GOP said Congress would cut spending. Rep. Massie on how it broke down.

It’s impossible to look at Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky without thinking about the national debt. And that’s by design.

The MIT engineer put in three 15-hour days writing 1,000 lines of code to create the little gadget clipped to his lapel. In numbers reminiscent of a gas station pump – in a font he designed pixel by pixel – it displays just how much the United States owes now…. And now…. And now.

The orange digits at the end whir so fast they’re blurry. In the hour-plus we spent talking in the ornate Speaker’s Lobby this week, the United States descended $350 million deeper into the red. 

The national debt is now at a record high of nearly $34.6 trillion. And today, the GOP-run House authorized the government to spend another $1.2 trillion that it doesn’t have. Meanwhile Mr. Massie, a Kentucky libertarian who voted “no” on today's funding bill, has learned a thing or two about what works – and doesn’t work – to rein in spending since he rode the Tea Party wave to Congress a dozen years ago.

As Washington concludes yet another budget cycle with a pricey, rushed bill that was negotiated largely behind closed doors, he reflects on how the GOP set out to do things differently 15 months ago, and where it all broke down.

An inventor turned cattle farmer who built his off-the-grid homestead with logs from his property, Mr. Massie stood out from the start for his willingness to go against the grain. He challenged his own party. He wrote the motion that in 2015 pushed out GOP Speaker John Boehner, who ran afoul of hardline conservatives. He flouted longstanding norms, earning monikers from “anarchist” to “the most hated man in Washington,” when he forced all of Congress to return to Washington in the early days of the pandemic to vote in person on a $2.2 trillion stimulus package.

Then-President Donald Trump called and chewed him out as the House was voting. 

Along the way, Mr. Massie mastered a Trump impression worthy of Saturday Night Live. (“I just have to say, you’ve come such a very long way since the screaming at you,” he intones, mimicking the former president’s backhanded endorsement of him after their blowout.) 

He has also learned that shutdowns don’t work. Ousting a speaker doesn’t work. So he has pushed for things to be different in this Congress. That put him in an unfamiliar position of no longer being a first-rate rebel, but somewhere between the Freedom Caucus hardliners and the establishment Speaker Kevin McCarthy. 

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

When Republicans won back the House in 2022, they promised a new regime of fiscal discipline. They vowed to develop the 12 required spending bills individually so that every aspect of government funding could be scrutinized – then pared down. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who negotiated with GOP holdouts through 14 rounds of voting before he finally was elected speaker of the House, agreed to mandate a 72-hour review period for legislation, so there would be no more sneaking in earmarks or controversial measures at the last minute.

He also agreed to lower the threshold for the “motion to vacate,” so that just one disgruntled Republican could move to oust the speaker.

Mr. Massie wasn’t exactly a McCarthy fan, but he cautioned the rebels against such a move. 

“ ‘Don’t do what I did,’ ” he recalls telling them. “ ‘We got rid of John Boehner, and we ended up with Paul Ryan.’ ” Things got measurably worse, he says, in terms of rank-and-file members being able to participate meaningfully in the legislative process.

“It’s a mistake just to change the person,” adds Mr. Massie. “If you don’t change the structure of this place, you won’t get any different outcome.” 

When Mr. McCarthy finally won the speakership, he put Representative Massie on the Rules Committee, which helps the speaker shape the majority’s agenda and controls if and how bills come to the floor.

When Mr. McCarthy negotiated the Fiscal Responsibility Act with the White House to prevent the U.S. from defaulting on its debt last spring, Mr. Massie leveraged his vote on the Rules committee to get the speaker to include a provision that would cut the federal budget by 1% across the board if Congress did not agree on a budget by April 30. 

He had learned that it was impossible to extract meaningful concessions with a shutdown looming. But, he hoped, now that the 1% cut had been passed into law with strong support from Democrats and President Joe Biden, the GOP could use that as a way to pressure their Democratic colleagues to agree to lower spending. If Democrats didn’t agree in time, then spending would get cut automatically.

“It’s the first time I was able to get something in law – not a promise,” says Mr. Massie. So, for the first time in his congressional career, he voted to raise the debt ceiling. 

Then a handful of rebels ousted Kevin McCarthy in October. When Speaker Mike Johnson took over, the Freedom Caucus kept trying to relitigate the Fiscal Responsibility Act, keeping him from “getting out of the starting blocks,” says Mr. Massie. The rookie speaker passed four stopgap funding measures and never leveraged the threat of that 1% cut.

The 12 appropriation bills got crammed into two big bills, including the 1,012-page one released Thursday at 3 a.m., which must be passed by midnight tonight, or else much of the federal government will shut down. 

Mr. Massie had taken comfort in the fact that at least the 72-hour rule had been upheld. He and other conservatives condemned Mr. Johnson’s decision today to waive it on such a significant piece of legislation. 

“I don’t have any hope for the rest of this Congress,” he says.

But his 1% provision signed into law is effective for two years. So there could be another opportunity to leverage it next year. 

Meanwhile, those gas-station digits keep on whirring.