Steve Bannon has a pessimistic forecast for Kevin McCarthy. According to him, McCarthy will face an early departure as House speaker due to his submission to Democrats on the debt ceiling increase.
The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, which the Senate voted on on June 1st, was essentially a Democratic measure, according to Bannon’s comments to Newsweek on Thursday. He cited the 165 House Democrats who supported it and carried it to success, which was hailed by the leadership and President Joe Biden as a win over “extreme voices.”
Only 149 Republicans in the House supported it. The GOP was unsuccessful in obtaining some of its key demands during the final negotiations between Biden and McCarthy, including a lesser-than-desired return of COVID-19 relief funds that were already spent and less strict modifications to the broadened work requirements for Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
“I think [McCarthy’s] gonna be gone relatively quickly,” Bannon predicted. “It can’t exist like this. He double-crossed people. He lied to people. He had all these press conferences, ‘We’re gonna hold the line,’ and he was already giving it away.”
The legislation’s restriction on non-defense discretionary spending for the fiscal years 2024 and 2025 accounts for around $1.3 trillion of the savings. The amount spent in 2024 will be almost the same as it is now, and it can only go up by 1% in 2025.
Other accomplishments, such as persuading the Biden administration to divert $20 billion in anticipated funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to other non-defense sectors and removing the protracted COVID-era moratorium on student loan repayments, have been hailed by McCarthy as successes.
For Bannon and the House Freedom Caucus, $4 trillion is the most important figure. Irrespective of the “marginal, small cuts” that the top officials of both parties agreed to, he earlier told Newsweek that the agreement will increase the national debt by at least that amount.
McCarthy was outmatched, according to Bannon, by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who praised Biden’s leadership for thwarting the “extremism” of the House Republicans during discussions and claimed the final package was a Democratic win.
The number of House Republicans “holding the floor” in the current session is sufficient to prevent McCarthy from even calling procedural votes on proposed legislation that would prevent the outlawing of gas stoves.
“Right now [McCarthy’s] being bled out every day on this, and if these guys seize the floor, they’re not going to give it up,” Bannon added. “This is a forcing function to show that he’s actually in partnership with Hakeem Jeffries—that Hakeem Jeffries is actually the majority leader and not [Republican] Steve Scalise.”
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In an interview with Punchbowl News on Wednesday, Scalise, the No. 2 Republican in the House, acknowledged “anger” within his party. He claimed he had no significant influence on the Fiscal Responsibility Act negotiations and wasn’t aware of every pledge made by the majority leader in January that allowed him to win the necessary votes to take the gavel in the first place.
“Fox [News] can’t cover that up, that ‘this is unity, this is compromise’ when people realize this is a Democratic bill now….There’s a fantasy out there that [McCarthy] can exist with four Democratic votes, but the base of the Republican Party’s not gonna support that,” according to Bannon, who described Jeffries as an imposing New York politician.
“These congressmen are gonna go back to their districts and people are gonna crush them. They’re gonna sit there and go, ‘What are you talking about? We did all this work and Hakeem Jeffries is your partner? Screw you. We’re not going to tolerate it.'”.
Tom Emmer, the Republican House Majority Whip sees things differently, though.
“House Republicans have been extremely successful as a team for the first five months doing things people never thought possible,” Emmer said to Newsweek. “It’s unrealistic to expect there will be no disagreements when there are 222 personalities involved, and we’re going to come out the other side even stronger as a team.”
Despite the fact that a motion to remove McCarthy as speaker only needs one vote, Bannon, the host of the well-known War Room podcast, called it a “blunt force instrument.” Instead, he believes that McCarthy’s continuing resistance would create a precedent that will cause almost half of the 149 Republicans in “deep red districts” to flip against him.
“Everything about the deal is awful,” Bannon declared. “And the key mortal sin you can’t ever recover from is making two years uncapped. They technically called a recession for the Eurozone today. China is in a freefall because of American demand. Our economy slowing down. The World Bank just gave a best case with the U.S. giving 1.1 percent growth.
“We’re f*****, and one reason we’re f***** is this deal. And that was a Republican pushing it. He cannot remain.”
