Exclusive — Rep. Mary Miller: Speaker Race Gave House GOP ‘Massive Power over’ Senate Spending Bills

Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) said during an appearance on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Saturday that the drawn out speaker race election was a “big victory” because it united House Republicans ahead of the anticipated debt ceiling fight with the White House and Democrat-controlled Senate.

“I can’t say enough what a big victory this was for the American people. The impact of it is going to be long. My goal always was to get concrete policy changes on spending and on our debt,” Miller said.

Miller, one of the roughly 20 members who initially voted against electing now-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), ultimately flipped her vote once she and most of the other holdouts had established with McCarthy an agreeable set of House rules, which included, among its many provisions, prohibiting net increases on mandatory government spending and requiring a higher voting threshold to pass any tax increases.

Republicans on the whole have said they will not vote to increase the nation’s $31.4 trillion debt limit this year without seeing substantial spending cuts or structural spending changes.

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“On Christmas Eve, the Senate sent over that $1.7 trillion omnibus that is gonna bring our national debt up to $31 trillion. Biden spent over $5 trillion in two years, and people are suffering,” Miller said. “This is what the inflation is from. It’s from government spending and creating all this money, but our bill is going to put hard spending caps at the fiscal year ’22 level, and it’s going to give us an ability to block omnis from the Senate like what we had. I mean, it’s giving us massive power over what the Senate sends over.”

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has indicated that the U.S. could see a disastrous government default sometime in June if Congress does not vote to raise or suspend the debt ceiling, and the Biden administration has said it will not negotiate concessions with the House in exchange for increasing borrowing limits.

“I can tell you that the 20 of us, or 19 of us, are back together hashing out where we can cut, and we’re talking discretionary spending, not Social Security or Medicare benefits, but discretionary spending,” Miller said. “The American people are tired of the government sending money to other countries, wasting our money, $100 billion to Ukraine. I mean, this is the kind of spending cuts that we can make and make a difference.”

Miller added that the post-speaker race sentiment among the GOP conference, which she said included “the RINOs that are practically Democrats,” “the centrists,” and the hardline conservative House Freedom Caucus members such as herself, has seemed “more positive” heading into the debt limit battle.

She said, “Actually, the whole conference seems different, seems more positive, more united, and more excited about doing things for the American people, starting with these spending cuts.”