{"id":6037,"date":"2025-02-12T00:04:15","date_gmt":"2025-02-12T00:04:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/jodey-arrington-has-2-days-to-save-the-house-budget\/"},"modified":"2025-02-12T00:04:15","modified_gmt":"2025-02-12T00:04:15","slug":"jodey-arrington-has-2-days-to-save-the-house-budget","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/jodey-arrington-has-2-days-to-save-the-house-budget\/","title":{"rendered":"Jodey Arrington has 2 days to save the House budget"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

This is the moment Jodey Arrington<\/a> has been waiting for: The Texas Republican and longtime fiscal hawk has a GOP trifecta, the House Budget Committee gavel and an opportunity to make the enormous cuts to federal spending he\u2019s always wanted.<\/p>\n

But Arrington\u2019s now at risk of being outmaneuvered by fellow chairs, senior leaders and the Senate as frustration gives way to full-blown anger among House Republicans over how he has struggled to advance President Donald Trump\u2019s vast policy agenda.<\/p>\n

A plan blessed by Arrington\u2019s close personal friend, Speaker Mike Johnson<\/a>, has stalled for weeks in the Budget Committee. Arrington and fellow Texas hard-liner Chip Roy<\/a> have battled Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith<\/a> (R-Mo.) and other senior Republicans over the fiscal parameters for the sweeping border, energy and tax bill.<\/p>\n

Arrington on Tuesday called a Thursday meeting of his committee to settle those vast differences and advance a budget blueprint, and he now has less than 48 hours to figure out how to make it all work.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll soon find out if Jodey is in over his head,\u201d one GOP lawmaker, granted anonymity to speak candidly, texted shortly after Arrington announced the Thursday markup.<\/p>\n

It is, to be sure, a staggeringly difficult task to bridge the deficit-minded politics of the hard right with the more pragmatic concerns of swing-district Republicans who are wary of political blowback, and top House leaders are ratcheting up the pressure as they try to swiftly deliver Trump\u2019s legislative agenda. His own struggles reflect just how difficult it will be for Republicans to deliver on Trump\u2019s promises with their narrow majorities in both chambers.<\/p>\n

Still, Arrington has struggled to get even the 20 other Republicans on his committee on the same page. He has made clear that his heart lies with the panel\u2019s most conservative members, who see the present moment as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get the nation\u2019s fiscal trajectory on track. He\u2019s long agitated for Republicans to get control of skyrocketing spending on the mandatory programs \u2014 including Medicare and Medicaid \u2014 that largely drive federal budget deficits.<\/p>\n

But as a committee chair, Arrington is a de facto member of GOP leadership who is expected to fall in line behind more senior Republicans who have to balance ideology and agenda with protecting their majority \u2014 and protecting the jurisdiction of other chairs with different priorities.<\/p>\n

Budget hawk<\/h5>\n

Arrington has allies and defenders among the small cadre of Capitol Hill budget hawks who have frequently battled Republican leaders as they push for deeper cuts than many in the GOP find politically palatable.<\/p>\n

\u201cI appreciate what Jodey\u2019s trying to do over there. You know, he\u2019s serious about bringing us back to some pre-pandemic level spending,\u201d said Sen. Ron Johnson<\/a> of Wisconsin, a member of the Senate Budget Committee and a longtime advocate for spending austerity. \u201cUnfortunately, others in his conference aren’t.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe’s listened,\u201d added Rep. Ralph Norman<\/a> (R-S.C.), a member of both the Budget Committee and the hard-right Freedom Caucus. \u201cHe is doing a good job.”<\/p>\n

But Arrington has openly warred at times with fellow chairs and other senior Republicans who believe he isn\u2019t a reliable team player. For instance, in a private meeting Tuesday, he rebuffed Smith\u2019s efforts to expand the scale of the tax cuts that could be embedded in the package.<\/p>\n

\"Arrington<\/p>\n

Smith afterward took a public shot at him, telling reporters that the figures Arrington put forward could not accommodate both a permanent extension of Trump\u2019s 2017 tax cuts plus other campaign priorities the president ran on last year.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnything less would be saying that President Trump is wrong on tax policy,\u201d Smith said.<\/p>\n

