If anyone believes a Republican trifecta in national government means Trump’s agenda is as good as implemented, last week’s chaos over a possible government shutdown should prove otherwise.
Despite members of the House having drafted a bipartisan continuing resolution (CR) to keep the federal government funded for a few more months, President-elect Donald Trump and businessman Elon Musk came out forcefully against the proposal — describing it as a bloated, pork-laden omnibus disaster.
Virtually overnight, House leadership dutifully rushed to propose a new CR that would appease their party’s standard bearer, despite the fact that almost anyone with even a casual understanding of D.C. politics knew it would struggle to win over the two-thirds majority needed to advance to the Senate.
To be fair, complaints that the first bipartisan agreement was stuffed full of unrelated pet projects weren’t exactly unfounded. That first version was full of one-off spending and regulatory proposals aimed at wooing otherwise skeptical lawmakers — unrelated proposals such as health care regulatory tweaks, a provision to allow lawmakers a 3.8 percent pay increase and even details to help bring an NFL team back to Washington, D.C.
In classic Washington fashion, the original CR was a 1,547-page bill full of priorities that had nothing to do with keeping the federal government operating for another few months — lending a bit of credence to the Trump/Musk complaint that it represented the sort of reflexive partisan horse trading that has contributed to the nation’s $36 trillion debt.
However, the Trump-approved 116-page version that replaced it wasn’t exactly a “fiscally conservative” alternative.
As far as keeping the government open, Trump’s preferred resolution was similar on key points to the pork-laden version it sought to replace — extending government funding into March and providing a few other critical expenditures, such as $100 billion in disaster relief funding. However, it would have done something else that should be a big red flag to anyone concerned about runaway federal spending: It would have suspended, raised or simply abolished the “debt ceiling” ahead of Trump’s second term.
In other words, while feigning concern over the fiscal “irresponsibility” of the original bipartisan agreement, Trump and Musk demanded a version that would have cleared the way for Republicans to continue racking up charges on the federal credit card, unobstructed.
The demand was so counterintuitive to the supposed conservatism of the GOP that more than three dozen Republicans joined Democrats to vote down the proposal.
“I am absolutely sickened by a party that campaigns on fiscal responsibility and has the temerity to go to the American people and say you think this is fiscally responsible,” said Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), one of the 38 Republicans who opposed the bill.
By Friday morning, Republican leaders were scrambling to concoct a compromise that would not only assuage the potential wrath of a historically vengeful Trump, but also win enough Republican and Democratic votes to keep the government from shutting down right before the holidays.
In the end, they succeeded. Friday afternoon, the House voted 366-34 to avoid a shutdown and approved tens of billions of dollars in disaster relief but had been stripped of the debt limit extension requested by Trump. The bill headed to the Senate, where it sailed through, and was signed by President Joe Biden.
The debacle should be an important lesson for political observers for a couple of reasons — not least of all because it demonstrates just how fractured and unruly the GOP remains, despite Trump’s near total dominance over the party’s leadership apparatus.
The spectacle also lays bare just how out of touch Trumpian populism is with the sort of traditionally conservative sentiments that used to dominate Republican politics. After all, since Newt Gingrich’s legislative majority in the 1990s, debt ceiling negotiations have been a favored way among Republicans to leverage moderate concessions from otherwise spendthrift political interests in congress.
As we saw in Trump’s first term, however, financial restraint was never a major component of his agenda. Even before COVID response efforts surged spending, the self-described “king of debt” had been increasing national deficit spending at a disturbing rate.
His desire to now remove the only real limit on his ability to drive federal ledgers even further into the red during his second term is a testament to how unserious he is about bringing down federal spending. To say nothing about the policy implications of such big-spending populism, it’s a political approach that will undoubtedly generate plenty of headaches for the GOP as they assume their trifecta in Washington next year.
After all, as last week demonstrated, Republican leaders clearly struggle when they’re required to balance the competing interests of fiscal conservatives, political realities and Trumpian populism. Rather than moving forward with a bipartisan (albeit pork-laden) funding proposal or even attempting a proposal that would have at least galvanized Republicans, Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) initially chose to merely placate Trump.
And in trying to secure the incoming administration a blank check for deficit spending, Johnson not only lost the support of Democrats in the GOP-led House, but also managed to alienate the sizable portion of his own party who still subscribes to traditionally conservative policy preferences.
If nothing else, such self-inflicted chaos is a useful reminder that legislative majorities simply don’t mean much when leadership is more concerned with appeasing a populist leader than forging pragmatic compromises with everyone else.
Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC — an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He has more than a decade of experience in public affairs commentary, having worked as a news director, columnist, political humorist, and most recently as the director of communications for a public policy think tank. Follow him at SchausCreative.com or on Twitter at @schausmichael.
