(The Center Square) – U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-KY, said on Monday he wouldn’t be voting for a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government, saying any debate or perceived fight over funding issues between Republicans and Democrats is “political theater.”
He also said a bill to prevent noncitizens from voting won’t be signed into law.
“Can we be honest with the American people about what's going on here?” he asked colleagues at a U.S. House Committee on Rules meeting held to discuss the Continuing Appropriations and Other Matters Act of 2025. The CR is a temporary spending bill Congress passes instead of a balanced budget and individual appropriations bills.
“This is political theater. I'm going to call out both sides right here. It's all posturing. It's fake fighting. We all know where it ends up,” he said as Congress convenes to approve a CR by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year, to continue funding the government.
Massie said it doesn’t matter if the House Speaker were a Democrat or Republican, a CR always comes before Congress instead of passing a balanced budget.
The CR arrives in September “and then we get an omnibus,” he said, sometimes before Christmas. “We've got some good theater. We've got great writers. I wish they'd just come up with a new plot. It's the same plot every fiscal year.”
Instead of balancing a budget and cutting spending, Congress continues to spend taxpayer money it doesn’t have, he argues. “We never cut spending … because Democrats want to grow the welfare state and Republicans want to grow the military industrial complex.” He said both will get what they want instead of Congress implementing fiscal restraint.
According to Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, Congress has power over the purse to control and cut spending. After sitting through nearly two years of hearings that “exposed lies at the CDC, shortcuts at the FDA, unconstitutional gun bans at the ATF, over prosecution of January Sixers, the DOJ targeting common citizens, spying by the NSA, illegal mandates for livestock by the USDA, … the censorship industrial complex,” he said Congress can cut the funding of these agencies to address these issues.
“I think most Democrats are just fine with this kind of totalitarian state that the bureaucrats are pushing on us, but Republicans at least pretend to be against these things,” he said.
Regardless, both will vote to fund “every freaking one of those things that we have exposed,” instead of using the one tool Congress has to stop them.
“Why are we funding things we don't like? We don't have to,” he said. The answer is, “because we're addicted to spending.”
He also said there’s usually “a bright shiny object” attached to the CR; this time it’s the SAVE Act, filed by U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas. The bill was filed to implement a range of measures to ensure noncitizens don’t vote in federal elections.
The House passed it in June largely along party lines with five Democrats voting with Republicans. A coalition of nearly two dozen attorneys general called on the Senate to act, to no avail, The Center Square reported . The bill has gone nowhere.
It was filed after House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, met with former President Donald Trump raising concerns that Democrats were registering noncitizens to vote in the election in November.
“Election integrity is tied to the border,” Johnson said . “We only want U.S. citizens to vote in U.S. elections, but there are some Democrats who don't want to do that … because they want to turn these people into voters.”
Massie said that while he agrees with the purpose of the SAVE Act, adding it to the CR was “good political theater. We’re going to see almost every Democrat cast a vote so that illegals can vote in our elections.”
The American people will be “all revved up,” he said, thinking, “we're going to save these elections. We're going to stop the illegals from voting.”
“Really? How are you going to do that six weeks before the election?” he asked. “They're already registered, if they're going to vote, some of them probably already voted,” he said of noncitizens, including illegal border crossers.
“This SAVE Act ain't going to save anything,” he continued. “It ain't ever going to become law. It's a false promise to get all the Republicans half pregnant. Then you're going to get fully pregnant by the end of September when you vote for this CR,” which won’t have the SAVE Act attached anymore, he said.
“This is political theater. We all know where it ends up. I've been here 12 years. I've seen it 12 times. I refuse to be a thespian in this failure theater.”
A CR with the SAVE Act attached “is an insult to Americans’ intelligence. The CR doesn’t cut spending, and the shiny object attached to it will be dropped like a hot potato before passage.”
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