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Tag: deep cuts

  • The Republicans Have No Majority

    The Republicans Have No Majority

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    Mike Johnson now knows what Kevin McCarthy was dealing with.

    At the new speaker’s behest, House Republicans today relied on Democratic votes to avert a government shutdown by passing legislation that contains neither budget cuts nor conservative policy priorities. The bill was a near replica of the funding measure that McCarthy pushed through the House earlier this fall—a supposed surrender to Democrats that prompted hard-liners in his party to toss him from the speakership.

    Johnson is unlikely to suffer the same fate, at least not yet. But today’s vote laid bare a reality that’s become ever more apparent over the past year: Republicans may hold more seats than Democrats, but they don’t control the House.

    Under McCarthy and now Johnson, Republicans have been unable to pass just about any important legislation without significant help from Democrats. The three most consequential votes this year have been the spring budget deal that prevented a catastrophic U.S. debt default, September’s stopgap spending bill that averted a shutdown, and today’s proposal that keeps the government funded through early 2024. More Democrats than Republicans have voted for all three measures.

    Read: Kevin McCarthy finally defies the right

    GOP leaders have struggled to pass their own proposals on spending bills, leaving the party empty-handed in negotiations with the Democratic-led Senate and the Biden administration. Like McCarthy before him, Johnson pledged that Republicans would advance individual appropriations bills to counter the Senate’s plans to combine them into legislative packages that are too big for lawmakers to adequately review. But in the past week, he’s been forced to scrap votes on two of these proposals because of Republican opposition.

    McCarthy surrendered to Democrats in late September after his members refused to pass a temporary spending bill containing deep cuts and provisions to lock down the southern border. When it was his turn, Johnson didn’t even bother to try a conservative approach. On Saturday, he unveiled a bill that maintains current spending levels—enacted by Democratic majorities in 2022—for another two months. He did not include additional funding for either Israel or Ukraine, nor did he include any policy provisions that might turn off Democrats. Johnson’s only wrinkle was to create two different deadlines for the next funding extension; funding for some departments will run out on January 19, while money for the rest of the government, including the Defense Department, will continue for another two weeks after that.

    The Louisiana Republican said that the dual deadlines would spare Congress from having to consider a trillion-dollar omnibus spending package right before Christmas, as it has done repeatedly over the past several years. “That is no way to run a railroad,” Johnson said this morning on CNBC. “This innovation prevents that from happening, and I think we’ll have bipartisan agreement that that is a better way to do it.”

    Johnson’s decision to avoid a partisan shutdown fight seemed to catch Democrats off guard. The White House initially slammed his proposal, but once party leaders on Capitol Hill realized that the spending bill contained no poison pills, they warmed to it. Democratic support became necessary once it was clear that Republicans would not be able to pass the measure on their own. Conservatives couldn’t even agree to allow a floor vote on the proposal, forcing Johnson to bring it up using a procedure that ultimately required the bill to receive a two-thirds majority to pass.

    Republican hard-liners have been no more willing to compromise under Johnson than they were under McCarthy. The conservative House Freedom Caucus, which initially suggested the two-deadline approach, ultimately opposed the bill anyway. “It contains no spending reductions, no border security, and not a single meaningful win for the American People,” the group said in a statement. “While we remain committed to working with Speaker Johnson, we need bold change.”

    Buried in that final expression of support for Johnson was the first hint of a warning. Conservatives have given the untested speaker some leeway in his opening weeks. Even McCarthy received something of a grace period; when the speaker negotiated a debt-ceiling deal with President Joe Biden, conservatives voted against the bill but didn’t try to overthrow him. Hard-liners haven’t threatened to remove Johnson, but that could change if he keeps relying on Democratic votes. When McCarthy caved to Democrats on spending for the second time, he lost his job a few days later.

