FLASHBACK: In 2010, House Republicans Demanded ‘Clean’ Funding Bill

 By Josh Israel

Yesterday, House Republicans forced a government shutdown when they refused to allow a majority vote on a clean bill to keep the government open — but just three years ago, they sang a rather different tune.When asked whether he would allow members to vote on a continuing resolution like the one passed by the U.S. Senate — but without riders to defund or delay the Affordable Care Act — Boehner told reporters Monday, “That’s not going to happen.”
But while nearly every House Republican voted repeatedly this time to insist on these controversials measures as their price for averting a shutdown, their message in 2010 was the exact opposite. The 23 then-minority Republican members of the House Appropriations Committee all signed a letter demanding that Congress only pass a continuing resolution that was “clean” and “free of any extraneous spending or policy provisions.”
The committee Republicans, fourteen of whom are still in the House, wrote:

We have serious and growing concerns about the process and composition of any potential CR… At a time of extreme spending and political fatigue, it is simply unacceptable to use a must-pass CR as a legislative vehicle for more wasteful federal spending or completing an array of unfinished political business before the election.

They concluded, “we want to make our position abundantly clear: we will not support efforts to pass a CR that contains any unnecessary spending or legislative provisions unrelated to maintaining government operations.”