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\n

Speaker Mike Johnson is dealing with a nightmare before Christmas. And it won\u2019t be his last.<\/p>\n

GOP leaders are now considering a plan B to avert a shutdown deadline on Friday as conservatives, Elon Musk, Donald Trump and JD Vance have excoriated the original spending plan, which included several add-ons like $100 billion in disaster aid and a one-year farm bill extension. Trump and Vance, while objecting to the current bill in a long statement, also surprised lawmakers by demanding that Congress address the debt ceiling now and explicitly opening the door to a shutdown.<\/p>\n

Plus, at least one hardliner is vowing to oppose Johnson for speaker next year, citing the funding issues, and others are noncommittal. Several conservatives have now also escalated their demands to offset ambitious policy bills on the border, energy and taxes next year with major spending cuts.<\/p>\n

In theory, most Republicans support the latter idea, but looking for trillions of dollars in savings could drastically slow down an agenda that the GOP hoped to accomplish in the first 100 days of Trump\u2019s administration.<\/p>\n

It all points to Johnson\u2019s almost impossible balancing act next year. He will need near-unanimous GOP support on both his speakership and President-elect Donald Trump\u2019s priorities, so he needs to find a way to keep an ideologically diverse conference satisfied. Meanwhile, Trump\u2019s notoriously unpredictable nature could throw curveballs into the planning at any time, and Johnson needs to keep him firmly on his side to remain speaker.<\/p>\n

Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, a frequent Johnson antagonist, on Wednesday became the first Republican to publicly say he will vote against him for speaker on Jan. 3. Other Republicans, including some who previously said they would support him, now won\u2019t commit to backing him, despite Trump endorsing Johnson just over a month ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll vote for somebody else,\u201d Massie said. \u201cI\u2019ve got a few in mind. I\u2019m not going to say yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

Members of the House Freedom Caucus are already publicly floating alternatives to Johnson. And Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), who told Blue Light News last week that he would support the speaker, told reporters on Wednesday that he was not committed to backing Johnson. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who said earlier this month that he would vote for Johnson if the speaker race were held on that day, said on Wednesday that he was not deciding at this point.<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s look at the way this has been handled, it\u2019s been horrible,\u201d Biggs said.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the statement Trump and his incoming vice president released Wednesday afternoon, demanding action on the debt ceiling and opening the door to a shutdown. And Musk is publicly weighing in against his spending bill and urging anyone who supports it to be booted out of office during the next election. As Johnson faces growing opposition to his plan, he is considering pulling it and instead passing a \u201cclean\u201d short-term bill into next year.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf Democrats threaten to shut down the government unless we give them everything they want, then CALL THEIR BLUFF,\u201d Trump and Vance wrote in a statement posted to X.<\/p>\n

Less pressing, but still looming over the other developments, is what the stark divisions mean for next year. There was already an existing Republican standoff on the most basic strategy question: Should Republicans divide their trio of policy priorities into two packages, with the first tackling border and energy priorities, or pass them all in one?<\/p>\n

Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.), the House\u2019s top tax writer, has been pushing to do all of the priorities in one package. And he\u2019s using the latest demand from conservatives \u2014 that any new spending next year is offset with cuts \u2014 to reinforce his point.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople should look at that statement showing how difficult it is going to be to thread the needle, and that\u2019s why one package as a whole will make it easier, so that you can have a lot of buy-in from everyone,\u201d Smith told Blue Light News on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

But there are potential personal drawbacks for Johnson. Some of his most vocal critics are among those pushing for a two-track and are the biggest potential threats to his speakership. And they are already fuming over the dragged-out government funding fight.<\/p>\n

Conservatives, particularly those housed in the House Freedom Caucus, want tax changes to have offsets. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), for example, caught the attention of his colleagues this week when he said that he is digging in on requiring spending cuts to pay for corresponding tax cuts. And some of his colleagues are going even further.<\/p>\n

\u201cI honestly don’t know why people up here are talking about tax cuts. There’s really no way to afford them,\u201d Massie said.<\/p>\n

Then a group of House and Senate conservatives on Wednesday released a letter backing the two-step spending strategy. In it, they notably stressed that the border and energy bill, which would be the first step, should \u201cnot only be fully offset with real mandatory spending cuts \u2026 but also achieve deficit reduction with additional spending cuts at a level the conferences require and are realistic for passage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Conservatives have got allies on that point among some of the tax writers, including deficit hawks like Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.). But other Republicans have their own ideas \u2014 or are at least warning their colleagues not to slow down a top legislative priority, tax, in order to enact sweeping spending cuts that might divide the conference.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou need to do both, and you need to do both effectively. But I would hope that we don\u2019t hold up great economic growth through good tax policies because we can\u2019t get all the spending cuts that we want initially,\u201d said Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas).<\/p>\n

Olivia Beavers contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speaker Mike Johnson is dealing with a nightmare before Christmas. And it won\u2019t be his last. GOP leaders are now considering a plan B to avert a shutdown deadline on Friday as conservatives, Elon Musk, Donald Trump and JD Vance have excoriated the original spending plan, which included several add-ons like $100 billion in disaster […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3850\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}