A hero has emerged in the House for the small number of Americans who genuinely care about the national debt — and her name is Victoria Spartz. On Monday, two days after Congress passed a stopgap spending bill to avoid a government shutdown, the Republican representative from Indiana came forward with a statement to let voters know that she has been fighting to rein in federal spending with everything she has. Alas, she wrote, “there is a limitation to human capacity.”
At her breaking point following the debt-ceiling vote, Spartz said that she will resign if Congress doesn’t pass a “debt commission” to figure out how to cut the national debt and inflation. “I will not continue sacrificing my children for this circus with a complete absence of leadership, vision, and spine,” she wrote. “I cannot save the Republic alone.”
One must assume that she means sacrificing the time she would otherwise spend with her children and that she is not offering them up to the Moloch of debt itself.
It’s a rather intense statement from the congresswoman, but it may not be the most dangerous of threats: Spartz already announced in February that she would not run in 2024, as she wants to spend more time with her teenage daughters. Still, her warning could still carry some weight within the GOP House caucus. She stated on Sunday that she is “open-minded” to Matt Gaetz’s motion to remove Kevin McCarthy from his position as Speaker. And if she were to bail in the last year of her term, it would at least temporarily reduce the already thin Republican majority in the House even further, making it even more crucial for McCarthy to keep the ranks in order.
