GOP infighting: Leaders 'mull bipartisan government funding deal' — but face 'backlash from hardliners'

During the United States' lame duck period, Democrats and Republicans avoided a federal government shutdown with a funding deal that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), then-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and then-President Joe Biden agreed to. But it was only a stopgap measure, and a new spending agreement will be needed in 2025.

Republicans have a lot more power in Washington than they did when the December 2024 deal was reached. The GOP still has a small majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, but the White House and the U.S. Senate are now controlled by Republicans. And according to Politico sources, GOP leaders in Congress "are internally debating a possible deal with Democrats that would include government funding, California wildfire aid, a debt-limit hike and border security money."

Politico reporters Meredith Lee Hill, Jordain Carney and Rachael Bade, in an article published on January 22, explain, "Senior Republicans have been privately mulling a bipartisan government funding deal for weeks now, wary that they may not be able to add a debt-limit hike to their party-line reconciliation package given internal GOP divisions over the matter. But conversations around the potential larger deal have heated up in recent days as GOP leaders try to figure out how to lift the approaching debt ceiling while also advancing a massive, party-line reconciliation bill and avoiding a March 15 government shutdown."

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This "strategy," the journalists add, "is not finalized" and "would come with plenty of risks."

Sen. John Thune (R-South Dakota), who replaced Schumer as Senate majority leader when a new Congress was seated on January 3, told Politico, "I'm interested in getting a result on all of the above, but how we do that is still an open question."

GOP leaders, according to Hill, Carney and Bade, "would need to convince Democrats to accept the border funding increase" and "could face backlash from House GOP hardliners unless they attach steep spending cuts, which would automatically threaten Democratic support and raise the risk of a shutdown."

Johnson and Thune, the Politico reporters note, discussed spending options when they met with President Donald Trump on January 21.

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"Speaker Mike Johnson has floated linking the debt ceiling to money to recover from the California wildfires," Hill, Carney and Bade report. "Thune also previously indicated that the debt ceiling was unlikely to be included in the GOP border and energy bill Senate Republicans are crafting, in another sign that Republicans were likely to leave it out of their party-line reconciliation effort."

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Read Politico's full article at this link.