Mike Lee was one of 20 Senators Wednesday to vote against the continuing resolution to fund the government through Dec. 11. The measure passed 78 votes to 20. Lee’s colleague, Sen. Orrin Hatch, voted for the measure, highlighting the growing division among Congressional Republicans over the best strategy to limit federal spending.
Adam Brandon is president and CEO of conservative grassroots organization FreedomWorks. He said that continuing resolutions are good political calculations, if not good policy, and that actions like Lee’s are challenging Washington’s political culture.
“There’s a very cozy relationship between corporate lobbyists and Capitol Hill. A lot of people, when they leave Capitol Hill, they go right over to K Street to get their consulting gig,” Brandon said. “Very often, when you hear about bipartisanship, bipartisanship is, ‘We’ll blow the budget caps today in exchange for cutting spending,’ literally, in 2030, and that’s just absurd that they keep putting all of the real work down the line but they gin up the spending for today.”
A week ago, House Speaker John Boehner announced his resignation, citing the battle between moderate and Tea Party GOP factions. California Rep. Kevin McCarthy is widely considered to be Boehner’s successor. Brandon said that McCarthy will have to pay attention to conservatives if he wishes to last long as Speaker of the House.
“When you look at some of the problems that the Congressional members had against Boehner, they were things like; they want to see 72 hours between a bill gets dropped and when they have to vote on it so they can read what’s in the details, they want to stop giving power to bureaucracies,” he said. “These are real things that I think that Kevin McCarthy will have to understand. He has a very short leash. If he doesn’t pay respect to these guys, the House conservatives on their issue sets, same thing will happen and they’ll put in another motion to vacate the chair.”
On Friday, President Barack Obama vowed that he would not sign another short-term spending bill, putting more pressure on Congress to figure out a budget by the end of the year.