A senior Republican aide made a similar point, saying Arrington\u2019s priorities do not necessarily align with those of the country\u2019s most powerful Republican: \u201cEveryone wants to cut spending. The problem is President Trump didn\u2019t run on cutting spending. \u2026 Jodey just isn\u2019t playing ball.\u201d<\/p>\n

The irony is that Arrington hardly cuts the profile of a hardcore conservative ideologue. Rather than emerge from the tea party politics of the late 2000s like many House members on the hard right, he\u2019s a veteran of the Texas GOP establishment \u2014 an alumnus of George W. Bush\u2019s gubernatorial administration and White House who later served as an executive for his alma mater Texas Tech.<\/p>\n

His brand of fiscal conservatism has soft edges, much like Arrington himself \u2014 a dimpled, eager and jovial politician who has sought to rally fellow Republicans behind his “Reverse the Curse” fiscal plan.<\/p>\n

That has been a struggle at times \u2014 one that has prompted some unusually personal clashes with fellow Republican leaders.<\/p>\n

In early 2023, after he first assumed the gavel, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy blocked Arrington from releasing a budget that included spending cuts so drastic that some centrists worried it would hurt them politically. With Democrats in control of the Senate and White House and no chance of any budget getting adopted, McCarthy saw no point in exposing his vulnerable members to blowback over the document.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese budget resolutions are not easy,\u201d Arrington said in an interview that year<\/a>, not long after The New York Times reported<\/a> that McCarthy considered Arrington \u201cincompetent.\u201d (Notably, Arrington was and remains close to Majority Leader Steve Scalise<\/a>, McCarthy\u2019s chief internal rival.)<\/p>\n

Opportunity of a lifetime<\/h5>\n

Now Arrington\u2019s job has suddenly gone from nuisance to necessary for House Republicans. The GOP wants to use budget reconciliation procedures to overcome a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, and that requires both chambers first adopting a budget resolution \u2014 a fiscal outline for the legislation to follow.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Arrington who is supposed to play the leading role in drafting that outline, and people close with him say he\u2019s reluctant to pass up the opportunity to institute serious spending reductions while also keeping tax cuts in check to finally wrangle out-of-control deficits.<\/p>\n

But as the plan has taken shape in recent months, senior Republicans have privately complained that Arrington has dragged his feet on making difficult decisions and have questioned whether he is more loyal to the conference\u2019s elected leadership or the Freedom Caucus hard-liners they\u2019re trying to corral.<\/p>\n

The tensions have been inflamed by Arrington\u2019s internal campaign to get fellow committee chairs to cough up increasing levels of spending cuts \u2014 or, in Smith\u2019s case, curbing his tax-cut plans \u2014 in order to keep the overall package\u2019s deficit impact in line.<\/p>\n

Things came to a head Monday night on the House floor, where Arrington held a tense conversation with Johnson and several other senior Republicans. The upshot was that Johnson would be shopping around a budget plan of his own \u2014 one that guarantees more modest spending cuts than what Arrington and the hard-liners have been pushing for while also reining in potential tax cuts.<\/p>\n

After a POLITICO story Monday<\/a> described it as Johnson \u201csnatching the pen\u201d from the Budget chair, Arrington rose inside a closed-door GOP conference meeting Tuesday morning to deny any such thing. And then, after weeks of waiting, he announced to his colleagues that his panel would finally schedule a markup later in the coming days.<\/p>\n

Senior Republicans are still concerned that a deal won\u2019t come together in time for the Thursday meeting, especially with the Senate Budget Committee set to move Wednesday on its own competing blueprint \u2014 one that some House hard-liners continue to prefer.<\/p>\n

\u201cI like Jodey quite a bit, personally \u2014 I don’t envy the position he’s in,\u201d observed Rep. Brendan Boyle<\/a> of Pennsylvania, the top Budget Committee Democrat. \u201cIt’s very interesting to me that there’s suddenly a markup on Thursday, because I did not realize that somehow, suddenly there is agreement on the House Republican side.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mia McCarthy and Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the moment Jodey Arrington has been waiting for: The Texas Republican and longtime fiscal hawk has a GOP trifecta, the House Budget Committee gavel and an opportunity to make the enormous cuts to federal spending he\u2019s always wanted. But Arrington\u2019s now at risk of being outmaneuvered by fellow chairs, senior leaders and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6038,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6037","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=6037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6037\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}