“There's no trust. No trust on our side for them. No trust within their own conference for each other,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) told Raw Story. “This is all about Kevin McCarthy remaining speaker for another day, no matter the consequences to the country.”
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Early this afternoon, House attendants and Capitol Police officers were catching some college football – “Oh shit, touchdown,” an officer with one eye on the USC game cursed – while lawmakers were heading to the House floor to cast their first vote of the day. Confusion erupted.
“Don’t vote! Don’t vote!” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and others yelled to their Democratic colleagues. “Don’t vote!”
McCarthy and his GOP lieutenants had only just sprung the temporary government funding measure on Democrats.
“I literally ran from my house to get here as fast as possible – I’m trying to make sure there’s, like, no tricky shit in there,” Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) told Raw Story.
After the speaker walked away from the deal he had struck with President Joe Biden to avoid a default on US debt obligations back in May, Democrats scoured the funding measure. McCarthy’s word has lost its value on their side of the proverbial aisle.
“This kinda feels a little bit like spousal abuse,” Raw Story overheard Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) describing McCarthy’s weekend tactics to former Democratic leader, Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) as they made their way to an impromptu Democratic Caucus meeting Saturday afternoon. “You know, ‘Okay honey, you’re not gonna do it anymore. I get it, you brought me flowers, you said nice things.’ Then the next week, you had one too many beers and I didn’t cook the chicken right.”
Democrats doubted the speaker now dared cross the Freedom Caucus and other far-right lawmakers, after spending the past couple weeks trying to appease the fringe wing of his conference by walking away from bipartisan solutions.
In recent government shutdown, it was clear what both sides wanted. For instance, the longest shutdown in American history – 34 days – occurred when Donald Trump was president and demanded funding for a wall with Mexico before he’d fund his own agencies. Democrats knew where Trump and the GOP stood, at the very least, which is no longer the case in Speaker McCarthy’s House.
“Even when we've had [previous] shutdowns, the issue has never been trust,” Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) told Raw Story. “I don't think he's a bad person. I think he's a decent person who put himself in a situation where he's coming across as untrustworthy.”
Cleaver says, “There is no trust,” because McCarthy seemed to cede the speaker’s gavel to the fringe right.
“The mega militants are the ones who were controlling things,” Cleaver said before the House passed the funding measure. “Even if we avert a complete shutdown, the Ukrainians are gonna feel let down, and the world is going to be concerned that the U.S. is in a meltdown. Nobody can celebrate this. Everybody loses, including the world.”
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The open secret is, the measure that sailed through the House by wide bipartisan margins could have passed weeks ago, but the very moderate Democrats who threw McCarthy a lifeline then felt he snubbed them today.
“As someone who has so diligently worked on navigating bipartisan possibilities, to see how this was just handled, is not just disappointing but it's just disgusting,” Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) told Raw Story. “He tried to jam us – the very people that have been offering to be helpful if he was willing to be principled. That's really upsetting.”
In the end, 90 House Republicans opposed it, along with one Democrat, Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL), who opposed Ukraine aid being stripped from the bill.
While Democrats felt disrespected, the far-right felt betrayed.
“It's disappointing. We really developed some momentum,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) told a scrum of reporters outside the Capitol Saturday.
Gaetz has threatened to challenge McCarthy’s speakership if he reached across the aisle, but ahead of the Saturday vote, he refused to say if his plan was going forward.
“Whether or not Kevin McCarthy faces a motion to vacate is entirely within his control, because all he had to do was comply with the agreement that he made with us in January, and putting this bill on the floor and passing it with Democrats would be such an obvious blatant clear violation of that,” Gaetz said.
Like Democrats, Gaetz too left the Capitol feeling burned by the speaker.
“We are at this point, because Kevin McCarthy has made multiple contradictory promises about the budget top line to different groups of people,” Gaetz said.
While Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) counts McCarthy as an ally, she’s upset Republicans pulled the pin but never threw the grenade.
“The American people don't give a damn about the government shutting down. They care about the government that they pay with their tax dollars actually serving them for once in this nation's history,” Greene told reporters outside the Capitol ahead of the final vote.
Sentiments like that had Democrats doubtful 'til the end.
“There’s so much chaos over there, it’s just frustrating,” Rep. Nanette Barragain (D-CA) complained to Raw Story.
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Even as McCarthy and the GOP helped avert a shutdown, they seem to have also lobbed more fuel on the fire that is the U.S. House of Representatives.
“The House has become ungovernable. It's been one crisis after the next,” Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) told Raw Story. “It's an unsustainable dynamic.”
After a couple of weeks of performative legislative theatre, Torres says McCarthy ended up right where Democrats asked him to begin – which is also right where we’ll all be in 45 days.
“I never quite understood why the speaker felt the need to pander to the far right of his party and debase himself in front of the world, knowing that, inevitably, he would have to get to a bipartisan outcome,” Torres said. “We all knew the end of the story.”
