Here We Go Again

The GOP never seems to learn that it cannot control the budgetary process on its own.

When I saw the New York Times headline, I had to chuckle: “Far Right Balks as Congress Begins Push to Enact Spending Deal.”

We might as well have been in March of 2023. Or September. Or November.

Ever since the GOP took narrow control of the House following the 2022 midterms, it has been paralyzed by its own extreme members. The House Freedom Caucus, which boasts only a few dozen members, has exerted outsized control over what the Republican party has been able to get behind. That’s because, as we might remember, it demanded changes to the party’s rules that granted it key committee positions and the ability to oust the Speaker should even one member file a motion to vacate the chair.

As a result, the proposals coming out of the House GOP have borne all the indicia of extremist legislation but have gone exactly nowhere. This has been the least productive Congress in generations. 

As I explain in today’s piece, this is a basic governance question that Republican extremists have failed to grasp. Instead, like insane people, they have made the same mistake over and over again on the budget, using the same playbook and expecting a different outcome. 

To change the budget, you need the votes

Every year, the House is required to work with the Senate to arrive at a budget. That is their biggest responsibility. Not hearings, not “anti-woke” bills, not evidence-free impeaching inquiries—the budget. 

When there is a divided Congress, as we have now with a GOP House and a Democratic Senate, the logical meeting point is exactly where things were left. That’s because no side will be able to get its preferred bill passed by both chambers and onto the President’s desk. If anything, the House is at a disadvantage because the penalty for not producing a budget is a government shutdown, and it is the House’s responsibility to originate revenue and spending bills that can win approval by the Senate and the President. When the government shuts down, the House is usually and rightfully blamed for it.

As a consequence, a divided Congress inevitably means no big budget increases and no big budget decreases. There’s simply no formula, other than something near the current budget equilibrium, that will gain the support of both parties. To move the ball by much more, you actually need to control both Congress and the White House. That’s why freezing the budget at current levels with some minor up and down possibilities is both a logical and sensible thing to do.

In this Congress, however, the GOP has come to the budget table over and over with a complete non-starter, seeking to dramatically slash federal discretionary spending while not raising taxes on the wealthy donor class. And it has done this knowing that there’s no world in which the Senate and the White House will agree.

That is performative nonsense. When the GOP only controls one half of Congress and the Democrats control the other half and the White House, that has never been a strong hand, even when Republicans have held a far bigger majority in the House. And acting as if it’s a strong hand and making big boasts and threats on Fox has gotten them exactly nowhere when it comes to actually passing a budget.

“It’s deja vu all over again.”

GOP extremists have never actually grasped that they have a losing hand, no matter how many times they experience failure. 

They brazenly held the economy hostage last spring by threatening to not raise the debt ceiling. That would have crashed the U.S. and the global economy by ruining the faith bondholders have in the U.S. government and its Treasury notes. When President Biden and Democratic negotiators called their bluff, the GOP predictably backed down. In the end, the debt ceiling and budget deal garnered more Democratic support than Republican, a sign of real failure in leadership by then Speaker McCarthy.

GOP extremists howled. They called for McCarthy’s head over this betrayal. They wanted to burn it all down. Some of the members even began to sabotage the GOP’s own legislative agenda by voting no on basic procedural rules, meaning McCarthy effectively had lost control over his own conference. If you don’t control the rules, you don’t control the floor. And if you don’t control the floor, you don’t control the House.

After Congress came back from the summer recess, Republicans faced another looming budget deadline. Yet the party found itself back where it was in the spring but with even less leverage. This time they couldn’t hold the debt ceiling hostage. All they could do was threaten a government shutdown. McCarthy blinked once again, agreeing to a “clean” continuing resolution that kicked the budget can down the road to November.

Once again, more Democrats voted in favor of the CR than Republicans. Only this time, Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s reliance on the Democrats proved too much, and McCarthy paid the highest of prices: He was ousted by his own party, which somehow still believed it could do better by putting someone truly conservative in.

Speaker Johnson pulls a McCarthy—twice

After a series of failed bids for leadership that exposed the ugly divisions of the party, with holdouts and their families even threatened with physical violence and death, an exhausted GOP limped its way to electing a relative nobody as Speaker: Mike Johnson (R-LA). The thinking went, Johnson was just crazy Christo-nationalist enough to win the sympathy and support of the House Freedom Caucus, but mild mannered enough to not scare off the corporate donors.

But one of the first things Johnson did was, once again, kick the budget can down the road, this time into two parts coming due in January and February. With the top line budget numbers unchanged, there was essentially nothing different about what McCarthy did and what Johnson did, except that McCarthy lost his job over it. The GOP extremists grumbled but gave Johnson a pass over it the first time, a kind of honeymoon gift to the new Speaker.

That honeymoon is now over, apparently. Once more, a GOP Speaker must decide whether to work with Democrats to pass a budget—one that looks more or less identical to the deal McCarthy made nearly a year ago that keeps getting put off. To do so, Johnson, like McCarthy, will need to rely on Democratic support because his own party comprises a bunch of children throwing the same tantrum they’ve thrown before.

But look. Nothing anyone in the GOP can do will change the basic math of the problem. And Democrats aren’t suddenly going to cave to ridiculous House Freedom Caucus demands when the Senate actually has the stronger hand. It may have taken Johnson several months to arrive at the same conclusion, but it really has been staring at all of them for a year.

The GOP now realizes it has wasted that entire year going around and around on the budget, while conducting a circular firing squad on its own leadership. Even the House Freedom Caucus seems to understand how bad it’s gotten. Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) encapsulated this best when he blasted his own Republican colleagues in a speech in November on the House floor:

“For the life of me, I do not understand how you can go to the trouble of campaigning, raising money, going to events, talking to people, coming to this town as a member of a party who allegedly stands for something … and then do nothing about it. One thing: I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing—one—that I can go campaign on and say we did. One!” 

Roy dared any Republicans in the room to come to the floor and “explain to me one material, meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done.”

Not a thing, Roy. Not one material, meaningful, significant thing.