With less than two weeks before a potential government shutdown, Johnson’s early decisions foreshadow a difficult path to bipartisan agreement.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has endorsed a measure tying funding for Israel to a reduction in funding for the Internal Revenue Service, a proposal rejected by both Senate Democrats and the White House. New House Speaker Mike Johnson took office pledging to unify his fractious GOP conference and work with House Democrats on issues including government spending, the national debt and Israel’s defense against Hamas terrorist attacks.
His first spending proposals have seen him seeking leverage for negotiations with the Democratic Senate and Biden administration. Conservatives have cheered the approach, seeing Johnson’s hard-line tactics as a way to move the starting point for policy discussions further to the right.
“I genuinely believe that the future of our republic may be decided in the next 12 to 14 months. This is a heavy time,” he said. “We go into that very sober-minded. The first week in the job has been a whirlwind.”How Johnson handles the fiscal fights through the end of the year could define his speakership. The government will shut down on Nov. 18 without a bipartisan spending deal.
But GOP leadership quickly shot down those ideas, fearing the custom fees were likely to be perceived as a tax increase. Even cuts to the clean energy credits would represent a tax hike on businesses. Instead, GOP officials coalesced around repealing part of Biden’s $80 billion expansion to the IRS, a policy they say Democrats have already showed they were willing to sacrifice in pursuit of more pressing goals.
More pragmatic Republicans began the year pushing for legislation that might pass a Democratic Senate, but gave up that fight as they realized those bills could never pass the House. They have opted to support more conservative versions for the sake of party unity, and many moderate Republicans have privately admitted they will probably vote for the remaining — and highly controversial — fiscal year 2024 appropriations bills since they know none of them will become law in their current form.
Johnson told skeptics that he no longer represented just his western Louisiana district and instead stood for all GOP viewpoints across the country, according to senators in the room.He most pointedly appeared to soften his stance on support for Ukraine. He’d previously been a skeptic of sending additional aid to the war-torn nation, but acknowledged that a large majority of Senate Republicans still support more funding, as do a significant number of House Republicans.
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