In a parallel universe, House Republicans are passing their spending bills this week, teeing up talks with the Senate and aiming to finish their work before a Sept. 30 government funding deadline.
In our dimension, House Republicans aren’t even at the Capitol this week.
After failing to rally around the partisan starting point funding bills they expected to pass before leaving for the August break, Republicans returned to their districts for recess a week early on Thursday.
By their own admission, there’s no chance they’ll attempt some kind of final sprint, bipartisan negotiation for spending bills that could actually become law on time. Speaker Mike Johnson’s move to send the House home early was functionally an admission that the appropriations process has, once again, failed. Leaders say they are already resigned to a short-term package in September that will keep funding levels the same — possibly through the spring when a new president will be in the White House.
“It’s not ideal,” Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas told NOTUS last week, before the House left early in lieu of voting on the remaining GOP spending bills.
“But,” he added, “there’s no point in staying if they’re not going to pass.”
Republicans say they’d prefer to follow the deliberative, member-involved spending process Congress is supposed to use each year. But both parties haven’t truly been able to do that since the last millennium.
Each year, members blow past the deadlines and rely on last-minute funding stopgaps, ultimately passing massive omnibus bills that are negotiated — behind closed doors — between a handful of congressional leaders instead of individual appropriations bills that are worked out in public on the House and Senate floors.
This House — with its razor-thin GOP majority and vocal faction of far-right members within it who would seemingly prefer never to vote for government spending at all — wasn’t quite positioned to be the exception to that trend. But after all of the party’s infighting over the past year and a half, the utter meaninglessness of this spending cycle is hitting members harder than usual.
“Until the Senate decides to actually take up the bills, it’s a futile effort here,” Rep. Barry Loudermilk of Georgia said.
And Texas Rep. Chip Roy has seen the House’s work as a messaging charade for months. He’s long predicted Congress will pass a stopgap funding measure instead of approving a full fiscal year’s spending.
“Does anybody think otherwise?” he wondered sarcastically in an interview with NOTUS in March. “It’s an election year.”
Last week, Crenshaw was just as cynical about the whole exercise.
“The Appropriations Committee, they come up with as many wins as they can — and we passed four bills — but even those are on partisan lines,” he told NOTUS. “Even those are just starting points in negotiations with the Senate. And you’ve got members who would rather grandstand and pretend to fight for their constituents as opposed to actually getting some wins for them.”
Crenshaw continued that those grandstanding members “block our ability to even unify on these appropriations bills.”
“And then we end up with whatever the Senate puts in an omnibus. That’s a summary of the appropriations process,” he said.
How could that be fixed? “Electing different members,” he answered. “That’s how.”
Crenshaw said many of his GOP colleagues “want the appearance of fighting more than they want conservative wins.”
They’d rather, according to Crenshaw, “get nothing than something.”
It’s true that the Republican conference can’t seem to unify around the party’s spending bills. GOP leaders had to pull two votes on those measures from their schedule last week amid internal policy feuds. Earlier this month, House Republicans couldn’t even agree on passing their bill to fund their own branch of government.
But when it comes to the fantasyland appropriations bills that, as Crenshaw noted, Republicans can’t pass, let alone force into law, some GOP voices don’t think the answer is just to get every Republican in line. They think the answer is to stop passing the fantasyland appropriations bills entirely.
“This illusion of leverage has been deluding people for so long,” said Brendan Buck, a former senior aide to Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan. “Passing your bill at a partisan level with partisan riders does nothing to affect the outcome. We should know that by now.”
While some Republicans believe the right path is to stake out a hard-line position on these bills — with lower spending numbers and conservative policy riders, to get Democrats to accept at least some of their demands — Buck thinks that strategy has already failed.
The Appropriations Committee, he argued, should reclaim the House’s institutional power by doing a serious, bipartisan negotiation earlier. The panel should bring bills that could actually become law to the House floor, he told NOTUS, and defend them even if it doesn’t satisfy everyone in the majority.
“It’s moving them earlier,” he said of that approach. “It’s empowering more people.”
Even if Buck thinks that would actually result in more leverage for House Republicans, it isn’t likely in today’s GOP.
When NOTUS asked Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio about that strategy, the congressman who replaced Boehner had a simple response: “No.”
“We have a Republican majority. We should pass a Republican bill,” he said.
Still, Buck has at least one sympathetic listener: Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole, the new chairman of the Appropriations Committee.
“I agree with that,” Cole told NOTUS last week when asked about Buck’s argument. “Typically smart comment by Brendan.”
Cole wants to see what the next president thinks, however. And he’s proud of the work his committee has done, even if the full House hasn’t approved all of the spending bills on time.
“All 12 bills are out of committee,” he told NOTUS. “Five, embodying 75% of all spending, are across the floor.”
That’s more work than the Senate has done, he noted — where the committees that deal with spending are still slowly moving through their own bills for the upcoming fiscal year.
The decision to leave a week early, Cole said, was “fine by me.”
“We’d reached the point that literally, I’m not sure what good we could have gotten done next week,” he said. “So letting people get home and campaign and cool off a little bit after what’s been an extraordinarily challenging session makes a lot of sense.”
For his part, Johnson, who previously promised that the House wouldn’t depart for August recess until all 12 spending bills made it through his chamber, denies that the decision to leave early was related to internal fights over the appropriations bills.
“We’ve had a tumultuous couple of weeks in American politics, and everybody is, to be honest, still tired from our convention, and it’s just a good time to give everybody time to go home to their districts and campaign a little bit,” Johnson told reporters last week. “We’ll come back and regroup.”
Rep. Andrew Clyde, a member of the Appropriations panel, declined to comment on Johnson’s handling of the issue. “I don’t want to talk drama,” he told reporters.
He also defended the work, even if it has stalled for now. “We’ve gotten them all out of committee, and that was one of the things that we had committed to doing,” he said.
Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican, said leaders have a tough job.
“You can’t accommodate a few people on our team,” he told NOTUS. “So it’s a hard needle to thread.”
Even so, he wishes the House had stayed for another week.
“I have constituents coming in, so I don’t really like changes of schedule,” Bacon explained.
Sure, maybe Republicans couldn’t pass the remaining funding bills this week, he added, but there are always other bills lawmakers could vote on.
“I have lots of legislation,” Bacon said.