As House Republicans prepare to bring a budget to the floor by the first week of March, the internal strife that has wracked the conference in recent years is flaring up once again, despite Speaker Paul Ryan’s repeated pleas for unity.
The division stems from whether to stick to the terms of the controversial budget deal struck by outgoing Speaker John Boehner and President Obama in October. The agreement, which would raise the debt limit and increase government spending for the year by $1.07 trillion, was widely seen as Boehner’s parting gift to the new speaker, a ready-made blueprint to help him avoid a government shutdown in his first two months on the job. But conservatives balked, and Ryan himself called it a “crap sandwich.” It ultimately passed with only 79 Republican votes.
Now that the time has come to enshrine the deal’s spending increases in the budget, those tensions have resurfaced. One camp comprises conservatives who believe that, deal or no deal, as Republican Study Committee chairman Bill Flores puts it, the conference must finally show “bold, aspirational leadership” and “write a conservative budget.” The other is led by senior members of the Budget Committee such as Tom Cole, who warns that “we can whine or complain about it, but we have to stick to a deal,” or else “risk losing the presidential campaign” by causing another government shutdown.
That’s a real worry, because when Senate Democrats implicitly promised not to filibuster any of the House’s appropriations bills for the new fiscal year, they did so with the understanding that Republicans in the lower chamber would stick to the deal’s numbers. So House GOP leadership, eager to avoid a politically damaging conflict with the Senate, wants to move forward using the October numbers as a template for passing all twelve individual appropriations bills through regular order, something conservatives demanded from Ryan at the outset of his speakership, and something he’s hoping to deliver on by July.
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Up until a few weeks ago, though few conservatives were enthused by the deal’s high spending numbers, the procedural and political upside it carried seemed enough to keep them on board with Ryan’s plan. But on January 25, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report predicting that in 2016, the federal deficit will increase in relation to the size of the economy for the first time since 2009, and projecting that the deal would add an extra $130 billion to the 2016 deficit.
For many deficit hawks in the House, the report was a game-changer, its predictions too high a price to pay for a quick and painless start to the appropriations process that helps them avoid politically damaging conflict in an election year.
‘What good is it to be in the majority if we don’t act like it?’ says HFC and Budget Committee member Dave Brat.
“It would not be wise for conservative Republicans to ignore that report. . . . It’s incumbent upon us to be proactive,” Flores says. Right now, he adds, it would be “really hard” for many of the 170-plus RSC members to support the spending increases agreed upon in October. They would prefer to keep appropriations levels closer to those in the 2011 sequester, even if it meant risking a filibuster in the upper chamber. “The chips may just have to fall a different way in the Senate.”
Freedom Caucus members echo Flores’s assessment and say that the House has for too long ceded its bargaining power to the Senate. They say that with a new speaker and a new, proactive ethos in the House, members shouldn’t continue falling captive to the exorbitant spending levels demanded by Democrats.
“What good is it to be in the majority if we don’t act like it?” says HFC and Budget Committee member Dave Brat.
#share#House leadership hasn’t stated publicly whether it will draw a line in the sand when it comes to the October numbers. Ryan recently told reporters that any internecine skirmishes thus far are “typical of the family conversations we have every year.” But sources close to leadership and aides to Budget Committee members say that, when it comes to the deal’s terms, negotiations have thus far been centered on allotting money for initiatives such as entitlement reform in the new budget, and there’s been no give.
Ryan has met with members both in groups and individually. On Tuesday evening, he hosted a “beer and budget” gathering with HFC members, where his arguments in favor of the plan largely fell flat, according to members present. Two days later, he and his chief of staff, Dave Hoppe, met with HFC leader Mark Meadows individually. A source with knowledge of the meeting says that the conversation went “well” but that Ryan was still “not budging on lowering the levels.”
Ryan has allies in Budget Committee members such as Cole, who continue to insist that the risk of reneging on the deal is too high.
“Provoking a spending fight and breaking your word . . . how is that helpful? It’s not,” he says. “To now renege on a deal, we’d be lucky to get an omnibus. We’d probably get a CR, and just kick the can down the road. I think a lot of folks don’t understand that. They think the only way to move forward is to shut things down. And that’s just not true.”
#related#There is the consideration, too, that if conservatives were to vote en masse against the plan, it could force leadership to make even more fiscal concessions to Nancy Pelosi and her team in exchange for Democratic votes. It’s this dynamic that plagued Boehner, and gave hard-line conservatives their reputation as principled stalwarts who unwittingly shoot themselves in the foot, helping Democrats move legislation through their intransigence.
Despite conceding that the process will be a “heavy lift,” Flores is confident that House Republicans will pass a budget one way or another, partly because of Ryan’s oft-repeated pledge to pass all twelve appropriations bills. “I want to get this point across: This is not impossible,” Flores says. “We will find a way to thread this needle and find a conservative solution.”
As NRCC chairman Greg Walden puts it, “Let the negotiations begin.”
— Elaina Plott is a William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at the National Review Institute.