    The former speaker and his allies warned his GOP critics that his replacement would find themselves in the same position: managing a majority that isn’t large enough to exert its will. “I’m one of the archconservatives,” Johnson told reporters before the vote, trying to defend himself. “I want to cut spending right now, and I would have liked to put policy riders on this. But when you have a three-vote majority, as we do right now, we don’t have the votes to be able to advance that.”

    Read: ‘We put sharp knives in the hands of children’

    Johnson has now used up one of his free passes. The question is how many more he’ll get. In the coming weeks, the speaker will have to navigate a series of fiscal fights over funding for Israel, Ukraine, and the southern border. The bill that the House passed today buys Congress another two months to hash out its differences over spending, but it doesn’t resolve them. Johnson vowed not to agree to any more “short-term” extensions of federal funding, increasing the risk of a shutdown early next year. The speaker will also have to decide whether to press forward with an impeachment of Biden that could please conservatives but turn off Republicans in swing districts.

    In the meantime, frustrated lawmakers from both parties are racing to leave Congress. Since McCarthy’s ouster, nine members, five of them Republicans, have announced their plans to resign or forgo reelection. Many more are likely to do so before the end of the year. After fewer than two terms in the House, GOP Representative Pat Fallon of Texas even considered returning to his old seat in the state legislature, which Republicans have long dominated, before changing his mind today. The frustration extended to other corners of the House GOP. “We got nothing,” another Texas Republican, Representative Chip Roy, lamented to reporters yesterday.  He shouldn’t have been surprised. At the moment, Republicans in the House have a majority in name only.

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    Russell Berman

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  • Republicans Don’t Really Want to Cut Spending

    Republicans Don’t Really Want to Cut Spending

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    Shortly after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced that he had struck a deal with President Joe Biden to raise the debt ceiling, Republican leaders began circulating a fact sheet to their members listing the victories McCarthy had secured. The first bullet point captured what was supposedly the whole point of the negotiations for the GOP: The newly christened Fiscal Responsibility Act would cut spending.

    An item further down the list, however, revealed far more about the agreement—and about how committed modern-day Republicans really are to their party’s small-government principles. That bullet point noted that the bill would “ensure full funding for critical veterans programs and national defense priorities, while preserving Social Security and Medicare.” At the end of a weeks-long negotiation, Republicans were bragging that they had exempted as much as half of the federal budget from the spending cuts they had fought so hard to enact. What they didn’t say was that for all of their rhetoric about reducing spending, they didn’t actually want to cut that much of it.

    The Fiscal Responsibility Act, which the House approved tonight on a vote of 314-117, will avert what would have been a first-ever national default, lift the debt ceiling through the next presidential election, and save Congress from a crisis of its own making. The bill, which is expected to clear the Senate in the next several days, is hardly what Democrats would have passed had they retained their House majority last fall. But in terms of “fiscal responsibility,” the proposal does vanishingly little. “It does nothing to change the unsustainability of the federal budget,” Robert Bixby, the executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan fiscal-watchdog organization, told me. “It’s taken off the table everything that would have an effect.”

    Read: Why the GOP wants to rob Gen Z to pay the Boomers

    It’s not that Republicans lost the budgetary battle because of Biden’s tough negotiating. They didn’t even try for major spending cuts in this round of talks. McCarthy followed former President Donald Trump in abandoning the party’s long-standing push to tackle the biggest drivers of the national debt: Social Security and Medicare. Biden and the Democrats were willing to cut the Pentagon’s budget, which accounts for nearly half of all federal spending outside of entitlement programs. But the speaker nixed that idea too. “Spending cuts are very popular in the abstract, much less so in the specific,” Bixby said.

    By the time McCarthy and Biden began negotiating in earnest, there wasn’t much left to cut. “You just can’t get major savings from the rest of what’s left,” Bixby told me. McCarthy was ultimately able to trim a few billion dollars from last year’s budget. That’s enough for him to claim that the Fiscal Responsibility Act cuts year-over-year spending for the first time in a decade, but in the context of the nearly $6 trillion that the federal government spent in 2022, it’s a pittance.

