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SALT LAKE CITY — With Congress still deadlocked and the deadline looming to renew spending, broad swaths of the federal government appear likely to be shut down when funding runs out at the end of this week.
Yet Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said there's "no reason" for Congress to pause the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden if the government is shut down.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-California, authorized multiple congressional committees to begin investigating Republicans' accusations that the president profited from his son Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings while he was vice president.
Lee told Fox News' Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that Congress can still continue to do its work during a potential shutdown and that includes investigating the president.
"Those allegations are very troubling and they need to be investigated. And I applaud Speaker McCarthy for launching this inquiry," Lee said. "I am aware of no reason, Maria, why that inquiry could not continue even if the government were to shut down temporarily. There's nothing suggesting to me that Congress can't do its work if that happens. In any event, we shouldn't use that as an excuse unilaterally to disarm and to just accede to whatever the Democrats want."
Although Lee has been supportive of past shutdowns, he told Deseret News last week that a shutdown "is not a good thing for anyone," but said Congress still needs to find a way to rein in federal spending.
He reiterated that point to Bartiromo, saying the best path forward is to pass "something that keeps the government funded for a few weeks" to give Congress more time to negotiate the series of bills to fund the government.
Lee also criticized the approach long taken by congressional leadership to pass an "omnibus" spending bill each year and said Congress should consider different spending bills "one by one." He accused House and Senate leaders of "waiting until the last minute" and bringing the omnibus spending bill up for a vote "at the worst possible moment."
"Sometimes they like to extend the deadline up until close to Christmas, and then they use Christmas extortion to get people to vote for it, not wanting to cause a shutdown and be delayed for getting home to their families just before Christmas," he said. "This has got to stop, and the best way to stop that is by doing these appropriations bills one by one. Fund one part of government after the other one at a time until it's all done."
In 2013, Lee was a key part of a 17-day government shutdown in opposition to the Affordable Care Act. He voted against a spending bill to reopen the government during a two-day shutdown in January 2018 and against a bill to end the longest shutdown in U.S. history that stretched 35 days from Dec. 22, 2018, to Jan. 25, 2019.
During the 2019 shutdown, Lee joined a group of Senate Republicans in introducing a bill to permanently prevent government shutdowns by creating an automatic continuing resolution for any regular appropriations bill to keep the federal government open during budget negotiations.
