House Republicans have vented their frustration Friday after a House GOP stopgap spending bill failed resoundingly on the floor.
Rep. Mike Lawler, a swing district Republican in New York, said Friday afternoon that there is only one person to blame for the looming government shutdown: “charlatan” Rep. Matt Gaetz.
“Unfortunately, a handful of people, and in particular a party of one, Matt Gaetz, have chosen to put his own agenda, his own personal agenda, above all else. There’s only one person to blame for any potential government shutdown. And that’s Matt Gaetz. He is not a conservative Republican. He’s a charlatan,” Lawler told CNN’s Manu Raju.
(Gaetz has been a central figure of resistance to Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s attempts at finding a last-minute deal. The two got into a testy exchange Thursday during a closed-door meeting, according to a source in the room.)
Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas, speaking to press immediately after the failed vote, also went after conservatives who tanked the GOP’s stopgap measure.
“They killed the most conservative position we could take and then called themselves the real conservatives, which is like — make that make sense. You can’t make it make sense. And so now you’re going to get a more liberal spending bill,” he told CNN, blaming the 21 Republicans who voted against the House’s bill.
Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus who helped negotiate the spending bill that failed Friday afternoon, said Republicans who killed the bill made a poor decision.
“They made a bad vote. That’s my position,” Donalds told CNN.
Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas, a senior GOP appropriator, slammed many of the 21 dissenters for not even attending the closed-door meeting where lawmakers tried to hash out their differences Friday.
“We’re the governing majority. This is what we’re supposed to do as a governing majority: We’re supposed to lead,” Womack said. But it’s hard to do so when the caucus can’t get on the same page, he added.
Rep. Ralph Norman said he was “disappointed” that Speaker McCarthy didn’t whip the vote more as he lamented that the House, in his view, has ceded their position to the Senate.
“I hate we ceded the purse strings to the Senate,” Norman told reporters. “We’ll live to fight another day.”
Other conservatives defended their decision: But hardliner Gaetz continued his attacks against speaker McCarthy after the vote and said that he doesn’t believe a continuing resolution will pass the House.
“Right now my sole focus is on getting our single subject spending bills passed. The speaker’s continuing resolution went down in flames. As I’ve told you all week it would. The house of representatives can pass single subject spending bills, we will not pass a continuing resolution on terms that continue America’s decline,” he told CNN.
Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee, a hardliner who also voted against the stopgap measure, pushed back against leadership and blamed them for not having more urgency earlier this year.
This post has been updated with additional comments from GOP lawmakers.
