Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, apologized Sunday for calling Republican holdouts against voting for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy "terrorists," but he said he was also "a little taken aback by the sensitivity" in response to the comments.
"I've got thick skin, and I'm called awful, vile things by the same wing of the party that I was fighting at that moment," Crenshaw told CNN's "State of the Union." "I was a little taken aback by the sensitivity of it."
But still, as colleagues were offended by his words, "I sincerely apologize to them," Crenshaw said. "I don't want them to think I believe they're really terrorists. It clearly is a turn of phrase we use in an intransigent negotiation."
However, the 200 people who were backing McCarthy were upset because they felt an agreement had been reached to elect him, Crenshaw added.
"Early on, before we had taken a single vote in a conference with everyone there, Kevin McCarthy had asked one of the leaders of this group, 'What else do you want? Let's make this work. What else do you want?'" Crenshaw said. "They couldn't answer at that moment, and it was a real turning point for a lot of people. That's what created all the animosity throughout the week. It's not as if we were fighting over something. It wasn't as if we were trying to stop them from getting what they wanted. It's that we didn't know what they wanted."
One of the concessions that was reached was to cap domestic spending at 2022 levels in the fiscal year 2024, resulting in billions of dollars not going for defense, show host Jake Tapper said, but Crenshaw pointed out the agreement is more complicated than that.
"The deal that I understand is that you've got to balance the budget in a 10-year window," he said. "The baseline for that balancing is 2022 spending. That doesn't mean there are automatic cuts to the defense budget. That will get worked out in the negotiation process."
Another part of the deal is that anyone can introduce an amendment to bills during the legislative process, and Crenshaw said he agrees that will make members feel they have a voice.
"There's not a lot of heartburn over what the asks were," Crenshaw said about the concessions that led to lawmakers eventually electing McCarthy. "Our heartburn was that this could have been done without all the drama."
But if the deal ends up cutting money from the Pentagon, that could be a problem, Crenshaw said, although he thinks the Pentagon can make its money go further.
"I think we need to be investing in what are probably very expensive new weapons systems, new technologies that help us compete with China," he said. "There's not a lot of disagreement on that within the conference. The government has spent a lot of money, added a lot of extra programs, budget items to agencies that probably didn't need them."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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