Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) joined Lisa Boothe on her podcast to talk about the upcoming September 30 deadline for the House and Senate to avoid a government shutdown.
‘When you close [the government]you are really ceding power to the government,” McCarthy said on “The Truth with Lisa Boothe.”
McCarthy said that if the government were to shut down, military troops and air traffic controllers would not be paid, and the U.S.-Mexico border would be “wide open” without U.S. Border Patrol personnel.
‘Say you don’t finance [the government], you go to a government shutdown. Do you know what happens then?” McCarthy told Boothe, a Republican strategist and commentator on Fox News since 2016, “The border is wide open. Don’t you want to fund the border agents?’
Recently, McCarthy has emerged and expressed frustration with Republicans in the House of Representatives, who have held up appropriations processes and received threats from members seeking to remove him from his leadership position.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has threatened to have McCarthy removed from his seat if he doesn’t stick to the spending priorities that were previously negotiated and promised when McCarthy tried to earn enough votes to become chairman.
Hardline conservatives have battled Republican Party leadership over spending bills for months, following a month of tension before the administration finally passed a bill that raised the debt ceiling and averted a government shutdown.
With less than two weeks until the deadline, McCarthy’s comments on the podcast appeared to be a message to those members.
“So the way I look at it, we want government to function, but we want it to be limited government. We want it to be fair; we want it to be accountable,” McCarthy said. “We can show that the government can govern in this way. That’s why we moved our credit accounts. We have to finish that job.”
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