he served with more than two decades ago.
"I'll tell you when I was in Congress, we were blessed to actually have people who wanted to balance the budget, so we balanced the budget four years in a row, only time it's happened in a century," Scarborough said. "Here, though, George Conway, this is -- unlike that group that balanced the budget, paid down the debt, did a lot of other things, this group doesn't really care about balancing budget. They don't really care about policy, they have shown us that time and time again. It's all gesturing."
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"So we're going to try to shut down the government -- why?" Scarborough added. "Just because we want to gesture, we want to gesture to somebody. We really don't care about policy, we don't care about balancing the budgets. We don't care about the troops, we don't care about military readiness. So we're going to shut down the government. We're not going to even bring, we're not even going to bring the bill up, the funding bill up for a vote. We won't let it go to the floor. Meanwhile in the Senate, you have Tommy Tubervillle and the senators doing everything they can to gut military readiness, too. What a long, long distance there is between the Republicans we were and what we have now in the age of Trump."
Conway agreed, saying most House Republicans were only concerned with raising money and garnering attention, and not with performing the duties of their job.
"These guys don't care about anything other than just getting on TV and being able to perform," Conway said, "and you know, have people send them money and contributions and to get air time, and they clearly don't have any policy positions that matter to them because if they were trying to do that, they would try to work towards some compromise where they would get some of what they want, even though it's not possible to get all of it. It's all about performance, it's all about -- they don't even care about having a majority."
"They're willing to sacrifice those moderate Republicans that you just showed on air here, that they're willing to basically jettison them because who needs them?" Conway added. "They don't need a majority anyway because they're not governing. All they want to do is throw sand in the gears."
Scarborough discounted GOP claims about reining in spending, because he said Donald Trump added $8.2 trillion to the national debt in just four years, compared to $8.34 trillion by Barack Obama over eight years and $1.84 trillion so far for President Joe Biden two and a half years.
"It's important that we all just stop for one second here and remind each other this is a clown show, and these clowns, along with Donald Trump, over Donald Trump's four years in the White House, spent more money over four years than any Congress ever spent in the history of this country or any other country," Scarborough said. They accumulated $8 trillion -- these people who are now saying we're going to go to the barricades and shut down the government because he won't cut spending, these are the people that were part of Donald Trump adding $8.2 trillion to the national debt over four years."
"It's not like we didn't warn them," he continued. "It's not like I wasn't tweeting something out every other day. It's not like I wasn't going to the Hill talking to them. It's not like we weren't saying, here, they need to stop being reckless. They can't be conservative only when a Democrat is in the White House. But a Democrat is in the White House, so suddenly they've remembered that they like balanced budgets. It's just an absolute, an absolute joke, and the fact is Kevin McCarthy doesn't need these clowns. He can just work with the Democrats because that's what the Republican moderate said yesterday in the Republican caucus meeting."
"They don't give a damn if they have a majority next year or not," Scarborough added. "In fact, if they don't have a majority, they can be even crazier on social media, even crazier on the House floor and raise more money. You look at the craziest people in the House Republican caucus that are destroying their chances of a majority right now, they're the people who make more money in the minority because they can say crazier things on the House floor and on social media. That's all this is about, gesturing for money."
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