Mike Johnson Has a Kevin McCarthy Problem

National Review Online

Tuesday, November 14, 2023

 

The speaker of the House is supporting a continuing resolution to fund the government at current spending levels for a few months. Some Republicans oppose the continuing resolution. With only a handful of Republican votes to spare, the speaker might have to rely on Democratic votes to pass the continuing resolution and avoid a government shutdown.

 

No, this editorial isn’t from September. Speaker Mike Johnson is already finding himself in roughly the same position Kevin McCarthy was in.

 

Congress must pass a funding bill by the end of this week, or else the government will shut down. The House was not working most of last week, and over the weekend, Johnson introduced his idea for a “laddered” continuing resolution. Four of the twelve appropriations bills would be funded at current levels through January 19; the other eight would be funded through February 2.

 

Johnson says this approach is beneficial to fiscal conservatives because it prevents the oft-practiced yet ignominious congressional tradition of passing massive omnibus spending bills around Christmastime when members just want to go home and aren’t paying attention to what they’re voting for. But enough GOP House members have already said they would not support Johnson’s proposal to sink it. They oppose it because it doesn’t include spending cuts.

 

So if Johnson wants to pass his laddered CR, he will need to rely on Democratic votes in the House. This was the grievous sin that supposedly necessitated Kevin McCarthy’s removal from the speakership a little over a month ago.

 

Clearly, there were other issues at play, including McCarthy’s overall relationship with the conference, which is very different from Johnson’s, and the apparently unquenchable desire among a handful of GOP members for attention. And Johnson has not yet passed the CR with Democratic votes, and hypothetically could change course.

 

But reality hasn’t changed since McCarthy was speaker: Republicans have a slim majority in the House, and Democrats have a slim majority in the Senate and control the White House. Large spending cuts aren’t politically possible. Government shutdowns aren’t effective ways to enact spending reforms and have failed every time they’ve been deployed for that goal. Republicans don’t benefit politically from shutdowns, either.

 

Congress should do its job and pass the twelve appropriations bills like the budget process it created demands. Congress should also pass spending cuts to get the deficit under control. But neither of those things is going to happen this week. Congress isn’t going to turn around decades of fiscal negligence by Friday, and nobody has offered a serious counterproposal that would do so.

 

Getting the CR’s timing away from the holidays is a tiny victory for fiscal conservatives, but we don’t see the prospect of anything bigger coming from this round of negotiations. Republicans should pass a CR this week to avoid a government shutdown and live to fight for spending cuts in a few months.

 

In the intervening time, Johnson should assemble a conservative budget proposal that outlines what should be cut and how. Republicans should communicate to voters why the current size of the deficit is a problem, how the deficit contributes to inflation, and why higher interest rates are bad for taxpayers. Republicans could include authorization for a bipartisan commission to study the debt and propose long-term solutions, a proposal Johnson has said he supports.

 

Undoing the government’s spending problem is going to take time, and it will require bipartisan buy-in. That means fiscal conservatives must think beyond the current spending window, and they must not blow up House leadership for doing what is, for the time being, simply a reflection of political reality.