Autopsy of a Spending Fight

Defunding nothing, reforming nothing, and simply kicking the can down the road.

By guest contributor John Esten Cooke.

Suppose you have found yourself paying attention to the political realm as of late, and in particular that fetid morass known in polite company as the House of Representatives. In that case, you may have had to swallow a pill that right-wingers in America have become all too used to: the Republicans gave away the farm. Again. And they have excuses. As they always do. But, you may ask, what makes this particular surrender any more or less egregious than the dozens of others? Why should I care about this? After all, there’s a presidential election on the way, and that’s more important! While you would not necessarily be wrong about the latter, I must raise the alarm. If President Trump is to be as successful as many of us on the Right wish him to be in his second term, he will need a majority in both Houses of Congress and political allies in the legislature. You can bet that the Left will be prepared to wage an all-out media campaign to make Trump and his agenda so toxic that weak Republicans or RINOs will oppose him out of fear of being called names on CNN, or of losing their seats and thus their access to power. I think that examining the minutiae of this recent spending fight will illustrate where many of our problems lie on this front, and also will allow me to present possible solutions going forward.

What makes this particular surrender by Speaker Mike Johnson (who, it seems, can’t allow himself to be distracted from signing checks to Ukraine and Israel to take some actual political risks and make some frickin’ sausage) so noteworthy is that, for the first time in a while, the GOP did at first try to extract concessions from the Democrats in exchange for keeping the government funded. And I mean actual concessions, not the feeble gibs extracted from Joe Biden by Kevin McCarthy during the tense debt ceiling negotiations of mid-2022. (Side note: it should be embarrassing that Biden was by all accounts already in steep decline by the time he and McCarthy met to hash out a deal to raise the debt ceiling, and we still got only milquetoast spending reforms, most of which have not been adhered to.)

However, this spending fight was different. Republicans were going to attach a bill called the SAVE Act to a Continuing Resolution (CR), which is a piece of legislation that says, to paraphrase: “We are going to keep government spending at its current levels across the board for the next X number of months while we get our shit together and pass an actual budget.” For the uninitiated, the SAVE Act is a piece of legislation introduced by Representative Chip Roy of Texas that would require individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. Very straightforward, basic stuff.

The SAVE Act was passed by the House earlier in July. However, the Senate has refused to vote on it. (You may want to call Majority Leader Schumer’s office and voice your thoughts on that.) When Speaker Johnson first announced that the GOP would attach the SAVE Act to the CR in early September, I had two thoughts. First, this was likely just more posturing by a GOP that has shown many times over that it has no interest in actually engaging in politics. Second, if this was an actual attempt at doing so, it would likely be stonewalled again by the Senate, and we would either shut down the government on September 30th or the House GOP would cave. So, going into this, I was a bit pessimistic, but hopeful. As we can plainly see at the time of my writing this, that small bit of hope was premature.

Things fell apart almost at the beginning. There was major discord among the Conference (which is the collective term for all House GOP members) over trying to “play politics with must-pass legislation.” You see, the establishment GOP has convinced itself that government shutdowns must be avoided at all costs. If that means surrendering everything to the Democrats, even when they are in the minority, so be it. Someone must be the adult in the room. The debt? We only talk about that during election years.

Anyway, some GOP members, who had voted for the SAVE Act when it came to the floor as a standalone bill in July, were vehemently opposed to such a maneuver. To his credit, Johnson weathered two very bad weeks of very contentious meetings and brought the CR + SAVE Act bill to the floor anyway during the second week of September, likely knowing that he didn’t have the votes to pass. Of course, whether he was willing to eat crow in order to get this out of the way so that he could get back to screwing us over with a clean CR, or whether he genuinely tried to, ya know, do politics, I cannot say. The CR + SAVE Act failed to pass the House, with a grand total of 14 Republicans voting with every single House Democrat to kill this legislation. I will list all of the defectors below. Some of them may surprise you:

• Jim Banks (Indiana)

• Andy Biggs (Arizona)

• Lauren Boebert (Colorado)

• Tim Burchett (Tennessee)

• Elijah Crane (Arizona)

• Matt Gaetz (Florida)

• Wesley Hunt (Texas)

• Doug Lamborn (Colorado)

• Nancy Mace (South Carolina)

