After months of infighting, bruising failed floor votes and the historic removal of their leader, Republicans signal they could wind up mostly falling back on the former Speaker’s deal, as hard-line conservatives soften demands for cuts steeper than those laid out in the compromise.
“Basically, they agreed to what we had said all along, that the numbers that the Speaker agreed to with the president were the numbers that are set and the numbers we should live by,” Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio), a spending cardinal on the House Appropriations Committee, told The Hill.
The shift comes as members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus are pressing for both chambers to begin to conference their drastically different batch of funding bills as soon as possible, particularly as Congress stares down another government shutdown deadline in January.
Lawmakers said Tuesday that they are hoping for a bicameral top-line agreement between leadership in both chambers in the coming days to kickstart bipartisan spending talks.
While Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, told The Hill on Tuesday that she’s not “directly involved” in those negotiations, she said that she expects “them to be concluded this week.”
However, there are still questions around where a side deal between McCarthy and President Biden stands on pulling back and repurposing $20 billion in IRS funding — which Democrats hoped would be reinvested into discretionary funding for nondefense programs.
While hard-line conservatives have let up in their demands for spending below the budget caps agreed to by McCarthy and Biden, they have already spoken out against rescissions to yank back old funding to offset spending elsewhere.
“It’s still spending. When you add it up, the dollars that go out, have got to equal some number,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) said. “You can’t plus it back up. That includes the supplementals and the rescissions.”
The Hill’s Aris Folley has more here.
