Republican Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) tore into his GOP colleagues during a Thursday appearance on Newsmax, criticizing their approach to government funding and saying his colleagues in the party have “nothing to campaign on.”
Biggs, former chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, slammed his conference after being asked how many of the 12 individual spending bills the House Republicans completed during an appearance on “The Chris Salcedo Show.”
“None. None. None have been completed,” Biggs said. “There’ve been a few of them. Seven I think have been sent to the Senate from the House. The Senate has not taken up a single one of those bills. How do you campaign on the trust of the American people? You failed and continue to fund this goofy Ukraine, this outrageous Ukraine debacle that’s going on.”
“We have nothing to go out there and campaign on, Chris. It’s embarrassing.”
Biggs’s agitation comes as House and Senate conservatives threaten to shut down the government unless Senate Democrats and the White House agree to secure the southern border. The border fight has delayed the supplemental funding bill that would allocate funds for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.
House Republican hard-liners have grown skeptical about Ukraine funding but recently expressed that they would support the supplemental package for the embattled country if Congress passes their proposed border security bill, H.R. 2. Some conservatives said Wednesday they were looking to add major border security revisions to regular government funding bills, while supplementary foreign aid remains stalled in the process.
“There’s going to be a big effort to make sure we do nothing on funding unless we secure the border,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) told The Hill on Wednesday. “That’s going to be the big fight.”
“Everybody knows that the southern border now is a clear and present danger, the country knows it’s a clear and present danger. The numbers [of migrants] are staggering,” he said. “I’m going to work with anybody I can to make sure there won’t be any funding bill done until there’s a secure border.”
If Congress doesn’t provide funding for military construction and the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Energy, Transportation and Housing and Urban Development by Jan. 19, the government will go into a partial shutdown. The rest of the government needs to be funded by Feb. 2.