Rush to year-end budget deadline tests tricky new McConnell-McCarthy partnership
When Kevin McCarthy implicitly told Mitch McConnell this week to “wait until we’re in charge” before working with Democrats to get the year-end budget bill over the finish line, McConnell surely understood his House counterpart’s conundrum.
McCarthy still hasn’t secured his own party’s votes to become Speaker and needs to placate a cranky conservative base in no mood for cross-party compromise. Besides, the institutionalist McConnell is always an easy foil for the party’s right flank.
And yet the breach between the two Republican leaders on their preferred approach to fund the government by next week may be just a preview of the duo’s new complex relationship, with McCarthy’s House caucus about to wield more power than McConnell’s minority caucus next month.
“McConnell’s position is known and stable…He still has power on the floor and so forth. But it’s less than he had before,” said Eli Lehrer, president of the R Street Institute, a free market Washington policy think tank. “McCarthy, provided he becomes speaker, will be the least powerful speaker of the past 50 years and have a very hard time managing a very, very narrow and likely unruly majority.”
In essence, the tug of war over the omnibus bill opened the window into the two men’s willingness to compromise during the second half of President Joe Biden’s first term.
“McCarthy has incentives not to and, with only 49 seats, McConnell must do so,” Lehrer said.
Still, some McConnell allies thought it was foolish for McCarthy to personally target the Senate minority leader when many Republicans just want to clear the decks of the must-pass spending bills before they take charge of the House next month.
Privately, there’s a belief McCarthy would prefer that outcome as well. Starting a clean slate with a GOP legislative agenda seems preferable to confronting a government shutdown in January right after taking the speaker’s gavel. Veterans of previous shutdowns know the instigators always shoulder the blame.
After initially signaling he favored a year-long omnibus bill to handle fiscal year 2023 spending, McConnell altered his expectations this week, saying it was “increasingly likely” Congress would have to settle for a short-term resolution to punt difficult funding decisions into the New Year.
“We’re running out of time,” McConnell said.
The current funding resolution expires next Friday and the two parties remain tens of billions of dollars apart on how much should be allocated. Conservatives both inside and outside the government are running a concerted campaign to resist a Democratic-steered budget.
Robert Ordway, a senior policy adviser to GOP Sen. Mike Braun of Indiana, encouraged Republican support for some sort of short-term continuing resolution, according to an email obtained by McClatchyDC.
“Why would we be doing a one-week CR negotiated by [Nancy] Pelosi when a two-week CR is the difference in who controls the House gavel?!?,” Ordway wrote in the email, in a plea to extend negotiations into 2023.
“Please watch my boss over the next few weeks and support the fight that he and a few others are in – uphill battle,” Ordway continued, copying an article on Senate conservatives “taking on McConnell.”
Outside influencers are also applying pressure.
“McConnell and McCarthy must not cave to the Biden-Schumer-Pelosi lame-duck agenda,” said Cesar Ybarra, vice president of policy at FreedomWorks, a conservative group that advocates for small government. “Republicans must uphold their campaign promises to tackle reckless spending.”
MCCONNELL VS. THE MAGA WARRIORS
McConnell and McCarthy are known to have a decent relationship but not a particularly close one. While McConnell has privately sought to move his party away from former President Donald Trump, McCarthy has openly courted him and his MAGA base.
To this point McConnell has rarely attempted to impact matters of the House, seeing the body as largely outside of his control. But starting in January, everything a GOP House attempts to move through a narrow majority, McConnell will be asked to answer for.
Whereas McConnell has characterized Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s conspiratorial views as a “cancer for the Republican Party,” McCarthy counts her as a supporter and is poised to reinstate her to powerful House committees.
Sitting in the majority, Greene and other far-right members will have a much bigger megaphone to broadcast their grievances and attacks, many which are likely to be aimed at McConnell, a deal-maker who favors governance over chaos.
“Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, they’re always trash-talking McConnell. They think he’s a RINO, they think he’s an accommodationist,” said Robert Draper, author of the book, “Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind.” “They’re going to be trying to enact legislation and they’re going to be furious if McConnell doesn’t push hard enough for it. Some of the stuff McConnell is going to view as zany.”
Some analysts also believe that McConnell wants to avoid a protracted budget fight when a few months later Republicans will have to confront raising the debt ceiling, another point of contention for conservatives.
A newly emboldened Republican House might just end up being a bigger headache for McConnell than when Democrats controlled the chamber.
“The dirty little secret in Washington is that no matter which party you belong to, members of the House and Senate view the other legislative chamber as the enemy,” said Ken Spain, a Republican strategist who formerly worked as a congressional aide. “There will continue to be differences between the Senate and House GOP leadership as the two legislative bodies respond to competing interests within their respective conferences, but the current situation is certainly unique.”
