If they win a majority in the November midterms, as currently predicted by most analysts, House Republicans will likely threaten a government shutdown in 2023 to force Democrats to cut Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare spending.
Bloomberg recently interviewed the four top GOP candidates to lead the House Budget Committee and they all indicated they plan, in varying ways, to force a ceiling on spending.
The plan is strikingly similar to the events following the 2010 midterm election in which the Republican-led House set in motion a partial government shutdown and told then-President Barack Obama that they wouldn’t address the debt ceiling until he agreed with their terms on Social Security and Medicare. If the president rejects their terms, their plan is to allow the government to default and purposefully crash.
Republicans also tried to carry out that plan when President Bill Clinton was in office. Both times led to less-than-desirable results.
Coercing the president to do what they want through threatening government shutdown has never in popular and even contributed to Clinton winning his second term in the White House.
“House Republicans are openly threatening to cause an economic catastrophe in order to realize their obsession with slashing Medicare and Social Security,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosispokesman Henry Connelly told Bloomberg. “As House Republican leaders’ own words constantly reveal, dismantling the pillars of American seniors’ financial security is not a fringe view in the extreme MAGA House GOP, it is a broadly held obsession at the core of their legislative agenda.”
