The House Freedom Caucus is not talking about booting Speaker Mike Johnson. But that doesn’t mean the GOP extremists are happy, or that they’re going to shut up about how unhappy they are that they didn’t get to shut down the government. After the House passed a two-step continuing resolution to keep the government open into early 2024, with Democrats providing the votes necessary to do so, 19 far-right Republicans vented their anger by joining with Democrats on a procedural vote that ended up blocking an appropriations bill.
That could be just the beginning. “There is a sentiment that if we can’t fight anything, then let’s just hold up everything,” Rep. Ralph Norman told Politico. Rep. Andy Biggs, one of the Republicans who voted to remove Rep. Kevin McCarthy as speaker, told The Washington Post, “The speaker says he’s going to be tough and fight it out. And I intend to make sure that he is tough and will fight it out.”
And, of course, the likes of Reps. Scott Perry and Chip Roy and expelled former Freedom Caucus member Marjorie Taylor Greene are never going to pass up a chance to get in front of a camera and rant about their complaint of the day. They’ve been doing a lot of that.
“We’ve had enough, we’re sending a shot across the bow,” Perry, who chairs the House Freedom Caucus, told reporters after the failed procedural vote. “We do this in good faith, we want to see these bills moved, we want to see good righteous policy, but we’re not going to be part of the failure theater anymore.”
Perry’s “failure theater” comment echoed Roy's rant on Wednesday, in which he challenged his fellow Republicans to “come down to the floor and come explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done besides ‘Well, I guess it’s not as bad as the Democrats.’”
Thursday, Roy rattled off a list of demands. Johnson is “promising a fight, so we’re sending a message right now, we expect that fight when we get back from Thanksgiving,” Roy told reporters, going on to demand an overall reduction in spending, plus “stop sending blank check money to Ukraine, stand with Israel, hold the Senate in check, and do what we need to do to secure the southern border.”
Greene called the vote to keep the government funded “extremely concerning to me” and “a big disappointment,” saying that “at the very minimum” the continuing resolution should have included a 1% cut in government funding—which would have been a recipe for a government shutdown given Democratic control of the Senate and Senate Republicans who don’t think too highly of what their House counterparts have been up to.
The House is headed home for Thanksgiving recess. It seems unlikely that they’ll be in a more productive mood when they get back.
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Republicans are challenging labor leaders to fights and allegedly physically assaulting one another. Donald Trump says he will abolish reproductive rights entirely and is openly calling for the extermination of his detractors, referring to them as “vermin” on Veterans Day. The Republican Party has emerged from its corruption cocoon as a full-blown fascist movement.
