Rep. Dave Brat said Thursday that House Speaker Paul Ryan deserves a high grade for trying to bring back regular order to the House, but still said the massive spending deal Ryan is hoping to pass on Friday deserves an “F.”
“Not a good deal,” said Brat, the Virginia Republican and member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, on C-SPAN Thursday morning. “This is what happens when you don’t follow regular order.”
“He’s moving in good faith to make sure this does not happen again, so I give him an ‘A’ or ‘B’ on process,” Brat said of Ryan’s effort so far. “But on the product, this end product from this year, it’s an ‘F.'”
Brat and many other Republicans are giving Ryan a pass on the huge $1.1 trillion spending bill and the extra $80 billion it spends over the next two years, in large part because the bill was set up by Ryan’s predecessor, John Boehner. Many GOP members said the real test will be next year, when it will be seen if Ryan can avoid another giant spending bill at the end of the year.
“Even [Ryan] says, he says this is no way to run a budget process,” Brat said. “On prior bills from the last four weeks, he just got in, he’s been doing his best to follow regular order.”
“He has the budget set up already for next year so that we’ll complete it in late February, early March, which is a month ahead of time,” Brat added. “So we’ll go to appropriations ahead of time.”
Under the deal struck by Boehner, the sequester was lifted for defense and non-defense discretionary spending, which means $80 billion more in spending. In addition, a related tax extender deal would put the U.S. another $680 billion in debt.
Brat said the last-minute legislative package busts through the budget caps that Republicans approved earlier this year.
“We lost $106 billion in deficit reduction, and so just on the numbers I’m a ‘no’ vote,” he said. “I’m an economist by training, and that’s the major lift I came here to do, not passing more debt onto the next generation.”
Brat also predicted that no one would have time to read the deal. When asked how many members would read the more than 2,000 pages in the spending bill, he said, “None.”
