[CLIP] Rep. Tim Burchett on McCarthy Ouster: I Voted With My Conscience | ATL:NOW

I went down two paths in my mind. One was to keep my friend Kevin McCarthy as the Speaker, and I value my friendships up here very well. I don't have many, probably don't have any now. And the other was, was I going to vote my conscience of what I thought was right? And I prayed about it. And we are $33 trillion in debt. We take in about $5 trillion every year, and we're going to spend, by conservative estimates and proposals, around $7 trillion. We took off the entire month of August, which we normally do, and then two weeks into September. September 30th was the end of our fiscal year. And they took it upon themselves to go on trips and do other things, vacation, what have you. I worked harder when I'm at home. You don't really work up here. This is all a smoke show up here, a charade, I guess, if you will. And I just got tired of it. I'm tired of these continuation budgets, continuation resolutions. We passed them for 30 days. And they told me, they said, Tim, we need to pass this one so we won't have to pass another one. We hadn't passed a budget in 30 years. Jody Arrington from the Budget Committee, I left the Budget Committee. I was to be taken off of it because we don't do a budget. He finally, he's chairman, God bless him, from Texas, he put a proposal together, brought it to the conference, and the leadership gave him the golf clap, patted him on his head and sent him on his way. And that was about it. That was about it. So we're going to go down the same road of continuation to pass another one so we don't have to pass another. I mean, that's like telling a crackhead, hey, I'm going to give you crack to get you off a crack. It just doesn't work. We are addicted now to our great-grandchildren's money. And yet we still go down this road every time. And then, this time, they did a 45-day continued resolution. And guess what? It pushed right up to the Thanksgiving Day break. So we'll get there and they'll say, hey, man, we got to go home. We got a holiday. Turkey's coming out of the oven. And so we'll pass what's called an omnibus bill. Now, an omnibus bill is a monstrosity. Say it's 2,000 pages, and you read down until you come to the 15th page or whatever. Oh, there's what I need, and there's the stuff that this lobbyist that greases me wants. And then you pull the Nancy Pelosi, you got to pass it so you know what's in it. You stop reading, you vote for it, and that's why we're $33 trillion in debt. And our leadership continues down that same path every dadgum time. When we were setting our debt limit bill, which I did not support, we said, let's put a mark in the sand, man. We're going to put a mark in the sand, Birchick, for the Senate. Well, during the continued resolution negotiations or what have you, they didn't want to put a stake in the sand. They told the Senate exactly what we wanted. They were going to cut 1% of new growth or some bogus number, and they trot out this stuff. We're going to save billions. We ran up a trillion in three months this year in debt. That is the seriousness of this. People are paying $100,000 for a pickup truck that I wouldn't step out of the electric chair to ride in, because the American dollar is so devalued and inflated right now because of this ridiculous spending. So enough is enough. We sent a message, and the Democrats joined with us. We didn't join with them. And now we've got a new speaker, and we'll have a new speaker. They'll do the student council election speeches on Tuesday, and I say, on the floor, we'll have one ballot. We'll have one vote, and we'll elect a speaker. I've been following a lot of feedback from people, Republicans, Democrats, and so forth. On C-SPAN, there were a bunch of calls being made. We've been following our own comments, various social media, and so forth. One of the themes that I see coming out from Republican voters is that they are very disappointed with a lack of unity. Now, this isn't everybody. I'm just saying this is one of the themes that I'm seeing. How would you react to that criticism? I don't represent anybody in Washington, D.C. that works up here or lives up here. I represent the 2nd District of Tennessee, and I represent those folks. That's part of the problem. That's what they call the uniparty. You close the doors, and the only color they see is green, and that's the color of money, and that's all this is about. They want a kumbaya session. I'm not going to violate my oath to office, and I'm not going to lie to the people back home. That's what I came up here to do. If they run me out of town on a rail, that's the cost. When I made this vote, I knew I would lose some of my key support, and I would have opposition, and it might possibly cost us our job, my job. But to be honest with you, they talked about us, we're going to close the government down, maybe, and how horrible that would be, three, four days. What's a lot more horrible is if this economy crashes, and you'll literally see people pushing a wheelbarrow load of cash down the road to get a loaf of bread, because these jugheads up here didn't have enough guts to vote to do what was right.