Speaker Mike Johnson is facing a mutiny among his members on both sides of Republicans’ ideological spectrum over what is in the continuing resolution and how he has handled the process of putting together the stopgap funding measure.
Members of the House Freedom Caucus told NOTUS just last week that they were entirely on board with the idea of a three-month continuing resolution through March. They even advocated for it, saying it was a smart and good plan.
Now, not so much. The hard-liner caucus shifted on the CR after Johnson added over $100 billion for disaster relief, $10 billion in aid for farmers and pharmacy benefit manager reform — a key priority for PHARMA that has immense bipartisan support.
The changes have forced Johnson to deal with fires on his right flank. Freedom Caucus members have started speaking out vocally against the CR, and the frustration is spewing out into the open.
“It’s a total dumpster fire,” Rep. Eric Burlison told reporters of the continuing resolution.
Rep. Ralph Norman was equally upset, saying that the “CR does not do it. It’s really an omnibus, to be honest with you.”
“Call it whatever you want, it’s spending that we’re not having no offsets for,” he added.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene — who recently reached détente with Johnson and pledged to back him in January after being his main antagonist for the past year — said the stopgap funding measure “is going to turn into a three-month omnibus, basically.”
“Here we are today, on Tuesday, we haven’t seen any bill text,” Greene said. “We’re supposed to fly out on Thursday. We’ve had a long time to deal with it. So it’s basically the same pattern of behavior, here we are again.”
Indeed the bill was pitched as a “clean” CR, meaning it matched last year’s funding levels, but it also contained a number of projects members have lobbied for. The CR, which was made public Tuesday night, grants DC control of the RFK stadium site, allowing the Washington Commanders’ NFL team to relocate there. There’s also a provision to recoup 100% of federal money spent in repairing Baltimore’s Key Bridge and an expansion of President Joe Biden’s outbound investment security program.
What’s more surprising is it isn’t just Freedom Caucus members getting upset at the process. More establishment Republicans — even some senior committee chairs — are expressing disappointment over what’s played out this week.
The speaker “kept saying, you know, ‘We’re doing a clean CR, we’re doing a clean CR. But we have to do farm aid, and we have to do disaster relief, oh, and then we’re going to do this [Pharmacy Benefit Manager] piece,’ which I think people were like, well, then we’re just adding on, now it’s a Christmas tree, which is exactly what we said we weren’t going to do,” one establishment GOP member told NOTUS. “I think there’s some frustration on that.”
“Trump won, I thought we were unified?” one House Republican told NOTUS. “He needs to say something now, otherwise the train is coming right off the unstable tracks they are already on.”
At a closed-door House Republican conference meeting on Tuesday, Johnson said the CR was designed in a “collaborative process with the committees.” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith replied, “Not true,” according to a source in the room.
Rep. Mike Lawler went to the microphone during the meeting to emphasize his displeasure with how the continuing resolution had been drafted. The New York Republican said he was frustrated that when he would raise his priorities to leadership, the response he would get back from the speaker’s office would be, “Jeffries and Schumer don’t support it,” according to another source in the room.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden, another establishment member, told NOTUS House Republicans could have done “better” on the process and that “the equities that we represent as individual committees need to be more robustly represented in the negotiating process.”
Another establishment Republican, Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, went public on X with her resentment, even though she admitted she hadn’t seen the CR yet and was going off what she’s been told.
“Everything I am hearing about the CR thus far leads me to believe that I’ll be voting NO,” Malliotakis said in the post. “Republicans are in the majority and yet the Democrats seem to get more of their priorities in than we do.”
The continuing resolution had been in the works for weeks, yet as of 3 p.m. on Tuesday — three days until the government would shut down — there was no bill text, and members were getting increasingly annoyed by the rumors percolating around the bill to the extent that some were coming out against it before ever seeing the language.
All this frustration could be a bad omen for Johnson as he attempts to hold onto the speaker’s gavel in January.
Burlison refused to commit to backing Johnson for speaker in January, saying he is “extremely frustrated.” Rep. Andy Ogles, another Freedom Caucus member, told Politico that his “fear is this is going to set up a speaker’s fight in January.”
Another House Freedom Caucus member texted NOTUS that “something has to change because this isn’t working.”
Johnson, for his part, is defending the bill.
“This is not an omnibus,” Johnson told reporters at his weekly press conference. “This is a small CR that we had to add things to.”
He also said that his future is not on his mind — though it likely is.
“I’m not worried about the speaker vote,” Johnson said.
This story has been updated after the CR was released.
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Reese Gorman is a reporter at NOTUS. Katherine Swartz and Helen Huiskes are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.