The Washington Post published a good profile over the weekend on a congressional staffer most Americans have probably never heard of. His name is Dan Meyer, he’s House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s chief of staff, and as the Post put it, “no other person — save McCarthy — is expected to play a more pivotal role this year in trying to steer House Republicans through a series of potentially explosive conflicts.”
Of particular interest in the piece was Meyer’s concerns about rank-and-file House Republican members making demands on spending “that will prove difficult, if not impossible, for McCarthy to reconcile.” From the article:
The party’s demands for spending cuts have also become increasingly outlandish. On a recent private phone call with a longtime colleague after McCarthy was elected speaker, Meyer marveled at the seeming absurdity of his position. As Meyer told his friend, McCarthy is in a nearly impossible bind, having vowed to advance a budget proposal that eradicates the deficit in a decade without touching Medicare and Social Security or increasing taxes.
None of this should surprise anyone. McCarthy is not a congressional rookie, and he must’ve understood that he was making promises that he couldn’t possibly keep: Balancing the federal budget in a decade without raising taxes on anyone, and without touching social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare, would require GOP lawmakers to propose brutally ridiculous cuts to practically every other part of the federal budget.
As Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, told The New York Times, “If you say that you’re going to eliminate the deficit by the end of the decade, but you say you’re not going to touch Social Security, you’re not going to touch Medicare, you’re not going to touch defense — that means you have to cut 100 percent of everything that’s left. So I welcome this debate. Math is on our side.”
McCarthy…
Read the full article here
