From the Right……
First they caved on the speaker election. Then last month they fell in line on a budget vote, and again on a divisive government funding bill. But now, it seems, House conservatives are ready to make a stand.
Speaker Mike Johnson is staring down the most significant internal revolt he’s faced all year — one that threatens his own plans to advance the Republican legislative agenda and one that even President Donald Trump has been so far unable to squelch.
Dozens of House Republicans are undecided or outright opposed to rubber-stamping a Senate-approved budget blueprint for the GOP’s domestic policy megabill, and an all-out whip effort from Johnson and his leadership team — including a private meeting Tuesday between Trump and key holdouts — has only produced modest gains. If Johnson and Trump can’t flip most of them in the next 48 hours, lawmakers will start to board flights for a two-week recess, denying the president a show of legislative progress as financial markets wobble over his tariffs.
“Why am I voting on a budget based on promises that I don’t believe are going to materialize?” one key GOP holdout, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, said about the Senate plan.
Roy and other hard-right members have bristled previously at Johnson’s big legislative moves, requiring significant attention from GOP whips and sometimes from Trump himself. But previous mutinies stayed relatively small and manageable. This time, the opposition is piling up and rebellion is seemingly in the air as deficit hawks across the Republican conference dig in to secure deep cuts to federal spending.
What’s also different is how determined some members are to defy Trump, who has repeatedly intervened at key junctures this year to help bring holdouts along. Last month, he threatened to boost primary challengers to unseat the one House Republican who voted against the GOP spending bill to avoid a shutdown…..
More Tiny Steps
And perhaps more to come.
More Republicans are starting to break with Donald Trump…just a very small bit at a time.
Three weeks ago, I noted that there were a few tiny signs of GOP resistance to Trump in Congress. Now we have seven Republican Senators sponsoring a bill to take back some of the authority that Congress has delegated to presidents on tariffs. It’s enough of a mini-revolt that the White House actually issued a veto threat instead of just ignoring the whole thing, even though the anti-tariff Senators are still far short of the 60 votes they would need to beat a Senate filibuster if it somehow reached the Senate floor. Nor do they have any hope of getting the bill considered in the House…..