After temporarily averting a government shutdown, House leadership lashed out at congressional holdouts with a strained use of the term “conservative.”

Saturday, through a series of events that landed the stopgap spending bill on President Joe Biden’s desk for a signature shortly before midnight, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) led the lower chamber in passing a 45-day continuing resolution. Touting the clean bill that kept spending at fiscal year 2023 levels and passed 335 to 91, with seven abstaining, the California congressman laid into GOP “no” votes in a fashion similar to the president maligning them as “extreme.”

“We tried to pass the most conservative stopgap measure possible…We put it on the floor, but unfortunately, we didn’t have 218 Republicans that would vote for it to help us secure the border then,” McCarthy contended at a press conference Saturday afternoon.

“If you have members in your conference that won’t let you vote for appropriations bills, who don’t want an omnibus and won’t vote for a stopgap measure, so the only answer is to shut down and not pay our troops — I don’t want to be a part of that team,” he went on to add. “I want to be a part of the conservative group that wants to get things done.”

The House just passed a short-term stop-gap measure that will keep the government open, pay our troops, and fully fund disaster relief. Now, the Senate must act. https://t.co/7I8R6bwK5d

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) September 30, 2023

Glossed over by the speaker was the fact that 90 of the 91 nays on passage of the resolution were from the Republican Conference amounting to more than 40 percent of his side of the aisle. Illinois Rep. Mike Quigley represented the only Democratic vote against the measure.

However, McCarthy appeared to make the opposition about a solitary member — Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz (R).

“If somebody wants to make a motion against me, bring it. There has to be an adult in the room,” the speaker told the press as the Florida firebrand had repeatedly harkened back to the marathon voting session that kicked off the 118th Congress that, in part, removed blocks to present a motion to vacate the chair.

Additionally, McCarthy’s talk of the measure being a clean resolution did not prevent the Senate from taking their own actions to ensure America continued to put Ukraine first. A standoff in the upper chamber led by Colorado Sen. Michael Bennett (D) resulted in leadership committing to scheduling a separate vote on further funding for the war-torn nation, the Washington Examiner reported. The measure went on to pass 88-9.

In a statement, Senate Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) expressed, “We will not stop fighting for more economic and security assistance for Ukraine. Majorities in both parties support Ukraine aid and doing more is vital for America’s security and for democracy around the world.”

So too did Biden promote tacking on to the billions already spent in his statement that labeled members putting America first as “extreme House Republicans” who “For weeks…tried to walk away from that deal by demanding drastic cuts that would have been devastating for millions of Americans. They failed.”

“While the Speaker and the overwhelming majority of Congress have been steadfast in their support for Ukraine, there is no new funding in this agreement to continue that support. We cannot under any circumstances allow American support for Ukraine to be interrupted,” he added.

Tonight, Congress voted to keep the government open, preventing an unnecessary crisis that would have inflicted needless pain on millions of hardworking Americans.

This is good news, but I want to be clear: we should never have been in this position in the first place. pic.twitter.com/U28kaX11Rq

— President Biden (@POTUS) October 1, 2023

Texas Rep. Chip Roy (R), who had consistently promoted using the power of the purse to negotiate for securing the border, released his own statement detailing a conservative argument for voting against the stopgap measure.

“Today, I voted no on a measure that continues government funding at bloated FY 2023 levels for 45 days without any cuts to the bureaucracy or any provision related to securing the southern border,” he began. “Unfortunately, today’s bill is the product of this fundamentally broken Congress that is unwilling to weather a storm in order to deliver real results for the American people.”

Roy remarked that he had voted in favor of a shorter continuing resolution that would have maintained essential funding while cutting waste by 30 percent for 30 days to allow negotiations to continue and “would have forced the Biden administration to abandon its open border policies and finally put an end to the border crisis,” but the measure that ultimately passed “did nothing of the sort.

“Conservatives must continue this fight and cannot reject future opportunities present to us to force this administration to end the out-of-control spending in Washington and the chaos at the border,” he Roy concluded. “No security, no funding.”

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Kevin Haggerty

Staff Writer

Native of Brooklyn, NY, Kevin Haggerty is a graduate of Hunter College where he studied Cultural Anthropology and Geography. An avid reader and truth seeker, he currently resides in Texas with his wife and their dog and, when he isn't researching current events and their impacts, you'll find him spending time with friends and family or working on his next novel.

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