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THE NEW SPEAKER’S FIRST TEST
By Lisa Desjardins, @LisaDNews
Correspondent
 
Last night, with November darkness over Washington, the motorcade of new Speaker Mike Johnson rolled two blocks north of the Capitol to the Conservative Partnership Institute, a networking and consulting firm run by two big names on the right: former South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint and former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
 
Both men were inside last night as Johnson sat down — again — with roughly a dozen members of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of House Republicans known for rebelling against leadership and who see a government shutdown as better than continuing current spending levels.
 
Talking with members as they exited, it was clear that neither Johnson nor the Freedom Caucus members shifted positions. They are on different pages. 
 
And that is the first real test of the new speaker.  
 
And now, a classic Here’s the Deal reminder: Things are fluid and may change by the time you read this email. For the latest and greatest, you can find updates on my X account here.
 
The basics

• The looming deadline. Government funding for most agencies runs out at the end of the day Friday.
• Johnson is proposing a two-step plan. (I call it the “Louisiana two-step,” after Johnson’s home state.) The plan was inspired by an idea from Freedom Caucus member Rep. Andy Harris, R-Md.
• What does the plan do? It extends funding for most government agencies, including those that draw a lot of debate for their involvement in issues like immigration and abortion, to Feb. 2.
• For a group of less politically hot agencies, funding would be extended until Jan. 19. (Those agencies fall under a few categories: agriculture, energy and the environment, transportation and housing, military construction and veterans.)
• Why this approach? The idea is to encourage separate appropriations bills with bifurcated deadlines. Pass what we can, when we can, and deal with the easier bills first.  Conservatives believe separate appropriations bills lead to less bloated spending than the typical “omnibus” appropriations, which have become enormous blobs of dollars in past years.

• Hard-line conservatives, led by many in the House Freedom Caucus, are flatly rejecting this plan.
• Why? They do not just want separate appropriations bills, they want changes in how much the government spends — and how they’re spending. And they want those changes immediately. These conservatives believe that the use of temporary funding bills, with no cuts in spendings, is simply a drawn-out process that leads to massive overspending.
• Who is opposed? There are as many as 20 or 30 Republicans who oppose the speaker’s plan. And that could grow.
• This is a tough situation. Johnson can lose just *three* of his members’ votes this week and pass a bill with only Republican support. (See my post here on why it is only three.)

• Because of this, Johnson is going big, procedurally. He is planning to go around usual House rules with a vote to *suspend the rules* to bring the two-step funding bill to the floor instantly, without going through committee first.
• Suspending the rules this way requires a two-thirds vote of the full House. That likely means that most Democrats would need to support it.
• The expectation here: Scores of members of both parties unite to pass this bill and avoid a government shutdown, for now.
• The Senate is poised to pass this.
• Democrats and Republicans in that chamber tell me that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has pitched the idea of giving the new speaker “a win,” of letting him try to govern and captain a major bill through the process. 

• Using this tactic is infuriating to many on the right. Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., who was at the Freedom Caucus meeting with Johnson last night, told me that he could not believe the speaker was considering a suspension vote.
• This is the precise move that led to the ouster of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy who used it to push through the temporary funding bill near the end of September. 
• Hard-liners are not talking of Johnson’s ouster at this point. They still harbor goodwill for Johnson, but it is diminished by this move. They now are using the same phrases — such as “We’ll see where this goes,” and “We may need to have a discussion at some point” — that they used following the debt ceiling deal in May, the moment that existential problems started to develop for McCarthy.
• Also, there are long-term issues here. It is not clear that House Republicans can pass the rest of their own appropriations bills. Issues, including abortion policy, have the labor and health bill in limbo this week. Concerns about Amtrak funding, among other things, have derailed the financial services bill.
• And lawmakers are not close to making out perhaps the most important decision here: How much total do they want to spend? That figure, called “the topline,” is not clear yet on the House side, much less negotiated with the Senate.
• Another problem: This approach leaves funding for allies in Israel and Ukraine in an uncertain state, something that is sparking some anger from Republicans and Democrats who see both running out of resources in weeks. 

• Lawmakers seem exhausted mentally and physically. Sitting in the tiny House Rules Committee room yesterday, where this was being discussed, each member’s face was openly and painfully drained. I saw two key, usually robust members sleeping on and off for 30 minutes, sitting just feet from the people who were speaking.
• As hard-liners want to stay and debate the nation’s deficit crisis, the issue of funding the government is what stands between members of Congress and their Thanksgiving recess. 

 
Where are we?
 
Speaker Johnson has chosen an unusual two-step path to get there, but in his first test of leadership he is pushing for bipartisan and simple compromise: extending current funding to buy Congress time to make more complicated decisions.
 
He is hoping that leads to substantive, conservative gains.  
 
But hard-liners have seen this situation before and are increasingly concerned that Democrats will use that time to jam Republicans into more status-quo spending.  
 
What happens in January and February — amid the start of primary elections — could determine the fate not just of government spending but of Speaker Johnson’s job.
 
Many more trips to the House Freedom Caucus are ahead for him. How dark or bright it will be outside is to be seen.