Arizona congressman on stopgap government funding bill: ‘It’s going to pass’
Dec 18, 2024, 8:58 AM
U.S. Rep. David Schweikert of Arizona, seen offering pizza to media members in October 2023, believes Congress will pass a continuing resolution in time to avoid a government shutdown. (File Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
(File Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
PHOENIX – U.S. Rep. David Schweikert of Arizona doesn’t think there’s any reason to worry about a potential government shutdown despite a looming funding deadline.
The Republican from Arizona’s 1st Congressional District said Wednesday that he’s confident Congress will approve a continuing resolution before the midnight Friday deadline.
“You’ll hear some of the political class and the reporting class, you know: ‘It’s a shutdown!’’’ Schweikert told KTAR News 92.3 FM’s Arizona’s Morning News. “No, it’s going to pass.”
Schweikert is a conservative budget hawk who just won his eighth term representing north Phoenix, Scottsdale and other northeast Valley suburbs.
What does Schweikert think about content of continuing resolution?
He said that while there are plenty of things he doesn’t like about the continuing resolution under consideration, he believes the stopgap funding measure has enough support from both parties to get through Congress.
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“They bought enough votes. … It will be Republicans and Democrats, and it’s lame duck, so you have a number of members here who won’t be here in January, so they don’t have a lot of skin in the game. They’ll vote for it, so I think it’s fine,” the Republican said.
Schweikert said lawmakers took advantage of the time crunch to load the continuing resolution with policy and pork barrel spending that aren’t related to keeping the government running.
“They’re turning it into what we call an omnibus, or mini omnibus, bill of ‘let’s just shove a bunch of stuff into it that hasn’t gone through hearings,’” he said. “So, I’m here going through 1,500 pages, my whole staff’s in different rooms with different parts of it, and we’re just really annoyed,” he said.
Schweikert’s biggest peeve is a provision to erase a backlog of $1.7 trillion in spending offsets.
“In one little paragraph, they say, ‘Oh, we’re just going pretend it’s not there; we’re going to set it all back to zero,” he said. “So, all the discipline for budget and spending that you hear the political class talk about, their secret is we just wait for a bill like this and just reset it and ignore it.”
