Time is running out for Congress to pass spending legislation to fund the government, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is facing opposition from his caucus, as well as some floating calls for his ousting.- House conservatives are demanding policy concessions be included during the appropriations process, some are floating McCarthy’s removal and political experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation they view the speaker as in a “weak” position, despite launching an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.
- “I don’t think that opening an inquiry is going to help, I don’t think keeping the government open is going to help to quell these calls for a motion to vacate,” Josh Huder, senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, told the DCNF.
With a possible government shutdown just weeks away, House Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy is once again fielding challenges among his caucus to pass spending bills as well as looming calls for his ousting.
Congress has until Sept. 30 to either pass 12 appropriations bills or a continuing resolution to fund the government, but House conservatives’ demands have put McCarthy in a “weak” position, political experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Some McCarthy detractors have threatened the speaker with a motion to vacate if he doesn’t follow through on policy promises, and the experts don’t see any potential spending concessions, or even the recent launch of an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, as enough to stave off those calls.
“He’s in a sort of an impossible position. And that’s why we’re at where we’re at. We can’t pass spending bills. We can’t get the [continuing resolution] across the table because the political realities of the Republican Party make it so that he doesn’t really have the authority to put anything on the floor, much less strike a deal with anyone,” Josh Huder, senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, told the DCNF. “He made a bunch of promises that he just could not deliver the votes for, and so now he’s kind of what his back against the wall.”
McCarthy secured the gavel in January on the 15th vote after agreeing to a rules package to add House Freedom Caucus (HFC) members to the Rules Committee, cap spending at Fiscal Year 2022 levels and establish a single-member motion to vacate the speaker, allowing just one unsatisfied representative to call a vote on his removal. During debt ceiling negotiations, McCarthy led the House in passing the Limit, Save, Grow Act, which enabled the government to acquire unlimited debt through Jan. 1, 2025, freeze non-defense discretionary spending at Fiscal Year 2022 levels, claw back unspent COVID-19 stimulus funds and other provisions.
The HFC released a list of demands on Aug. 12 that must be included in the spending bills to gain the members’ support, including the Secure the Border Act, addressing the “weaponization” of the DOJ and terminating the Pentagon’s “woke policies.” The Caucus won’t support a continuing resolution or appropriations that provide “any blank check for Ukraine.”
“You had [McCarthy’s] own conference almost come to blows on the floor of the House over the last few holdouts,” Jeremy Mayer, associate professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, told the DCNF. “McCarthy isn’t just weak because his margin is narrow … and he’s not just weak because his party is divided. But the combination of how divided his caucus is, and how narrow the margin is, as well as the fact that there is a Freedom Caucus that doesn’t care about things that have kept other fringe movements among the Democrats, Republicans in line. Like they don’t care about a shutdown.”
Huder and Mayer insisted McCarthy does not have the votes to deliver on the provisions that the HFC is demanding, and both fear a government shutdown is likely.
Montana Rep. Matt Rosendale, one of the 20 McCarthy holdouts from his speakership bid, slammed the speaker for his handling of the spending fight and hinted at the vulnerability of his leadership position in a statement to the DCNF.
“I am extremely disappointed in the Speaker’s lack of leadership. The appropriations bills should ALL have been completed by the end of June, allowing ample time for analysis and input from Congress and the general public,” Rosendale told the DCNF in a statement. “Whether it is planned or negligence, Speaker McCarthy has put the House on a path towards passing a CR and or an omnibus, which will no doubt cost the taxpayers $7 trillion a year, adding $2 trillion a year to the national debt.
“This is unacceptable to Montanans, and if McCarthy chooses to solicit support from Democrats to pass any such provisions, as he did with the debt ceiling package, which had more Democrat support than Republican, his allegiance will be clear, and his position will surely be in jeopardy,” Rosendale added.
Texas Rep. Chip Roy criticized McCarthy and Republican leadership for being “afraid” of a government shutdown during an interview with Glenn Beck Thursday, which his team pointed the DCNF toward upon request for comment.
“We have to use the power of the purse to force change. So we are trying to force Kevin and the leadership of the Republican Conference to understand that now is the time to force Biden to come to the table,” said Roy.
After several House Republicans, like Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, pushed McCarthy to launch an impeachment inquiry into Biden, the speaker officially announced the move Tuesday.
“This was an attempt to throw a bone to the pack of wolves that were after McCarthy and after a shutdown, and the problem is that bone they already expected. They believe it’s theirs,” Mayer of the impeachment inquiry. “It didn’t seem to work, it just made them hungrier for more.”
Gaetz has been vocal about ousting McCarthy, and the speaker’s move to launch an impeachment inquiry has not quelled his sentiment.
“Impeachment is not some get-out-of-jail-free card for Kevin McCarthy on the motion to vacate,” Gaetz wrote in a tweet a spokesperson pointed the DCNF toward upon request for comment. “This is about the Biden administration’s policy choices that the American people abhor. A vote for a continuing resolution is a vote for continuing election interference from Jack Smith, the Green New Deal, and inflationary spending.”
Huder believes it’s not a question of if there will be a motion to vacate, but a matter of when, he told the DCNF.
“I almost don’t think it matters if there’s a formal move to vacate him because he’s so weak right now, he’s barely speaker. It is not a leadership position,” said Mayer.
McCarthy reportedly challenged those threatening a call for his removal, and told his colleagues in a closed door meeting on Thursday to “file the f***ing motion.”
“I don’t think that opening an inquiry is going to help, I don’t think keeping the government open is going to help to quell these calls for a motion to vacate,” said Huder. “At the end of the day, though, the motion to vacate is not going to remove him from the speakership, but it would damage his political capital and political sway within the chamber.”
Some prominent Republicans have since voiced support of McCarthy amid the spending fight, impeachment inquiry and calls for his ousting.
“I support Speaker McCarthy. He’s the right man for the job,” House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio told the DCNF in a statement.
“There are over 200 of us who are prepared to vote for McCarthy not just fifteen times, but fifty. McCarthy has nothing to worry about,” Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon, an ally of the speaker, told the DCNF in a statement.
Colorado Rep. Ken Buck isn’t calling for the speaker’s removal, and is focused on funding the government.
“Congressman Buck’s priority is to pass a continuing resolution and avoid a government shutdown. He does want to keep spending levels to the previously-agreed to 2022 levels,” Victoria Marshall, spokesperson for Buck, told the DCNF.
The House Freedom Caucus didn’t immediately respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
