Roy’s frustration reflected the reality facing the band of House conservatives that has aggressively pushed for steep and immediate cuts to federal spending: Despite all the chaos in their own party and the turmoil they’ve brought to government, little in the federal budget has changed as a result of their actions.
Since Republicans took control of the House in January, a small group of far-right lawmakers forced the longest speaker nomination contest in U.S. history, paralyzed legislation on the House floor, threatened to breach the U.S. borrowing limit, then deposed former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) for working with Democrats to fund the government. (Roy joined some of these actions but was not among the House Republicans who pushed out McCarthy.)
And yet for all that, the federal government is currently spending the same amount as it did before House Republicans took office.
On Friday, President Biden signed into law a bipartisan bill to avert a shutdown and continue to fund the government at existing levels until January, staving off cuts for the rest of this year. (Those existing levels were agreed to when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress last December.) Democrats are optimistic they can again thwart steep spending reductions in the new year, defying expectations that the new House majority would force Biden to cut many programs that liberals hold dear.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has vowed to finally break that dynamic in the next spending fight, promising that the latest deal to extend government funding without cuts will prove his last after he, like McCarthy, relied on Democratic votes to keep the government open.
“I’m done with short-term CRs,” Johnson said on Wednesday, referring to the “continuing resolution” that extends funding. “We are. We’re resolved.”
“You’re right: This is very similar to the package that led to Speaker McCarthy’s ouster,” said Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), a frequent intermediary between far-right House members and Senate conservatives. “The big difference here is that Johnson came in sort of at the end of the fourth quarter with the Bengals already down by three touchdowns. I blame the quarterback who’s been in the game from the very beginning much more than the guy who came in at the end and is trying to salvage the situation.”
But Johnson’s prospects for achieving cuts are complicated by the same factors that bedeviled McCarthy.
McCarthy agreed with Biden in May on spending levels that would have amounted to a slight cut (accounting for inflation) for the current fiscal year, which started Oct. 1, in a deal that also suspended the debt ceiling. But he then tried repeatedly to pass appropriations bills through the House with GOP votes alone that would instead have cut spending by hundreds of billions of dollars, aiming to create leverage in subsequent negotiations with the White House and Democratic Senate. So far, many of those measures have failed to pass the House due to opposition from the far-right, which insisted the cuts did not go far enough — even though they would have been rejected by the Senate anyway. Other bills failed because Republicans representing districts Biden won in 2020 rejected the sharp cuts.
House conservatives have expressed optimism that Johnson would forge a better path. But now the new speaker finds himself in precisely the same bind as his predecessor: Unable to pass bills through the House to cut funding due to resistance on the right, he may instead have to pass legislation that Democrats will support to keep the government open, lest voters blame the GOP for a shutdown — ultimately leading to bills that are far more bipartisan.
“They’re not functional enough to get whatever budget cuts a slim House majority might otherwise command,” said Liam Donovan, a GOP strategist. “Unless you’re willing to do more of the lifting for what can actually become law, you don’t…
Read More: House Republicans toppled McCarthy, but budget cuts didn’t follow