Frustrations are mounting across the Capitol — and could potentially spill into House Speaker Mike Johnson’s leadership election early next year — as party leaders struggle to finalize a year-end spending package to avert a shutdown this week.
While congressional Republican leaders have informed their members that they’ve reached a deal on government funding, negotiators have so far failed to produce any text of the estimated 1,500-page deal, which is infuriating lawmakers of both parties eager to return home for Christmas.
The deal — which Johnson told CNN he hoped to release Tuesday afternoon — involves nearly $100 billion in disaster aid and $10 billion in relief for farmers in rural communities, those sources said.
And there’s a new wrinkle: Some House Republicans are making a last-minute push to shore up funding for the Department of Homeland Security in the continuing resolution, hoping to give President-elect Donald Trump the resources to fulfill his mass deportation pledge.
“That’s what they’re wrestling about right now,” GOP Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada, who leads the House Appropriations subcommittee over DHS, told CNN about the negotiations.
Amodei said the number “still isn’t decided” but the longer the negotiations take, the more the process becomes “like whack a mole.”
It’s unclear when the House would vote on the plan, but leaders of both parties are confident they will avert a government shutdown ahead of Friday night’s deadline.
The delays on the deal come amid far bigger problems for Johnson: The speaker’s late-December dealmaking with Democrats is stirring intense anger across his GOP conference, just weeks before the pivotal vote the Louisiana Republican needs to win to keep his gavel. Many Republicans are irate at the policies that have been tacked onto a bill that was intended to simply extend current funding levels, and multiple GOP lawmakers and senior aides privately predict Johnson won’t get a majority of his conference to back the bill in the end.
“It’s a complete monstrosity,” GOP Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona said of the spending bill, adding, “No, I don’t think it was handled well at all, but that’s kind of par for the course for this town.”
Asked by CNN if he sees himself voting for Johnson on January 3, when members will meet to elect the House speaker, Crane said he would “absolutely not” vote for the spending bill, and “we’ll see about January 3.” Crane was one of the eight GOP members who voted to oust then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy last year.
Another of the GOP lawmakers who helped take down McCarthy, Rep. Tim Burchett, called the way leadership has handled funding the government “gutless,” explaining, “They got a bunch of garbage they want to pass, so they’ll attach emergency things to it.”
Crane and Burchett are among multiple House conservatives who said Tuesday they feared Johnson and GOP negotiators have ceded too many Democratic demands — resulting in the kind of massive year-end package that Johnson has promised he’d avoid.
“It is a total dumpster fire,” said Republican Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri, voicing his frustrations at Johnson, whom he wouldn’t commit to backing on the floor in January.
Their anger is largely symbolic since most of those conservatives routinely oppose spending deals on the floor. But conservatives are sending an early warning to Johnson, suggesting this week’s funding fight could determine the speaker’s fate in that leadership vote.
“We’ll see. Everything’s got consequences,” said Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, when asked if the funding bill would impact his support for Johnson next month.
In recent days, Johnson and his allies have spent hours trying to keep conservatives on his side as negotiations continue. Johnson sat down with the House Freedom Caucus at their weekly meeting on Monday night as he detailed some of the spending conversations and worked to head off a conservative rebellion.
Rep. Byron Donalds, who attended that meeting, said members still want to see the text of the deal: “We got a lot of questions.”
“A deal put together like this, the number one question is, ‘What did the other side get?’” Donalds said.
Negotiators had hoped to finalize the government funding deal over the weekend, but last-minute hang-ups emerged, pushing congressional action closer to Friday’s deadline.
A fight over aid for farmers vexed negotiators over the weekend with Republicans desperate to include additional funds in the end-of-year spending deal and Democrats continuing to make demands in exchange for the ask.
Asked if the farm aid could wait until 2025, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told CNN, “There’s the potential for a lot of foreclosures to happen by the end of this year, so it’s an imminent threat that has to be addressed before the end of the year if we’re going to maintain family farms across America.”
Republican Rep. Frank Lucas of Oklahoma, the former chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, said, “From the perspective of the political crowd, of course, rural America is and has been for a long time Republican, so this conference has a responsibility to address those needs, not just because of the political base but because those farmers feed the United States and the world.”
GOP Rep. Chip Roy of Texas argued that Republicans should have forced Democrats to vote down farm aid on the House floor and not offered any sweeteners in exchange.
“If I was doing this, I would make Democrats vote down farm aid,” Roy said. “Put it on the floor, actually go down and legislate … So instead, we get this negotiated crap and we’re forced to eat this crap sandwich – why? Because fricking Christmas is right around the corner. It’s the same dang thing every year, legislate by crisis, legislate by calendar, not legislate because it’s the right thing to do.”
This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.
CNN’s Annie Grayer, Clare Foran and Haley Talbot contributed to this report.
Source: edition.cnn.com
