Democrats’ alliance with Gaetz could doom Ukraine funding and debt deal
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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The grand irony of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) characteristically unserious endorsement of Donald Trump for House speaker is that the former president actually is the single most effective man at terrifying Republican lawmakers into a consensus. But Trump, preoccupied with running for the White House and away from liberal prosecutors trying to put him in prison, has thrown his weight behind perhaps the second most painful possibility for Democrats: Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH).
Democrats had no obligation to bail out beleaguered Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), but in their unholy alliance with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and the crazy eight, they did worse than give the lie to the notion that they simply want a normal Republican like the Californian, one who would continue to keep the government open and Ukraine’s coffers filled. In making a deal with the Floridian, Democrats all but ensured that McCarthy’s successor actually will put a kibosh on government spending deals and Ukraine aid.
McCarthy was no squish. Before Gaetz suicide-bombed McCarthy’s original debt deal, McCarthy had extracted spending concessions that would have cut an unprecedented 8% from our discretionary spending. (To put into context just how addicted Washington is to spending growth, that discretionary spending comprises a mere quarter of our total outlays, the projected explosion of which is primarily fueled by entitlements that Gaetz notably does not clamor to reform.)
But when push came to shove, McCarthy fought tooth and nail to keep the government open and winked and nodded across the aisle that a separate spending bill for Ukraine would follow. Now, instead of that guy, the next speaker will likely be a Republican who is happy to fiddle not just as Congress fails to pass a spending bill to keep the government open but also as it fails to raise the debt limit and causes the free world to default on cataclysmic fashion.
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House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), McCarthy’s second in command who has entered the race for speaker, may speak less fluently in MAGA than Jordan, but the Louisiana lawmaker was just as instrumental in orchestrating the 2013 government shutdown than the Ohio firebrand.
And just as Bill Clinton’s one free blow job and Harry Reid’s nuking of the judicial filibuster directly opened Pandora’s box to result in President “Grab Em by the P****” to appoint a full third of the Supreme Court bench, consequences of the Democrats pulling the fire alarm (metaphorically speaking, in this particular case) will come when the shoe is on the other foot. Make no mistake, the day will come when some “sane” and “normal” Democratic speaker looks up to House Republicans and shouts, “Save me,” and Republicans will look down and whisper, “No.”