Horowitz: McCarthy failures and perfidious GOP senators give Schumer upper hand on budget

On July 19, I called on Speaker McCarthy to keep the House in session for part of the summer recess to command attention in Washington and shed light on each of the major corrupt policies of the government through the prism of the spending bills. That would have given Republicans time to sort out differences within the conference, pass each of the 12 appropriations bills, and defund the destructive Biden policies. Instead, they decided to return from recess a week later than even the Senate Democrats, thereby enabling Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell to work their uniparty magic against conservatives.

Naturally, Republicans should have the upper hand in budget negotiations, because they control the House with a simple majority and have the ability to pass budget bills. The Senate Democrats, on the other hand, have only 51 seats, far short of the 60 required to effectively pass anything. However, McConnell and his top lieutenants are actively working with Schumer to jam the House and force it to eat Biden’s priorities rather than blocking Schumer’s budget bills so that the House could jam through bills that defund Biden’s priorities.

If you talk to most Senate Republicans, particularly those in leadership, you will quickly discover that they lack a sense of urgency to deal with the border, vaccine injury, castration of children, inflation, the Green New Deal, and political persecution of opponents of the regime. Their concern is simply avoiding a partial government shutdown and sending even more funding to Ukraine. In other words, they are indistinguishable from Democrats.

To that end, McConnell and other Republicans are giving Democrats well over 60 votes to begin moving the 12 appropriations bills in tranches of two or three at a time. It looks like they will bring the Military Construction-VA and Agriculture bills to the floor along with the State-Foreign Operations bill as the first “minibus.” Energy-Water or Transportation-HUD might be next. Senate Republicans believe these are all non-controversial in terms of both spending levels and policies. That’s how close together the two parties are in this era!

The Senate Appropriations Committee approved all 12 annual appropriations bills before the August recess with almost zero opposition from any Republican, even as House Democrats opposed most of the GOP bills in the lower chamber. Senate Republicans have zero problems funding inflationary levels of debt as well as Fourth Reich policies that abridge life, liberty, and property and fund the border invasion.

In addition, McConnell endorsed Biden’s request for $24 billion more for Ukraine in a supplemental spending bill. “The Senate’s top priority must be keeping the American people safe,” McConnell said on the floor Tuesday. “And this month, we’ll have the chance to do that with supplemental appropriations for urgent national security and disaster relief priorities.” You know, because the biggest priority for Americans is Ukraine.

Meanwhile, House Republicans have only passed one appropriations bill, Military Construction-VA. McCarthy will push for a continuing resolution, claiming he lacks the time and unity to pass the 12 individual bills before October 1, but that is his fault for taking such a needlessly long recess at this critical juncture in our history. At this point, not a single bad policy should be funded after midnight on October 1, and if House Republicans are unprepared to move on all the bills, then so be it.

The American people lived through the worst shutdown of the private sector, human experiences, schools, funerals, life cycle events, and religious services. After being designated by the government as non-essential, we can certainly live without the government bureaucrats that even our current policy regards as non-essential while we sort out the long-term devastation of government spending and policies. Yet the entire GOP is off message.

For those wondering why we are dealt a weak hand at such a perilous time, it’s because at every decision point within the GOP, most of the top voices were silent or on the wrong side. We could have gotten rid of McCarthy, but most of talk radio, at the behest of the former president, sided with McCarthy, thereby pressuring the 20 heroes to end the fight prematurely.

Likewise, why do we have so many leftist Republicans from deep red states? Because during every primary over the past 15 years, especially against McConnell and his lieutenants, influencers on the right remained silent or allowed Trump to endorse the establishment. After I helped recruit against McConnell in 2014, people finally understood what we were concerned about, and his approval rating among Republicans plummeted headed into his 2020 re-election. Yet Trump bizarrely and pre-emptively endorsed him before we could encourage a credible challenge.

There are no signs on the horizon that we are changing our modus operandi. Matt Rosendale is one of the most conservative House members and is running for Senate in Montana. Yet McConnell is recruiting someone else to box him out. In West Virginia, leftist governor Jim Justice, who is more pro-COVID fascism than Biden, is running for Senate against Joe Manchin. Trump has already made it clear that he will not support Freedom Caucus member Alex Mooney against Justice. Nor will he support Rosendale, ironically, because Matt refused to take his call when he was leading the challenge against Kevin McCarthy, Trump’s candidate for speaker. So here we are with personal ego and patronage trumping the very essence of what has motivated the movement behind Trump.

In other words, we have nobody to blame but ourselves for our attention deficit disorder when it comes to the issues that matter, in the way they matter, at the time they matter. The GOP has not changed one iota since the Bush years in terms of being an effective voice for the issues of the time. The only thing that has changed is that the devastation being wrought upon us is so grave that we are simply out of time.