How Freedom Caucus Bomb Throwers Guarantee Inflated Spending Bills

As the great fireworks of our radically recalibrated presidential politics continued to explode in the sky, the leaders of the world’s most arguably functional deliberative body, the U.S. House of Representatives, calmly returned to form. Since there was no conceivable way its conference would reach a government funding agreement weeks before their final self-imposed deadline in September, Speaker Mike Johnson declared in late July that the House’s August recess would begin early, setting the stage for another installment of the Republican majority’s seemingly endless regression of constant last-minute resolutions and omnibus spending packages. Months of delays absorbed mostly by election-driven culture war inquisitions now regularly devolve into harum-scarum budget votes that serve mostly to generate more crude but impotent rhetoric from the far-right Freedom Caucus and cannibalize the House GOP leadership. We can bet with certainty that this is not what the founding fathers of the republic had in mind when they entrusted the House with the solemn responsibility of controlling the government’s purse strings.

The House GOP’s dilatory handling of budget responsibilities is particularly puzzling less than four months before the general election. With Johnson presiding over a slim five-vote majority and the party’s presidential standard-bearer slipping in the polls, one might think it’s time for the Republican House to show off its basic governing chops. It’s hard to convince the electorate to expand and extend your majority when you repeatedly fail to fulfill the one fundamental duty the Constitution mandates.

Yet governance is not exactly in the MAGA-ified GOP lexicon. All the numerous missed budget deadlines testify to that, as does Congress’s decision, at Trump’s direction, to kill a long-negotiated immigration bill that thwarted the former president’s plans to demagogue the immigration issue in hyperspace during the final stretch of his campaign. (Indeed, even with the House closed for August, the GOP Senate conference continued to pursue the party’s agenda of maximum legislative entropy by engineering a filibuster vote that would block the extension of the popular and widely beneficial child tax credit.) And for the conference’s most ardent anti-government faction, spending impasses are perverse promotional opportunities: They can rail against the failed domestic politics of Beltway influence peddling, block any attempt to reopen early spending negotiations in the Appropriations Committee, wait for the next unwieldy continuing resolution or omnibus bill, and cast free votes against those, too, knowing that Johnson will have to broker deals with Democrats to get them passed, which inevitably opens up more intraparty feuding and spluttering on the floor before C-Span cameras. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The process has become so sclerotic and counterproductive that some Republicans, including key congressional players in the budget process, are actually mulling a return to thoughtful bipartisan bargaining, a political sin of the first order in the MAGA house, but clearly the only way out if sound, intelligible spending deals are ever to return to the House floor. “The solution is very simple, it’s right in front of everyone,” says Brendan Buck, a partner at the public relations firm Seven Letters and a former adviser to former House Speaker Paul Ryan and press secretary to Ryan’s predecessor, John Boehner. Buck’s proposal is essentially a return to something resembling regular order on the floor, a process of early negotiation between top brass from both parties in the Appropriations Committee, and then later deals to define preferred spending priorities. Today, however, the House deals with the appropriations process only in a fitful and afterthought fashion, and this directly fuels the opaque, last-minute adoption of rolling resolutions and haphazard omnibus packages that have come to characterize the miasma of House spending.

It says a lot about the state of the House that this return to bipartisan legislation sounds decidedly utopian, and Buck himself is not at all optimistic about its immediate prospects. “It’s the most acute example of the broader problem the conference has, for sure,” he says. “There’s no value in compromise. And if there is compromise, the will to vote for those things is not there.” Still, he notes, the upcoming election could help focus the conference’s attention on the stark consequences of such short-term, self-interested calculations. “The politics that flows down to the leadership is that if you want to keep your majorities, if you want to save vulnerable members, then you have to make deals.” And such compromises are not unprecedented, even in the recent rancor-prone GOP conference. “We made some small progress in 2018,” Buck says. “We made a kind of trade with the Democrats, saying, ‘Well, we want Defense funding, and you want Labor, Health and Human Services. Let’s make a trade.’ And you know, that was half of discretionary spending, right there.”

But the problem is that there’s no clear path to steer the restive GOP conference toward compromise spending packages, and plenty of perverse incentives to make them do a 180-degree turn in the other direction. “The irony is that the people who say they want a continuing resolution or an omnibus are the ones who are enabling it by basically saying none of the current budget bills are good enough and then blocking them from passing,” says Doug Heye, a former Republican National Committee spokesman who has also held senior communications posts in the House and Senate. “The fact that we’re in a media and campaign finance incentive structure that rewards those same members only exacerbates the problem.”

Even hardline fiscal conservatives in the House understand the need for a drastic overhaul. “The Appropriations Committee, they’re pulling out all the stops, and we’ve passed four bills, but those are partisan as well,” Texas GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw told the D.C. political site known. But as Crenshaw went on to explain, this is just Potemkin legislation, designed primarily to drum up enthusiasm among the anti-government GOP base. The spending bills now emerging from earmarks “are just starting points in negotiations with the Senate,” he says. “And you have members who would rather play the starring role and pretend to fight for their constituents than actually win victories for them… And then we end up with whatever the Senate puts in an omnibus. This is a summary of the earmarks process.”

House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole of Oklahoma has also signaled he’s receptive to a more transparent, measured and chaos-resistant approach to reaching spending deals in his panel. “The appropriations have been typically bipartisan,” Heye says. “Cole is an adult in the room and he wants to be one again so we can avoid constant resolutions, omnibuses and threats of closure.”

But again, there’s simply no way to get there from here; the adults in the room are simply outnumbered and often outnumbered by the bomb-throwers aligned with the Freedom Caucus. “That’s a boring answer, but it’s a matter of educating the membership,” Buck says. “One of the problems we face is that some of the loudest voices tend to be the newest members, who come in and think they can fix everything… They all come in beating their chests, and it’s hard to turn the room around at that point and say, ‘Yeah, that really doesn’t work.’” There’s an ally education deficit in Johnson’s case, she notes; Johnson’s close alliance with conference bomb throwers ends up, perversely, creating precisely the kind of rushed, unwieldy spending packages that fiscal conservatives profess to hate: “We also have a speaker who doesn’t have a lot of experience with this process, and you know, all of this ends up in the speaker’s hands, so people have to say, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do to avoid this.’”

Unless and until such teachable moments coalesce into an intelligible governing program, the House GOP conference is bound to court maximum delay, disorder and dissent on the fundamental issue of government spending, an apparent recipe for a bad Election Day. “That’s not going to change now,” Buck admits. “No one wants to be accused of being a traitor or be seen waving the white flag. Even if you’ve seen this before and know what’s going on, you’re not going to support bipartisan compromise.”