• Cory Mills (Florida)

• Mike Rogers (Alabama)

• Matt Rosendale (Montana)

• Greg Steube (Florida)

• Beth Van Duyne (Texas)

Additionally, the following Republicans either voted “present” or did not bother to cast a vote:

• Thomas Massie (Kentucky) – voted present

• Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia) – voted present

• Anthony D’Esposito (New York) – did not vote

• Neal Dunn (Florida) – did not vote

• Kay Granger (Texas) – did not vote

• Nick LaLota (New York) – did not vote

• Nicole Malliotakis (New York) – did not vote

For those of you who are unaware, a bill only needs the support of a simple majority to pass the House of Representatives. The current makeup of the House as of this writing is 431, meaning that the bill needed 216 votes to pass. Had Republicans acted like Democrats and all voted along party lines when one of their major political priorities was on the line, the bill would have garnered 225 votes and passed the House. It would likely have been intentionally stymied in the Senate, but at least the ball would then be in Chuck Schumer’s court and some of the pressure to meet for a compromise would be placed on him. That would be getting somewhere. Instead, a week later, the House GOP passed a last-minute stopgap CR that defunded nothing, reformed nothing, and simply kicked the can down the road.

Instead, we are left with another betrayal, more theater, and no accountability from any level of our government or the Right’s supposed political representatives. Take note of the names on that list. Everyone’s vote, even the ones who ultimately did not vote, was intentional. The purpose of not voting on a piece of legislation like this is for plausible deniability for big spenders such as Kay Granger and other establishment Republicans who, while not wanting to see the bill passed, are either too cowardly or too shrewd to put their name in the record as a “Nay” vote. In my opinion, there was no good reason to oppose this legislation, and the Republicans who didn’t support it due to their “principles” or because they’re establishment whores are going to be a problem that we are going to have to tackle at some point in the future.

There is a serious grifting problem among the Right, and it is perhaps most acute and damaging among our elected political leaders. Politics is not the sole answer to our nation’s problems, but if we don’t start getting acquainted with what is going on in Congress (versus just taking what is said on Twitter at face value), then we are going to have a very hard time weeding out the bad actors and RINOs and replacing them with people who want to win.

Take it from someone who interacts with the D.C. class on a day-to-day basis: many people up here are charlatans and liars, or would happily see us lose so long as they can claim adherence to “principles.” The only solution I see to this problem is a highly organized, district-by-district effort led by competent and smart individuals. Their task is to assess whether their Representative is a RINO, a traitor, a backbencher, or someone genuinely capable of serving the interests of the American people. (I know, we’ve been trying to oust the RINOs since Rush Limbaugh urged us to do so in the ’90s, but Republican primary voters can be infuriating.) In my experience, the minimum standard we should accept is a backbencher, as the Party still needs a certain number of warm bodies. As I have implored readers in my previous article, cleaning house in the Party can only happen if we engage in the political process at the local and district level, including in the primaries.

This does not mean immediately treating your representative as an enemy or a traitor (although if you live in a district represented by a Democrat, those criteria certainly apply). You must do the research on your Representative, and attend town halls if he or she holds them (and dates for these can usually be found on the Member’s website or social media). I encourage you to write to your Member, and if you are respectful and thoughtful, you will usually get a response. (Many times this response will be drafted by a staffer, but about half the Members that I worked for personally reviewed all of their outgoing mail.) Look up your Representative’s past votes on key legislation. After this, make an informed decision as to whether or not your Representative adequately represents your interests, and go from there. In a perfect world, with an organized and active Right that is engaged in the political process, these actions that I have outlined would be repeated in all 435 Congressional Districts, and we would send a crop of good, competent Representatives to D.C. every two years. I still believe, in spite of what I have seen up here, that Congress can be saved if enough Americans organize and proactively engage in the political process.

If you find what I have to say interesting, I ask that you subscribe to mine and The Realizer’s new Substack, The Capitol Caller, where we will be bringing you the latest updates and news from our nation’s capital, distilled in such a way as to be interesting and relevant to our side. It’s time that the Right had a bulletin from its insiders in the Beltway, and we hope that you will place your trust in us. I will be following this essay up with a second part that looks into the recent disastrous federal response to Hurricane Helene, which will premiere on The Capitol Caller.