1 week ago
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Mike Johnson notched another victory for Donald Trump’s MAGA agenda on Thursday, but the struggle to get the Republican Party’s budget passed into law is only at the halfway point.
With the House and Senate GOP caucuses now due to reconcile two budget frameworks into one, the real work begins: finding as much as $1.5 trillion in spending cuts that won’t scare vulnerable moderate Republicans in swing districts off from the final package.
That could be tricky, unless Johnson is able to sell major cuts to Medicaid as the result of a hunt for waste, fraud and/or abuse. But center-right Republicans have been clear: they’re not voting for a bill (they claim) unless it avoids kicking any Americans off of the nation’s low-income health insurance program. Any bill cutting Medicaid would also have a difficult time passing the Senate, where Republicans have an even thinner margin than the House.
But Johnson also must live up to commitments he made Thursday to House Republican deficit hawks — commitments that allowed him to pass a Senate budget framework which only set a floor for cuts at a few billion. An organized rebellion of the House Freedom Caucus on Wednesday delayed the bill’s final passage to the next morning, when the speaker joined with Senate Majority Leader John Thune to pledge that the Senate GOP was on the same page with the Freedom Caucus.
In the end, Reps. Thomas Massie and Victoria Spartz still voted against the Senate framework on Thursday. Johnson will need to hold every other member of his large caucus in line over the coming weeks.
Out of the frying pan, into the fryer.
The House GOP leader dared his conservative colleagues on Thursday to remove him as speaker if he is unable to keep those commitments over the rest of the process. It’s a knowing challenge — Johnson is keenly aware that his caucus knows it may be unable to find a consensus candidate (other than him) who could win enough votes to become speaker. And throwing him out of the job would shut down Congress and grind the lower chamber to a halt for days, possibly weeks.
At stake is more than just Johnson’s own future as speaker. If Republicans fail to pass a budget aligning with their policy priorities now, they likely won’t get another chance before midterm elections next year present the real possibility of one or both chambers falling into Democratic hands. Donald Trump himself recognizes the risks, too: since January (and possibly before) he has pushed GOP lawmakers to pass “one big, beautiful bill”; a moniker he used deliberately to convince lawmakers to pack as much of his agenda into this budget package as possible, including his funding for border security and an extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts.
The president, like the speaker, knows that wrangling a caucus as wily as the House GOP twice will be difficult — to say nothing about possible restrictions on using the Senate reconciliation process, which bypasses the 60-vote filibuster threshold.
Republicans do not have the votes to pass any other legislation through the upper chamber without cutting a deal with Democrats.
More likely, Johnson could find himself unable to thread the needle his caucus set up for him. Should that happen, the future of the legislation is unclear. It could be stripped down, punting the fight over extending the Trump tax cuts to later in the year.
Or the speaker could, again, succeed. His ability to keep the caucus together this far has outshone his predecessor Kevin McCarthy’s and impressed many who could barely remember his name before his vault to power.
Nothing is certain, but if this week is any example then betting against Johnson’s ability to win a tough vote is always risky.
