WASHINGTON — Republican House Speaker John Boehner is angrily firing back at powerful conservative groups that are blasting a new bipartisan budget agreement.
The groups, including Heritage Action, FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth, derided the deal as a “step backward,” saying it puts off steep budget cuts long into the future.
“They’re using our members, and they’re using the American people for their own goals,” Boehner fumed Wednesday.
“This is ridiculous.”
It was a rare flash of public anger at the right from Boehner, who has been getting grief all year from GOP conservatives and the Tea Party — most prominently during the government shutdown this fall. The conservative groups, which sometimes have the ability to tank legislation just by giving it a negative rating, returned the fire in kind.
“Speaker Boehner’s real problem here isn’t with conservative groups like FreedomWorks. It’s with millions of individual Americans who vote Republican because they were told the GOP was the party of small government and fiscal responsibility,” said Matt Kibbe, the group’s president.
Club for Growth President Chris Chocola responded, “After carefully reviewing the budget deal, on which we never commented until it was complete, we determined that it would increase the size of government. We support pro-growth proposals when they are considered by Congress. In our evaluation, this isn’t one of those.”
Many House Republicans say they’ll go along with the budget deal, partly out of respect for House Budget Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), who negotiated it.
The two-year pact averts a government shutdown and rolls back looming “sequester” cuts.