McCarthy Delivers Implicit Rebuke of Unified Republican Government During Trump Years: ‘They Didn’t Cut Anything!’

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) delivered an implicit rebuke of the unified Republican government under former president Donald Trump from 2017-2019 on Tuesday, noting that it didn’t result in any meaningful budget cuts whatsoever.

“Do you realize that of all the Congresses in the past, you can add up all of the money that they rescinded and add them together, this is higher than that,” McCarthy told a group of reporters on Capitol Hill.

“I’m not sure what everybody wanted,” continued the speaker, referencing GOP holdouts who have expressed their opposition to a debt ceiling deal he brokered with President Joe Biden. “We couldn’t get everything we wanted, and when we had this debate, you couldn’t talk about the whole budget. So in essence we were only able to focus on 11% of the budget. And when the Freedom Caucus talks about wanting to suspend back to 2022, the non-defense is back lower than 2022. Veterans get more money and defense gets more money.”

Later, McCarthy compared his work favorably to that of the Republican-controlled 115th Congress, when Paul Ryan was speaker and McCarthy served as majority leader:

This is a House, a Senate, and a presidency. I think when you read the Wall Street Journal, you read the New York Post, you sit back and listen to a lot of economists, they’ll say ‘this is the strongest debt ceiling we’ve ever had.’ And if I compare it to when Republicans were in the majority, when they had the House, the Senate, and the presidency, they didn’t cut anything! They just added more money.

McCarthy’s comments came after Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX) publicly threatened to bring an end to his speakership on Tuesday morning, just a few months after he secured it following 15 rounds of voting. Roy said that if McCarthy’s agreement were to pass, “We’re going to have to then regroup and figure out the whole leadership arrangement again.”

Roy and his colleagues in the House Freedom Caucus went on to tear into the deal in a press conference during which Roy declared that “not one Republican” should support the deal.

Watch above via Fox News.