Senate Republicans Plot To Leapfrog Speaker Johnson on Spending Fight as Democrats Threaten To Shut Down Government

With Speaker Johnson’s legislative timeline to codify the Trump agenda in a “big, beautiful bill” slipping away, Republicans in the Senate will this week try to leapfrog their more dysfunctional colleagues in the House and chart their own course. The speaker had originally hoped to have his budget framework done by Friday of last week, though a small number of conservatives in a narrowly divided chamber are making it difficult for him to move forward. All of this comes as Democrats say they will not help to keep the government open if Elon Musk and his fiscal vigilantes are allowed to continue their slash-and-burn tactics across the executive branch.The top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, Congressman Jim McGovern, told The New York Sun last week that he is willing to band together with his colleagues, withhold their votes for government funding, and let the Republicans take the blame if they refuse to scale back Mr. Musk’s role in the executive branch. “They’re bragging about this great mandate that they have. Let them put on their mandate pants and do whatever they wanna do,” Mr. McGovern said. “If they want us, things have to change, and you know, I’m more than willing to work with them. … But I’m not a cheap date.”Mr. Johnson’s plan for a reconciliation bill strategy was simple — pack everything from border security to defense spending to energy reform to tax cuts into one bill that could pass on a simple majority vote in both the House and Senate. Those plans were derailed, however, when members of the Freedom Caucus demanded $2.5 trillion in cuts to the budget over the next ten years, a number so steep that many members of the chamber could be forced to vote against it. When the speaker’s budget plan fell behind schedule, the Senate decided to move forward with their own bill to deal with border security and deportation operation funding, defense spending, and energy reform, which would then allow them to deal with taxes in another bill later this year before the 2017 tax cuts expire. The chairman of the Budget Committee, Senator Graham, says that he will now put forward his own legislation. On Friday — one day before he played golf with the president in Florida — Mr. Graham released a 61-page budget resolution that would actually increase spending by more than $85 billion every year for the next four years, though that spending would be offset by cutting other items that have yet to be specified. Under this framework, the Homeland Security and Judiciary Committees would be given $175 billion to spend on border security and deportation operations, the Armed Services Committee would have $150 billion to spend on the military, and the Commerce Committee would be authorized to spend $20 billion on unspecified programs. Other committees would be instructed to propose spending cuts to their respective remits by March 7 — one week before the government is due to shut down and the debt limit is set to be breached. “This budget resolution jumpstarts a process that will give President Trump’s team the money they need to secure the border and deport criminals, and make America strong and more energy independent,” Mr. Graham said. “Senate Republicans are ready to roll,” the majority leader, Senator Thune, wrote on X.Neither of the senators mentioned the nation’s ever-increasing $37 trillion national debt or the unsustainable growth in entitlement spending that is putting the country on a path to insolvency. The problem for Senate Republicans is that they need to get their bill through the chamber and through the House by March 14 if they want to include additional government funding and increase the amount of debt — via the debt ceiling — that Congress is legally allowed to saddle American taxpayers on a party-line vote. If they fail to do that, they would be forced to turn to Democrats for assistance in keeping the government spending spigots open and avoiding a default on the debt, which experts have warned would be disastrous for the world economy. Democrats are already saying that they will not help the GOP keep government open unless they force Mr. Musk to stop his crusade against the executive branch, which has already resulted in the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the end of day-to-day operations at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “They are simply trying to dismantle the government, so yes … if we have to take steps to be able to hold them accountable, use the leverage that we have to force it, I cannot support efforts that will continue this lawlessness that we’re seeing when it comes to this administration’s actions,” Senator Kim — a former diplomat and USAID employee — told NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “For us to be able to support government funding in that way, only for them to turn around and dismantle the government, that is not something that should be allowed.”“This is on them,” he added. “They are the majority, and if they cannot govern, then that’s for the American people to see.”

Senate Republicans Plot To Leapfrog Speaker Johnson on Spending Fight as Democrats Threaten To Shut Down Government

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