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‘A shutdown in December shouldn’t be off the table’
U.S. Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) doesn’t fit the media mold for the typical chairman of the House’s conservative Freedom Caucus. He was born in New York to parents who had immigrated just a few years before. He went to high school in Manhattan, became a doctor, and today serves as deep-blue Maryland’s only Republican congressman.
If that’s not enough, Harris is an appropriator — and not just rank and file, but a “cardinal,” or chairman, of one of appropriations' 12 subcommittees.
'The beauty is that we could reopen the government Jan. 3, when we take over. So it would basically be three days nobody's working.'
He was elected chairman at a perilous time for the caucus, which turns 10 in January. His predecessor, Rep. Bob Good of Virginia, lost a bitterly close summer primary after he was targeted by ranking members of the Trump campaign. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson’s bid to attach six months of government funding to the election-protecting SAVE Act just exploded on the launch pad. And Republicans are staring down the barrel of a massive Christmas omnibus that that threatens to tie the next administration’s hands for most of 2025.
Harris sat down Tuesday morning with the Beltway Brief to explain why the speaker’s CR fight was the right thing to do and why a December shutdown might be worthwhile, discuss consequences for leadership members if they side with the Democrats, and give us a peek at what it’s like to come to work with a delegation that wants to imprison more Republicans.
This interview has been edited slightly for length and clarity.
Beltway Brief: You come in at an interesting time in Congress. Something seems to be changing every day, but as it stands right now, there’s no SAVE Act going through (at least not attached to spending), no clean six-month CR; there doesn’t seem to be any promise not to have an omnibus from leadership, and it appears the three-month CR might be passing under suspension with Democratic votes.
You’re in charge of the Freedom Caucus now — or at least trying to chair it as much as anyone can. What are some of the next moves for a Congress that is divided and even a Freedom Caucus that itself voted in different directions in the last fight?
Rep. Andy Harris: Obviously what we have till the end of the year is we’re going to have a big spending battle, and we’ve got to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The bottom line is we should have passed that six-month CR with SAVE. SAVE is incredibly important to the integrity of the election. The speaker is absolutely right about that. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get enough Republican votes to pass it, so we’re going to do what we’ve done in the past — punt this into December.
The difference is that the speaker has indicated he will not back an omnibus. I managed to help get this to December 20 instead of earlier in the month because I believe that a shutdown in December shouldn’t be off the table. You know, it’s not going to affect an election 23 months later. It’s going to send a message to the Democrats that we’re serious about cutting spending, and if you’re not serious about it with us, if we win the House and the Senate and the presidency, we’ll just kick this into the next year and take care of it. Then I think that’s the best way to proceed.
BB: Do you think you can get your colleagues behind a shutdown fight right before Christmas? Social Security checks, all the drama they’re going to try to drop on you from the media?
AH: Well, the beauty is that we could reopen the government Jan. 3, when we take over. So it would basically be three days nobody’s working. Jan. 1 falls on a Wednesday. I bet you most federal employees are taking Thursday and Friday as vacation days. So basically, nothing’s going to happen in the government for three days, and then when we come back on the 3rd, God willing, we hold the majorities. Different deal. New sheriff in town. Let’s get a handle on spending.
‘The conversation in Washington for about a month around the time of the last indictments and trials was almost entirely, “Oh, he's a felon. He’s a convict. He’s this and this.” That’s totally gone.'
BB: Now, you’re an appropriator. I think one of four in the Freedom Caucus — the most senior of them. And you’ve got a three-month trial period as chairman of the caucus. But this is a new tactic for the Freedom Caucus to go with. Conservatives have sometimes been criticized by people on appropriations, saying, “You guys talk a big game, but you don't even know how to do this.” What is the future, then, for some of the tactical changes that you’re going to try to make in this rather difficult time?
AH: Historically, I think there's been only one other time in the past 40 years that we’ve gone from ... Democrat control of at least two of the three, the Senate and the president, to complete control by Republicans. To me, that’s a completely different scenario.
I tell people every CR is not the same. When you have a CR that potentially could go into a new administration where you hold all the levers of power, that’s very different from a CR where you’re just going to be negotiating, as I say, an omnibus bill just before Christmas. You know, lard it up with $100 billion in extra Senate spending. That doesn’t even count the emergency spending, the supplemental spending that the Senate wants to do.
This is going to be a huge battle in December, and I hope the speaker is up for it. I hope that he is true to his word. We're not going to deal with an omnibus bill larded up with all kinds of goodies for Christmas, and [we'll] be willing to say, “Look, if you're not going to do the work for the American people of controlling the spending, we’ll see you on Jan. 3.”
