Democrat Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said that members of his conference don’t trust the House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and need more time to review the speaker’s last-minute stopgap bill.
Mr. McCarthy, California Republican, is gambling on whether Democrats will support his newly unveiled bill, which would continue funding the government at current levels, last for 45 days and include $16 billion in disaster aid after his own conference shot down a previous stopgap with a wishlist of conservative priorities.
The speaker moved to put his bill on the floor under suspension, meaning that it can avoid timely procedural votes at the cost of reaching a two-thirds majority of votes in the House.
However, Mr. Jeffries said that his conference cannot trust what the Republicans are doing until they get time to review the bill. He likened Mr. McCarthy’s “eleventh-hour” attempt to the promise that the speaker made that an impeachment inquiry into President Biden would get a floor vote, which never happened.
“You drop a bill, tell America that it’s a clean continuing resolution, and we’re expected as elected representatives just to blindly vote on it like sheep,” Mr. Jeffries said. “With that record of having your credibility undermined over and over and over again, at minimum, we need time on behalf of the American people that we represent to evaluate the continuing resolution that will be before the House of Representatives.”
