With their backs yet again up against the wall, the House and Senate on Thursday extended Congress’ self-imposed deadline to keep the federal government open and fully funded. It’s the second time in his short tenure atop the House GOP that Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has agreed to allow a clean funding bill to pass with mostly Democratic votes. This has not endeared Johnson to the far-right wing of his caucus, which is once again bandying about dark warnings of consequences for the speaker.
This dynamic will likely haunt Johnson for the remainder of his time as speaker, and follow any Republican successor when Johnson eventually steps down. There is no avoiding that the role of speaker of the House is divided between priorities that can be at odds. Johnson is showing that once again the greatest weakness to a Republican speaker is that push and pull between his role as a political leader and his responsibility to the country writ large.
The greatest weakness to a Republican speaker is that push and pull between his role as a political leader and his responsibility to the country writ large.
We were last here in November when Congress approved a short-term spending bill, or continuing resolution, that split the funding into two tranches, each with its own expiration date. The first tranche — which included funding covered in the Agriculture, Energy and Water, Military Construction-Veterans Affairs, and Transportation-Housing and Urban Development appropriations bills — was set to lapse at 12:01 a.m. Saturday. If it had, the areas of the federal government those bills covered would have been forced into a shutdown.
The new extension — which passed the House with a vote of 314-108 after sailing through the Senate — bumps that deadline back to March 1 and moves the second deadline from Feb. 2 to March 8. The bill had to bypass the Rules Committee, which is stacked with hard-liners who would have prevented the bill from coming to the floor, requiring a two-thirds majority of the House to approve it. It’s the same move that was needed for the last short-term funding extension, giving conservatives even more reason to grumble.
In theory, this extension is to give legislators more time to finish hammering out 12 full-year spending bills that cover the current fiscal year, which began back in September. Congressional leaders showed some progress earlier this month when they agreed on a topline spending total that more or less lined up with the spending caps negotiated last year between President Joe Biden and then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy. For a moment it looked like Johnson might also attempt to renege on that deal as McCarthy did, angering Democrats ahead of his downfall. But Johnson has held firm to his word, much to the anger of hard-line conservatives.
Johnson is also waiting to see what the Senate produces, if anything, on immigration and foreign aid. A small group of Republican and Democratic senators have been negotiating for weeks to come up with a deal that both overhauls the asylum system at the southern border and provides foreign aid to Ukraine and Israel. Senate Republicans have been stressing to their House counterparts that whatever deal might be struck is likely to be the best that they’d get, even if former President Donald Trump should win re-election later this year.
Johnson has one potential saving grace in this mess: His caucus will likely only punish him for success.
If GOP hard-liners were annoyed at the spending bill, they promise to be apoplectic if Johnson brings any compromise bill the Senate passes to the floor. The problem the speaker faces, though, is that after hammering the importance of boosting “border security” and the failures of the Biden administration to take immigration seriously, it’d be a bad look to entirely ignore a bill that addresses those concerns. At the same time, doing anything that might make Biden look good and reduce the pressure on him politically with regard to immigration could be seen as political malpractice to a party base that has been trained over the decades to see anything other than total victory as a loss.
As he dances along this high wire, Johnson will have the smallest majority possible; thanks to resignations and illnesses, he may at times only have one vote more than Democrats. In so precarious a position, with Democrats controlling the Senate and White House, there’s only so much that Republicans can achieve substantively. Any attempts to effectively change up whatever deal might be struck will fail, but the idea of passing a bill less draconian than the House’s preferred bill and funding Ukraine is anathema to many Republicans.
But Johnson has one potential saving grace in this mess: His caucus will likely only punish him for success. Passing a short-term spending bill that keeps the status quo in place may be disappointing to many Republicans but remains better politically than a shutdown. In contrast, standing back and allowing conservatives to put up enough amendments to derail any Senate-passed bill would be a free ticket to continue to gripe about the broken system that Democrats have put into place. It would be a betrayal of his Senate colleagues and make a mockery the supposed danger toward the country from our migration system — but it would be a win for House Republicans and keep Johnson inoculated. In effect, the most dangerous thing that Johnson could do right now is his job.
