JOHNSON URGED TO DROP BUDGET DEAL
Some Republicans pressing for deeper cuts to spending
Speaker Mike Johnson came under mounting pressure Thursday from House GOP hard-liners to renege on the spending deal he struck with Democrats over the weekend for avoiding a government shutdown, as ultraconservatives demanded he put forward a new plan with deeper cuts.
After meeting privately in his office in the Capitol with Republicans irate about the spending agreement, Johnson said he was discussing their demand to walk away from the bipartisan agreement but had “made no commitments” to do so.
But Republicans made it clear that they considered the deal the speaker negotiated a nonstarter, and threatened to wreak havoc in the House if he did not advance a different one. They are pressing for deep spending cuts, and many have said they cannot vote for any government funding measure that fails to include a severe crackdown on immigration.
“It’s a bad deal,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, RGa., said of the plan Johnson had agreed to with Democrats. “It’s a deal that I don’t support and other conservatives in the conference don’t support.”
Johnson has told critics of his deal that he would consider dropping it, but only if they could come up with an alternative that could appeal to a majority in the House, where the party has
just a two-seat edge. Such a plan would need to attract the backing of both the far right and more mainstream Republicans in competitive districts who have balked at the scope of the spending cuts and conservative policy dictates that their colleagues have demanded.
The blowup underscored the challenges Johnson is facing as he tries to keep the government funded while assuaging the anger of hardliners in his conference.
What the ultraconservative members are suggesting — abandoning a deal days
after it was announced — would amount to a remarkable breach by Johnson with Senate Democrats, Republicans and the White House just three months into his speakership. Johnson said Thursday after the meeting that he would continue to discuss “funding options” with a cross-section of lawmakers, and he denied making any promises.
“While those conversations are going on, I’ve made no commitments,” Johnson said. “If you hear otherwise, it’s simply not true.”
House Republicans on
the Appropriations Committee, which is now working to break down the total dollar amount agreed to into 12 individual spending bills that fund the government, largely panned the suggestion that Johnson walk back the deal he negotiated, saying it would undermine his credibility in the future.
“He’s our unanimously elected speaker,” said Rep. John Rutherford of Florida, an appropriator. “He makes a play call and they don’t want to follow it — I don’t like that.”
The potential backtracking from the deal, which essentially
hews to the bargain to suspend the debt ceiling that President Joe Biden struck last year with Kevin McCarthy, the speaker at the time, caught senators by surprise. Democrats said they would proceed with the deal they made with Johnson, and with a temporary spending patch — known as a continuing resolution, or CR — to buy more time past a Jan. 19 deadline to enact it without a partial government shutdown.
“Look, we have a top-line agreement,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the majority leader. “Everybody knows to get anything done, it has to be bipartisan. So we’re going to continue to work to pass a CR and avoid a shutdown.”
Schumer on Thursday went ahead with a procedural move to tee up a future vote on a stopgap spending bill, saying it had become “crystal clear that it will take more than a week to finish the appropriations process.”
“We have publicly and clearly and unequivocally reached an agreement on the top-line spending number,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader. “There is nothing more to discuss. To the extent that House Republicans back away from an agreement that was just announced a few days ago, it will make clear that House Republicans are determined to shut down the government, crash the economy and hurt the American people.”
Mainstream Republicans in the conference, however, said they supported the deal Johnson had brokered. Rep. John Duarte of Turlock, who narrowly won a district that Biden won in 2020, said it was important that Johnson, who he noted was a fiscal conservative, “go into these meetings with credibility with his counterparts.”
“We have realities; they’re the same realities that our previous speaker had,” Duarte said. “If we want deeper spending cuts, if we want to have more control over the constitutional republic, we should do things that win more votes, not things that lose more votes. So I’m going to stay in the governing part of our conference and support the speaker.”