Speaker McCarthy Tells Biden: Work With GOP on Border Bill and Avert Government Shutdown

Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s latest plan to avoid a government shutdown — with just four days to go before federal funding expires and no viable legislative solution in hand — involves trying to convince President Biden that adopting some of GOP hardliners’ border security demands is a win-win for everyone. 

“You don’t even have to write a law,” McCarthy said during a Capitol Hill press conference, campaigning, in effect, for Biden to unilaterally act on immigration policy through executive actions.

“Pull something back and let's fund this government for a short time period," McCarthy said.

The bid to get Biden to bite on the polarizing border bill that far-right members of the House Freedom Caucus threw into the stopgap spending deliberations a few weeks ago comes as McCarthy now faces the Herculean task of having to pass 11 appropriations bills that violate the prescribed spending caps the White House agreed to earlier this year. 

The piecemeal approach, which won’t defuse a looming shutdown because those bills have no chance in the Democratic-controlled Senate, is what House Republicans settled on after trying, and failing, to get their colleagues to even agree on bringing up a Pentagon funding bill — an effort in futility that blew up in leadership’s faces twice last week. 

While insisting he’ll bring up the previously shelved, stopgap-border bundle for an uncertain floor vote before the lights go out overnight on Saturday, McCarthy urged Biden to give a little. And trust in him. 

“I'll be the first one there to work with him — just like we did on the debt ceiling,” McCarthy told reporters.

The White House signaled the president has little trust in the House speaker.

Citing the dangers of furloughing border agents to stop the flow of lethal substances into the United States, White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández said in a statement to The Messenger that House Republicans are "marching the country towards a government shutdown that would leave hundreds of thousands of federal law enforcement personnel unpaid. It is time for House Republicans to get serious about providing federal agencies the resources they need to combat the flow of illicit drugs.”