    McCarthy succeeded in getting much of what he said he wanted, but that’s only because he didn’t ask for much. Congress will take back $28 billion in unspent COVID-relief funds, and Republicans chopped off as much as one-quarter of the $80 billion Democrats earmarked for the IRS as part of their Inflation Reduction Act last year. But the reduction in IRS funding could actually increase the deficit in the long term, because the purpose of the money was to secure higher revenue for the government by cracking down on tax fraud. The toughest provision for progressives to swallow is additional work requirements for childless adults ages 50 to 54 who receive food stamps and cash welfare. Other changes, however, will expand the food-stamp program to veterans and homeless people, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office yesterday estimated that the government will end up spending more money on food stamps, not less, as a result.

    The CBO projected that the bill would save $1.5 trillion over the next decade. But its estimate assumes that Congress will stick to lower spending levels for far longer than the two years that the legislation requires. The speaker has touted other reforms in the bill, such as a requirement that the administration find cuts to offset expensive new rules or regulations, and a provision that calls for an across-the-board 1 percent cut in spending if Congress fails to pass the 12 appropriations bills that fund the government each year. But neither of these is guaranteed.

    The best that fiscal hawks could say for the agreement was that it temporarily halted spending growth. Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, told me that the most significant part of the deal was the “change in behavior” it represented. In recent years, she said, “lawmakers have only added to the deficit. They haven’t had any bipartisan deals that have brought the deficit down in a decade.”

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    McCarthy and his allies have argued that he extracted as many concessions as he could, considering that Democrats control the White House and the Senate whereas Republicans barely have a majority in the House. As speaker, McCarthy must protect the members most vulnerable to defeat next year, and he evidently determined that demanding cuts to some of the government’s most popular programs—Social Security, Medicare, the military, and veterans—could threaten the GOP majority.

    House conservatives were quick to denounce the agreement. To them, the cuts McCarthy secured were a woefully insufficient price for suspending the U.S. borrowing limit for the next year and a half. “Trillions of dollars of debt for crumbs,” Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, the chair of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, told reporters yesterday. “This deal fails, fails completely.” Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado noted that by only freezing rather than cutting spending, the legislation would “normalize” the growth of the federal government that happened during the coronavirus pandemic, even after most of the COVID-specific spending wound down.

    A few conservatives accused McCarthy of betraying the commitments he made to the party when he narrowly won the speakership in January. But even the Freedom Caucus spared the Pentagon and the biggest safety-net programs in its own proposals.

    Republicans have flinched on cutting spending before. Although the House GOP passed a debt-ceiling bill last month stuffed with conservative priorities, the party did not adopt a spending blueprint that would have detailed how it planned to balance the budget without raising taxes. And last week, Republicans abruptly postponed committee votes on four traditionally noncontroversial appropriations bills that contained spending cuts. GOP leaders cited the ongoing debt-limit talks as a reason, but congressional observers suspected that the party lacked the votes to advance the bills to the House floor.

    The GOP’s supposed zeal for smaller government has long been inconsistent. Most Republican lawmakers were happy to support spending sprees led by Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Trump. Only when Democrats have occupied the White House has the GOP demonstrated any interest in spending restraint.

    But that may be changing. In the 2011 debt-ceiling talks, Republicans forced Barack Obama to bargain over entitlement programs and accept deep cuts that applied equally to the military and domestic programs. Now the GOP is poised to hand Joe Biden a debt-ceiling increase of roughly the same duration in exchange for hardly any spending cuts at all.

    The party’s hardliners fought the deal but could not stop it. They appear unlikely to try to oust McCarthy over the agreement, and Republicans might not get another opportunity to force their agenda through for the rest of Biden’s term. That they chose to fight over so little represents a huge concession of its own, an acknowledgment that despite all their denunciations of out-of-control spending, Republican leaders recognize that what the federal government funds is more popular than they like to claim.

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    Russell Berman

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