Gaetz on looming shutdown: ‘McCarthy brought us to this moment’

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) blasted House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) over chaos in spending negotiations, accusing the Speaker of making too many contradictory promises to fund the government.

A government shutdown will start at midnight Sunday, unless a last-minute spending bill passes both the House and Senate, which is unlikely.

“It is by design that Kevin McCarthy brought us to this moment, to put our backs against the wall as part of shutdown politics,” Gaetz said in an CNBC interview Friday.

“I am concerned that he hasn’t been true to a deal he made to become Speaker of the House,” he said. “We made him agree to spending guardrails. He has blown through those guardrails, and even worse, Kevin McCarthy has made multiple contradictory promises to the White House, to appropriators, to House conservatives.”

Gaetz was referencing the controversial deal McCarthy made in order to win enough votes to become House Speaker, after over a dozen failed votes — which ceded significant influence to hard-line conservatives.

In negotiations over the debt ceiling months later, McCarthy made a deal with Democrats to keep federal budget cuts small. His budget proposals now go beyond the terms negotiated in that bipastian deal, to the ire of Democrats, while they still don’t go far enough to please Gaetz and other House conservatives.

The Florida lawmaker and other GOP holdouts have framed a shutdown as a way to stop government overspending and force legislators to make significant cuts. The Senate passed a short-term funding bill with bipartisan support on Thursday.

A government shutdown would shutter most government offices and services, including most national parks, as well as force employees deemed essential — including active duty military, border patrol and TSA agents — to work without pay.

“I don’t want a shutdown. I’m not a cheerleader for a shutdown,” Gaetz said. “It looks like we’re going to have one, I want it to be as short as possible, but I know the only way to rescue ourselves from financial ruin is to pass single-subject spending bills that are able to be reviewed at a programmatic level.”

“It’s nothing personal, I’ll still send [McCarthy] a Christmas card, but we do need compliance with the agreement he made for fiscal sanity,” he added.