BB: And you're no stranger to fights with Republicans over politics. You entered the Maryland Senate primarying a sitting incumbent. Your first shot at the House of Representatives was the same. Right now, you’ve got the Congress seemingly split into so many different groups. You’ve got the 12-billers who don’t want to vote for any CR, the folks who are still mad at basically any speakership, and those who don’t want to do anything that’s going to upset the Pentagon. What’s the sort of path to bringing those sorts of people together, not only for people like yourself or the Freedom Caucus but for Republican leadership and the role they might play in that?
AH: I’m going to deal with just one of those groups you talked about: the defense folks. I mean, the bottom line is they’re always against continuing resolutions because in the past, continuing resolutions have always merely continued the defense spending from the last year again into the CR period.
There is no reason you can't write a continuing resolution that has all the stops and starts the Department of Defense needs. There's no reason you couldn’t do it. We could pass it in such a way that the defense appropriators would be quite happy with it.
But again, the powers in Washington want defense spending coupled with non-defense spending. So when we negotiate up defense spending, there's a big plus-up in non-defense spending. As far as I’m concerned, we broke that parity several years ago, and that parity was here since I’ve been in Washington. We broke that parity.
Now it’s time to take the next step, which is say, let’s break defense away from the rest of the continuing resolutions. Let’s treat it separately because, honestly, in this day and age with Russia and China able to turn on a dime in terms of new defense strategies and programs, we need to make sure that we can do that.
But we can do it. We just have to stop doing things the way we’ve always done them, and there's no reason not to. I’ve proposed this now for several months, and everybody nods, “Well, that’s pretty good idea," you know?
But then they say, “We can’t do it because we’ve never done it.” Well, that's not a reason any more. We’ve never had a $35 trillion federal debt. We’ve had $2 trillion-plus deficits for several years in a row. It’s about time to try something new.
BB: I know everything changes if there’s a Republican majority coming in the Senate, the House, and then the White House. But what changes for the speaker if he ends up passing an omnibus under suspension with more Democrats than Republicans?
AH: He’s in trouble if he passes an omnibus with suspension. Because ... he told us Tuesday morning he is not going to agree to an omnibus in December. ... So I think we should hold them to that.
BB: I'll switch track briefly to some Maryland moments here because you represent the Eastern Shore. You’re from Cambridge, or at least live in Cambridge. So you a hunter or fisherman?
AH: Fish.
BB: Old Bay or vinegar on your crabs?
AH: Old Bay.
If the Democrats take control, Jamie Raskin will be in charge of stuff, and we’ve heard what he says.
BB: When are Republicans going to win the Maryland panhandle?
AH: I hope this year! I mean, the bottom line is ... because of our court case, the Democrats drew that to be a toss-up district. With Rep. David Trone (D) the incumbent, it was almost impossible to win because he could throw tens of millions of dollars at it — and he did. But now that he’s not there, it’s an open seat. This is Neil Parrott’s third run, he is widely known in the district, the polls show an absolute toss-up. It’s all going to depend on who turns out their votes.
BB: We could liberate Deep Creek.
AH: We absolutely could! And I could stop being the only Republican in the entire Maryland delegation.
BB: As the only Republican in the Maryland delegation, do you think it's going to be awkward in Rep. Jamie Raskin’s prison camp in January, or how is that going to work out?
AH: Haha! Just fine! Look, you bring up a good point. I’m worried. I mean, if the Democrats take control, Jamie Raskin will be in charge of stuff, and we’ve heard what he says.
The Democrats want to lock up their opponents. That’s the bottom line. They tried it with the president, and it was so, so much fun to watch, you know? Every time they’d indict him or accuse him of something else, his poll numbers went up. It’s incredible. It’s interesting.
If you listen to what's gone on the past month and a half, they stopped talking about it! Because they know every time they’ve talked about it, the independents, the hardworking men and women of America, look at that and go, “That’s unfair. We know there’s a two-tier system. There’s a system for the wealthy and a system for us, and they're treating President Trump like they treat us.”
And they don't like it, so they’ve stopped talking about it. It is fascinating to have watched. The conversation in Washington for about a month around the time of the last indictments and trials was almost entirely, “Oh, he's a felon. He's a convict. He's this and this.” That’s totally gone.
I think Kamala made one mention of it in the debate, briefly, and that's it. That wasn't the point she was pounding home. Because every time she pounds it, her numbers would go down and the former president’s numbers would go up.
BB: You can see the T-shirts for sale on the Ocean City Boardwalk. That’s when you know you're starting to actually change the culture.
AH: Oh, I know it. When I go into town on the Eastern Shore, I see an “I'm Voting for the Felon” shirt or hat almost everywhere I go.
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