The weekend brought no signs of progress from Congress on passing a federal budget and avoiding a government shutdown at the end of the week, with hard-right lawmakers refusing to budge on their demands for sharp spending cuts and tougher border security.
Republican hardliners in the House of Representatives remained opposed to both a short-term funding measure and sweeping budget legislation that’s been in the works in the Senate.
“Folks like me, we’re sticking to our guns. And all of a sudden we’re the bad guys cause we want to balance our budget,” Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
As a bipartisan Senate effort to pass comprehensive budget bills stalls, talk in Washington has shifted to the prospect of a budget stopgap known as a “continuing resolution.”
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has been trying to get far-right members of his party on board with a measure to keep the government running for another 30 days, with funding maintained at 2022 levels.
“I’ve been trying to put (a continuing resolution) on for quite some time,” he said Saturday. “I appreciate all the members who’ve worked so hard on that.
“There are still a few members that won’t vote for funding the government while we finish all the 12 bills. I don’t understand.”
Burchett, who’s viewed as close with the House’s hard-right Freedom Caucus, scoffed at the proposal.
“Every year we do this, the temporary (resolution),” he said. “That’s like telling a crack addict we’re going to give you more crack to keep you off of crack. It doesn’t work.”
McCarthy insisted Saturday that there’s still time to reach a deal before funding expires on Sunday, Oct. 1.
But Burchett warned that his leadership would be in peril if he cuts a deal with Democrats.
“That would be something I would look strongly at … if we do away with our duty that we said we’re going to do,” he told CNN when asked if he’d support a push to remove McCarthy from the speakership.
Democrats appeared to be nonplussed by the GOP infighting.
“I don’t know what to think,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said when asked Sunday if the government is going to shut down.
“The Senate got off, at least, to a good start,” he said on “State of the Union,” adding that McCarthy’s had an “inability to get a majority for anything.”
If no spending bill is passed by 12:01 a.m. next Sunday, federal employees would stop getting paid and many vital government functions would grind to a halt. Social Security payments would still be made, though.
There will be problems at the nation’s airports, too, according to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
“In the event of a shutdown, we would have to immediately stop so many important activities in the Department of Transportation, like training air traffic controllers,” he told ABC’s “This Week.”
“After everything we’ve been through, after all of the disruptions … to air travel that we experienced last year, this year, we finally see cancellations and delays back to normal,” he added. “This would be a reversal that nobody wants, nobody asked for.”
Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., voiced hope that a shutdown would be avoided.
“It is not a foregone conclusion. And I don’t think we’ll get to that point, I certainly hope not,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
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