Speaker Johnson (R-LA) knows that if the government is forced to shut down because funding legislation was held up, Joe Biden and the media will push this on Republicans.
So, while it did not have unanimous support among Republicans in the House, he still managed to get stopgap funding passed, which also made it through the Senate.
Talking Points…
- Stopgap funding passed
- Republican reaction to funding
- Analysis
After seeing how the media reacted to the border situation after Biden made a trip to the southern border, I cannot blame Johnson for just wanting to get a stopgap funding bill passed to keep the government open. He did just that by passing the legislation in the House with a vote of 320-99, with 97 Republicans voting against the bill.
The bill also passed through the Senate with a vote of 77-13. It is now headed to Joe Biden’s desk, where he will sign it and keep the government up and running. This will move the deadlines for full funding back to March 8 and March 22.
The final legislation will have individual bills for each government area, although they may be presented in a package for the vote. This alone was a big win for Johnson, who stated:
“We broke the omnibus fever. That’s how Washington has been run for years.
“This was an important thing to break it up into smaller pieces.”
This is a win-loss situation for Johnson, who now has to deal with the Freedom Caucus and other members of the GOP caucus who were unhappy about passing yet another temporary measure. And the pushback was significant.
As he was with past legislation that did not address the border and that was not paid for, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) was frustrated over another continuing resolution (CR) being passed rather than a full budget that would show significant cuts in overall spending. Roy stated:
“Just more of the same. We’re not going to do anything that’s going to actually change the border.
“It’s just the swamp doing what the swamp does.”
Speaker Johnson has leverage here, but it is limited. The one thing that he can hold over the head of Joe Biden is the funding for Ukraine, especially now that there are reports of Ukraine rationing ammo because they are just about out. Biden does not want to be in the Oval Office if Ukraine falls, but Johnson could now be worried about that falling to Republicans rather than Biden and Democrats.
I say this after watching just a few days of Biden’s sudden reversal on the border. After allowing more than seven million illegals encounters and close to another two million gotaways over the last three years, Biden is now calling on Republicans to help him get the border under control.
Most Republicans have rejected the bipartisan border deal that went through the Senate because, while it does have some positive aspects, it also codifies a lot of what Biden and Mayorkas have been doing over the last three years to flood this country with illegal immigrants. Even so, the media has already flipped the script on this and making Republicans out to be the ones preventing border security, completely ignoring everything that Biden has done over the last three years.
Johnson can still survive this by presenting legislation in March that shows serious cuts to spending and trading out legitimate border security for aid to Ukraine and Israel. If not, he will probably have the same fate as Kevin McCarthy.
