Speaker Mike Johnson says he’s in lockstep with his colleagues in the House and Senate on the issue of budget reconciliation — the filibuster-free process by which Republicans are hoping to achieve key policy objectives in Donald Trump’s first year.
But it may be that other Republicans have different ideas of what “lockstep” really means.
The speaker sat down with Fox News Sunday this weekend and gave an updated timeline for the leadership-approved budget package he will try and push through the narrowest of majorities in the House — a bill that will require every Republican vote, or just about, to pass. Johnson said that a planned committee markup this week may need to be pushed back, putting a timeline for the bill’s release in question.
And when he joined Senator Lindsey Graham, the Senate GOP’s chief appropriator, alongside Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso and the president at the Super Bowl, Johnson was projecting pure Republican unity.
“I spent a good while talking with Lindsey Graham at the Super Bowl in the suite with the president. And he and I are on the same page. In fact, I can show you a photo on my phone where we both held up the one finger and I said, one beautiful bill, and he smiled,” claimed Johnson on Monday, speaking to reporters. “There is no daylight between us.”
But Graham jumped ahead of Johnson last week. On Friday, he released the Senate Budget Committee’s framework for a bill that would address funding for border security, energy policy, and a boost to national defense funding. Missing from Graham’s bill: an extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which Johnson and House Republicans want to see included in the reconciliation package instead of passed later this year as part of separate legislation.
Johnson also wants to see a debt limit increase included as part of the deal.
On Monday, the speaker’s problems grew larger. The House Freedom Caucus, representing the hard right of the GOP, put out its own framework and immediately began circulating the competing plan throughout the broader Republican side.
Their plan calls for the debt limit to be raised alongside nearly $500 billion in spending cuts. It also includes the boosts for defense spending and border security. And in a memo, the group explicitly calls for an extension of the Trump tax plan to be addressed in a second package.
Johnson is now facing pressure from all sides — while Democrats are showing no signs of eagerness to bail him out. In comments to reporters, the Speaker has said that it is still his position that the House GOP could only pass one reconciliation package this year.
So far, that argument doesn’t seem to be convincing his fellow Republicans.
A mid-March funding deadline is putting leadership on the clock, too. Johnson and his team will have a little over one month to wrangle his unruly caucus into line, something that will be necessary if he is to back the Senate off of taking the lead. That could prove difficult if Republican leadership delays too much longer in releasing the framework for its own plan.
Much of the debate could end up being centered on cuts to Medicaid, which news outlets reported on Monday will likely be a major point of the GOP’s strategy for funding both the extension of tax cuts and other GOP priorities. Among the cuts, according to multiple reports, could be reductions in benefits to enrollees and possible work requirements.
Johnson saw success throughout the last year of Joe Biden’s presidency in his efforts to manage an unruly House GOP majority held together by just a handful of votes. But his newest challenge puts him up not just against conflicting views within the House but the Senate as well, where he is seeing no support from either leadership or the back bench of the Republican caucus. Trump, too, seems intent on focusing his time on what he can achieve via executive action, leaving Johnson without his bully pulpit.
Perhaps that daunting reality was in the Speaker’s mind on Sunday when he told Fox: “I appreciate the Senate’s zeal, we have it in the House as well…But as I reminded my friend Lindsey, I have about 170 additional personalities to deal with and he’s only got 53 on the Republican side there.”
