Speaker Johnson starts enjoying a — possibly brief — fiscal honeymoon

Speaker Mike Johnson is about to enjoy a smoother-than-expected path to navigating the GOP’s upcoming spending crises, for one key reason: His name isn’t Kevin McCarthy.

The next few weeks certainly won’t be drama-free, with seven full-year GOP spending bills still to vote on, a massive Israel aid package in the works and a federal funding deadline on Nov. 17. But at this early stage at least, the usual antagonists of Republican leaders are signaling that they’re willing to go easy on Johnson as he carves his own way out of the party’s spending mess.

Several hardliners said they’re open to another short-term funding patch, albeit with conservative priorities attached, that would prevent a shutdown next month. Some of those Republicans are even suddenly willing to disregard one of their biggest demands of McCarthy during the former speaker’s tenure — cutting $115 billion from the GOP’s existing spending topline.

House Freedom Caucus member Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.), one of the eight GOP rebels who ousted McCarthy earlier this month, sounded more like establishment Republicans that he and other ultraconservatives have clashed with on spending as he shrugged off the $115 billion call. That’s a “measly amount of money up here” compared to the nation’s trillion-dollar deficits, Crane said.

“We’re going to keep doing the best we can, but I’m going to try to be realistic about the process,” the first-term Arizonan added about the fall spending fight.

That kind of about-face that hasn’t gone unnoticed by McCarthy allies, including centrists who were ready to push back on conservatives over the issue — which would have made life harder for the new speaker.

“They’re already talking and saying, they’ll give him more room on a [continuing resolution] and all the things that they wouldn’t give to McCarthy,” senior spending leader Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio) said of the hardliners. “It sort of proves that whatever happened to McCarthy was out of spite.”

McCarthy’s critics argue that unlike the former speaker, his successor is genuinely committed to passing all 12 of the House GOP’s funding measures on the floor, and in short order. Already on Wednesday, hours after Johnson’s speakership began, the chamber kicked off debate on the bill to fund the Energy Department and water programs.

Passage swiftly followed on Thursday, 210-199, after the House debated well over 100 amendments to the funding measure.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican who initiated McCarthy’s ejection from his leadership post this month, said the House is done with the lax “French workweek” of the former speaker. “We’re going to be working bayou hours, which is a little more rigorous,” Gaetz said.

House conservatives fought “so fervently” against a stopgap funding patch under McCarthy, Gaetz added, because McCarthy wasn’t committed to using the extra time to pass a full dozen individual spending bills.

Perhaps more critically, though, Johnson is starting out with far more trust from the far-right than the Californian.

Top Republican appropriators like Reps. Tom Cole of Oklahoma and Steve Womack of Arkansas said they’re eager to abandon the hardline push to slash billions of dollars from the GOP’s annual spending bills — if that’s, indeed, what conservatives are willing to do. Instead, they hope to adhere to the funding totals established by the bipartisan debt limit deal earlier this summer.

That debt agreement, negotiated by McCarthy and President Joe Biden, eventually contributed to the former speaker’s ouster because it didn’t slash enough spending to satisfy conservatives. But now that seems like ancient history.

“This is going to have to be negotiated and there’s going to have to be some reckoning on it,” Womack said of the Republicans’ spending bill totals. “And I don’t know what that’s going to look like.”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a Republican close to the conservative Freedom Caucus, predicted “it will be at least 30 days” before Republicans start feeling “stabby again.”

“I think he has a grace period,” Massie said of Johnson, suggesting that the new speaker push for a spending bill that would extend current government funding levels for a full year. That outcome, some lawmakers are betting, could be the best-case scenario for keeping the government open and avoiding a fiscal standoff every few months.

“I would buy myself the entire year of runway,” Massie said.

Johnson has floated a temporary spending patch through Jan. 15 or April 15, whichever garners more GOP support. While a year-long continuing resolution is deeply unpalatable for most members, it would technically avoid a 1 percent funding cut in April that’s otherwise baked into the debt limit deal.

Lawmakers could also boost budgets where necessary through funding exceptions known as anomalies, or emergency supplemental spending bills.

Not every conservative, though, is willing to look past divisive policy spats as the GOP’s full-year spending bills start coming to the floor in the next three weeks.

“That has nothing to do with the speaker,” said Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), who predicted the House GOP would run into problems with several contentious pieces of legislation, including the one that funds the Department of Justice and the FBI.

“Whether you’re the speaker, or I’m the speaker, bad policy is still bad policy,” Ogles said.

Jordain Carney contributed.

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