Rep. Mast lambasts the Senate’s inaction on spending bills in interview with Newsmax

The Senate has “done squat” with the appropriations bills approved by the House, Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., told Newsmax on Wednesday.

“Out of the House we already moved four, five, six individual appropriations bills. To my knowledge, the Senate has done squat with them to this moment,” Mast told “Carl Higbie FRONTLINE.” “They’re not interested.

“We know this. It’s always a constant battle between the House and the Senate. We say, ‘You know, our enemy isn’t always the other side, it’s just quite often the Senate because they’re the ones that are battling against us, Republicans or Democrats,’ so they’re not taking up the appropriations bills, they probably want to push over another continuing resolution or omnibus bill right as close as they can get it to the holidays because people want to be with their families.

“They’re going to say, If you want to go to Thanksgiving or you want to be home Christmas morning or something like that, sign this omnibus bill and fund the government at this ridiculous level for the next year, which is exactly what they did before Republicans took the House.”

Newly elected House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., earlier this week laid out an ambitious plan to have the House pass all 12 of its appropriations bills by the Nov. 17 deadline, including scrapping next week’s scheduled recess.

He said he would start with the Energy-Water bill before tackling the legislative branch, Interior-Environment and Transportation-HUD bills. Financial Services and Commerce-Justice-Science would then be considered the week of Nov. 6, followed by Labor-HHS-Education and Agriculture the week of Nov. 13.

“This is an ambitious schedule, but if our speaker can work across the conference to unify our membership and build consensus, we can achieve our necessary objectives,” Johnson wrote.

Mast applauded Johnson’s appointment.

“Strict constitutionalist, devout Christian down to his core, strict conservative and he spoke about it eloquently on the floor,” Mast said.

Mast said Johnson’s goal is to “get those appropriations bills done to make sure that the government is operating but at a lesser spending level so that we hopefully don’t take dollars out of the pockets of Americans at the same wasteful rate that it’s constantly being done and throw it away the way the left loves to do it.”

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