McCarthy’s Catastrophic Credit Scam
U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is planning to punch through his narrowly divided House an attempt to require catastrophic cuts to clean energy, pollution control, and nearly every health and human services program nationwide. It’s his attempt to hold the American economy hostage to the pro-polluter agenda of his party’s most extreme fringe.
Observers not steeped in the arcana of weird Congressional rules are often puzzled by the predictable, repeated, and artificially created “crises” of paying the bills for spending that Congress has already authorized. They pass budgets year after year with huge deficits, and then pretend to adhere to an artificial “debt ceiling” that they know from the start they’ll have to exceed.
The hypocrisy on display is jaw-dropping, but it always provides an opportunity for the more extreme political elements in Congress (like those currently in control of McCarthy’s narrow majority) to put their true priorities on display. That’s the case now—and the conservation voters movement has wasted no time in calling them out on it.
“Speaker McCarthy’s proposal is reckless and dangerous. House Republicans’ idea of an “opening bid” is to slash the popular and affordable clean energy plan (the Inflation Reduction Act), jam through the Polluters Over People Act, and gut critical environmental protections in exchange for not causing an economic catastrophe, all to appease their Big Oil donors. Right now, our country is at the start of a clean energy boom that is lowering costs and putting people to work. McCarthy’s list of demands would halt that progress when we need it most. As if that weren’t bad enough, draconian cuts to agencies like EPA would severely curtail support for small drinking water systems and monitoring communities for exposure to pollution in the air, land, and water,” declared League of Conservation Voters (LCV) Senior Vice President for Government Affairs Tiernan Sittenfeld.
Sittenfeld added, “The ongoing climate crisis, as well as recent environmental disasters like the train derailment in Ohio, underscore that we should be increasing, not cutting, funding for environmental protection and spurring the clean energy economy. House Republicans must abandon these stunts to appease Big Polluters and their MAGA base before their plans result in higher energy costs and the loss of the clean energy manufacturing boom that is already underway. It is dangerous and irresponsible to play politics with a default crisis looming.”
Senate leaders declared this dangerous and irresponsible gambit by McCarthy and his caucus to be ‘dead on arrival’ in the Senate. President Joe Biden affirmed his insistence on a ‘clean’ debt limit increase, repeating that he would negotiate on the budget only in the context of a bill to enact a new budget.
