Conservatives Rebel Against Johnson’s Budget Deal With Democrats

The unveiling of Speaker Johnson’s budget framework has sparked fierce backlash from within his own conference and the conservative think tank world. He will be forced to suspend House rules and work with Democrats to ultimately pass his appropriations bills — once again making it likely that Congressman Hakeem Jeffries will deliver more votes than the speaker. Messrs. Johnson and Jeffries, along with Senator Schumer, released the budget framework on Sunday. The total cost comes out to $1.59 trillion in discretionary spending during the next fiscal year, not counting the more than $60 billion in pet projects they included for more senior appropriators. The discretionary budget includes $886 billion for defense and $704 billion in non-defense spending. The only cuts to the budget include the repatriation of unspent Covid emergency funds and additional cuts to the Internal Revenue Service on top of those President Biden agreed to last year. Conservatives were quick to lash out at the relatively new speaker, saying his proposal is nothing more than a continuation of past bipartisan budget deals that fail to tackle the nation’s debt problem and do not include any major policy wins. The conservative House Freedom Caucus called the agreement a “total failure” after the blueprint was released. “It’s even worse than we thought,” the group wrote on X. “Don’t believe the spin. Once you break through typical Washington math, the true total programmatic spending level is $1.658 trillion — not $1.59 trillion.”One of the caucus’s members, Congressman Chip Roy, was clearly disappointed by the lack of more substantive cuts and policy wins. When the House and Senate went to the conference to reconcile differences in each chamber’s draft of the National Defense Authorization Act, conservatives like Mr. Roy were angry that Senate Democrats stripped out a ban on drag shows at military installations and a rescinding of a Pentagon policy that allows certain servicewomen to take paid time off and be reimbursed for travel to obtain abortions.Mr. Roy said on X on Sunday that the topline number of $1.59 trillion is unacceptable. “Topline in spending is terrible and gives away the leverage,” he said. “We’ll wait to see if we get meaningful policy riders … but 1) the NDAA was not a good preview, and 2) as usual, we keep spending more money we don’t have.”Messrs. Jeffries and Schumer have promised that there will be no “poison pill policy changes” like the drag show ban or an abortion policy change attached to the budget.Mr. Roy has outsized power in this process, though. When Speaker McCarthy was struggling to win the speakership last year, he promised to place three conservatives on the House Rules Committee, giving the Freedom Caucus a veto over what comes to the floor. Mr. Roy, Congressman Thomas Massie, and Congressman Ralph Norman were the chosen three. Mr. Norman called the budget framework a disappointment, saying “there’s no hope of ever balancing our budget or securing the border.” Mr. Massie has yet to comment on the bill publicly, and his office did not return a request for comment. Another Freedom Caucus member, Congressman Mike Collins, ribbed his fellow conservatives in a sarcastic post on X on Sunday, noting the impossibility of winning serious conservative policy with a divided government and a three-seat Republican House majority.“Are we learning that negotiating with the Democrats in the White House and Senate with a slim majority is hard and you can’t get everything you want, no matter who is in the Speaker’s office?” he asked about his conservative friends’ objections to the spending agreement. Outside of Congress, some of the most influential Washington-based conservative think tanks are weighing in on the speaker’s compromise. The president of the conservative grassroots organization FreedomWorks, Adam Brandon, says Mr. Johnson’s middling cuts to discretionary spending are not enough — he needs to tackle entitlement programs and the debt head-on. “Trust fund programs and interest on the share of the debt held by the public are what’s driving deficits and debt and, ultimately, what’s pushing America into a sovereign debt crisis,” Mr. Brandon said in a statement. “Speaker Johnson promised a fiscal commission when he took the gavel in October. We’re still waiting to see movement on that.”President Trump’s last director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought — who has emerged as a key advisor to conservatives in Congress — called the proposal “unbelievable.” He said he would have preferred Mr. Johnson extend Speaker Pelosi’s 2022 budget so that automatic cuts across the board would take place in a few weeks. “What was agreed to last night would be $100 billion more than a long-term [continuing resolution] that triggered the across-the-board cuts,” Mr. Vought said Monday on Steve Bannon’s podcast. The budget numbers “are much higher and the Democrats are getting everything that they want.”

Conservatives Rebel Against Johnson’s Budget Deal With Democrats

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