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Speaker Mike Johnson

House GOP’s big problems on spending bills

Fearing an embarrassing loss, House GOP leaders suddenly canceled a vote on final passage of the FY2025 Energy and Water spending bill late Tuesday night.

At around midnight, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise announced that the House instead will take up the Interior funding bill today. That’s a big lift, although GOP leaders believe they have a chance to pass the measure. It may be the last one before Election Day. Republican leaders still haven’t decided if they’re bringing members back next week or recessing until September.

Speaker Mike Johnson and the House GOP leadership are planning a floor vote today on a non-binding resolution “Strongly condemning the Biden Administration and its Border Czar, Kamala Harris’s, failure to secure the United States border.” Also up — a resolution establishing a bipartisan task force to investigate the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.

And there’s the highly anticipated speech to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But it’s fair to say that the appropriations process is a mess following Tuesday night’s debacle.

Senior House Republicans and aides describe deep frustration with Johnson and the GOP leadership over their plans to jam through spending bills despite overwhelming opposition to these measures from Democrats, the Senate and the White House. This has forced vulnerable House Republicans into votes on bills that have no chance of becoming law.

The Senate isn’t in much better shape, however. Senate appropriators have reached a bipartisan deal to spend a lot more than the House GOP leadership will go for, but they haven’t moved any bills to the floor either. The House has at least passed four bills.

There’s still no agreement between the two chambers on topline FY2025 spending levels. Meaning everything will have to be passed in a lame-duck session or it’ll drag into a new administration. That’s not surprising for an election year, but it’s still ugly to watch.

The key issue here is that Johnson and House Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) won’t honor the “side deals” hammered out last year by President Joe Biden and former Speaker Kevin McCarthy in conjunction with the Fiscal Responsibility Act. The FRA set spending limits for FY2024 and FY2025, while the side deals greased the wheels with some more money.

Instead, Johnson and Cole have sought to boost Pentagon, border security and veterans funding. Non-defense domestic spending would be slashed. In turn, Democrats have accused House GOP leaders of going back on last year’s agreement.

House Republicans also included numerous “culture war” riders in their proposed bills despite huge Democratic objections. And with only a very narrow margin of control and unyielding Democratic opposition, House Republicans have struggled mightily to pass any of the measures.

Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said House Republicans are wasting their time passing “messaging bills” that can’t become law.

Greene — not a Johnson fan — and a lot of other House Republicans want to attach the SAVE Act to a short-term CR, vote on that package sometime in September and go home to run for reelection. The SAVE Act requires proof of citizenship for voters in federal elections.

These House GOP lawmakers want to dare Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the White House to risk a government shutdown just five weeks before the election over their opposition to the SAVE Act. Although knowing House Republicans, there’s no guarantee they can execute this strategy either.

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Editorial photos provided by Getty Images. Political ads courtesy of AdImpact.