What They Are Saying: Conservatives Tout GOP Wins in Fiscal Responsibility Act
Washington,
May 31, 2023 -
Today, House Republicans—under the leadership of Speaker Kevin McCarthy—will vote on a bipartisan agreement to get America’s fiscal house in order, while raising the debt limit. For the first time in a debt ceiling negotiation, House Republicans secured historic spending cuts, the largest funding rescissions in history, and pro-growth regulatory reforms. Here’s what notable conservative leaders and editorial boards are saying about the Republican wins in the agreement:
“The agreement reached Saturday night between Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden is an historic first step toward shifting government back toward common sense and conservatism. It is a step toward creating a smaller government, lower taxes, less regulation, economic growth, prosperity, and more take home pay. All of this will also strengthen Social Security and Medicare. … Every House Republican now faces a simple choice: Help take the first step and move on to even bigger steps – or fight about it and hand the initiative over to President Biden and the Democrats. … They should all vote "yes," and prove the House Republicans are now leading the future of America.”
“As the various factions on Capitol Hill pore over the proposed debt ceiling deal, I cannot help but wonder at how much the conservative wing of the Republican Party has been able to accomplish in this process. … And from where I am sitting, we are witnessing a miracle — a minor miracle, perhaps, but a miracle just the same. That’s because there will actually be some spending reductions as part of this deal. Not large reductions, by any measure. But some. There are some policy reforms as well — not a lot, but some. There is even some COVID money clawed back — not as much as some Republicans would have liked, but some. … So, I will take “some” minor victories. “Some,” after all, is a lot better than what conservatives got the last couple of times the debt ceiling was raised.”
“One measure of strong leadership is the ability to focus on a specific goal while ignoring the noise until you achieve that goal. … In this case, Speaker McCarthy understood that our country finds itself in a uniquely treacherous time in our economic history, and that strong medicine is required to avoid significant economy upheaval. … They motivated him to pass the House debt-limit bill containing key reforms despite heavy odds against success. They him the resolve to stay firm at the negotiating table until this deal was settled. … And it shows those who believe policy needs to change even more in the future that Washington now has a powerful agent of change in charge of the House of Representatives. That’s progress. That’s leadership.”
“McCarthy outmaneuvered the White House and has negotiated a deal that has valuable concessions that conservatives have demanded: strict spending caps for 2024, a green light on new energy permitting, no new student-loan bailouts, reinstituting work requirements for welfare, a rescission of some $50 billion of unspent COVID money and new limits on President Biden’s job-killing regulations.”
“Given that Speaker Kevin McCarthy is in a much weaker position than then-Speaker John Boehner, it’s a better deal than you might expect. $1.5 trillion in savings in the first two years is in reality a spending cut of around $900 billion, compared to $2.4 trillion in a ten-year window. The McConnell-Ryan-Trump spending bills were much worse — and many of the people lobbying against this deal also backed those.”
“Conservatives should welcome the deal that the GOP House negotiated against an obstinate Biden Administration. Is the package everything we want on the Right? No. But it represents tangible success and a key starting marker for fiscal sanity in Washington. … With control over only the House, at present, this agreement represents a worthy deal that should receive the support of patriotic populists. Then, it should be used as a foundational steppingstone to far more expansive economic and fiscal wins ahead.”
“This weekend, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), House Republican leadership, and President Biden settled on a 99-page debt-ceiling deal. The bill, formally introduced as the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) in the House, consists of numerous, significant wins for conservative priorities. While the deal does not go as far as Republicans’ Limit, Save, Grow Act(H.R. 2811), it is a crucial step in the right direction. Fortunately, the bill does not include any tax hikes or leftist priorities.”
“Divided government is rarely pretty, but sometimes it can yield good results. That’s the case with the weekend debt-ceiling deal negotiated by President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy, which shows what can happen when House Republicans stick together. The deal is a significant victory for GOP priorities, in return for raising the debt ceiling that had to be raised anyway. … Assuming the deal passes Congress, it will defy the Democratic narrative that Republicans can’t govern. Mr. McCarthy’s troops are proving they can, and conservatives would be foolish to abandon the victories in this deal.”
“The ‘agreement in principle’ includes many wins for the American public. It’s a two-year budget deal that will hold government spending flat for 2024 and increase it by 1% for 2025 while raising the nation’s borrowing limit for the same period. It limits top-line federal spending to 1% annual growth for the next six years. Small spending increases were given for veterans affairs and defense. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget described it as ‘the first major deficit-reducing budget agreement in almost a dozen years.’ … The speaker did his job. Now it’s time for the Senate to do theirs.”
“Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s debt-limit deal with President Joe Biden is a compromise, of course: Less good than the House-passed bill, but far better than anything the White House or the Democratic-controlled Senate would ever produce on their own. The key is that it advances the GOP’s control-spending agenda significantly, on multiple fronts. Most crucially, it starts reducing federal outlays immediately, rolling back most domestic non-entitlement outlays to the prior year’s levels — that is, it cuts some spending rammed through when Democrat still ran the House. That by itself is the first such major spending-reduction ever. … Credit McCarthy with playing his cards well enough that this compromise is a lot closer to the GOP’s vision than the Dems’.”
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