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Editor's note, Dec. 21, 10:20 a.m. ET: Shortly after midnight Saturday, the Senate passed a bill to fund the government and avert a government shutdown. The bill did not include a suspension or repeal of the debt ceiling, which President Donald Trump had called for.
This week's long-running narrative, “House Republicans can't govern,” will soon be forgotten. Elon Musk's decision to abandon a bipartisan agreement to keep the government funded through the power of the post (and the potential threat posed by his vast wealth), Donald Trump's sudden debt limit House Republican Chip Roy told Trump to repeal the law. All this drama will be replaced by even more ridiculous drama in the new year, with colleagues pointing out that they “lack any sense of self-respect.”
But this week's government funding battle also revealed something that could have serious implications for governance over the next four years. The idea is that Trump's power over Congressional Republicans is quite limited.
That didn't seem to be the case just a few days ago. On Wednesday, President Trump, along with Elon Musk, urged House Republicans to withdraw a bipartisan spending deal that would have continued funding the government through March, expanded disaster relief, and funded childhood cancer research. asked to do so. Trump says House Republicans will reject the carefully negotiated compromise, even though Republicans need the consent of a Democratic majority in the Senate to pass the bill and failure to pass a spending bill by Saturday would mean a government shutdown. Heeded the President's call.
But it turns out that while Trump had no difficulty persuading his co-partisans to block one spending bill, he was less adept at getting them to support another.
On Thursday, House Republicans worked with President Trump to release a new funding bill that ignores all of Democratic priorities. The president-elect directed his party via social media to “vote 'yes' on this bill tonight.” Thirty-eight House Republicans then voted against the bill, more than enough to sink it amid near-unanimous Democratic opposition.
Part of House conservatives' opposition to Trump stems from ideological differences. The president-elect's opposition to Wednesday's bipartisan deal differed from that of donor Elon Musk and other hard-line House Republicans. The latter downplayed the spending bill's page count and fiscal cost. Trump, by contrast, seemed more preoccupied with the bill's failure to raise or eliminate the debt ceiling.
That's understandable. The debt limit may be the most unreasonable of all U.S. government programs. It does not prevent Congress from approving expenditures that far exceed federal revenues. Rather, it gives the government the power to borrow money to cover spending already mandated by Congress. The alternative to raising the debt ceiling is for the government to default on its obligations to the American people, lenders, or both. In reality, breaching the debt limit could cause global financial turmoil, as U.S. government bonds, the world's most widely trusted “safe” asset, suddenly become a risky investment.
Refusing to raise the debt ceiling would be economically disastrous, but many lawmakers tend to do it anyway. After all, with the federal debt already at $36 trillion, raising the government's debt ceiling could sound bad to voters if highlighted out of context in campaign ads. . Some conservatives also see threatening to destroy the global financial system as a potential means to force through unpopular spending cuts.
So getting Congress to raise the debt ceiling is inevitably a bit of a headache. And President Trump doesn't want the high-stakes process of enacting massive tax cuts that, if history is any guide, to significantly increase debt and deficits, to get in the way.
So President Trump implored House Republicans to suspend the debt ceiling for at least two years, or otherwise eliminate it completely, so as not to disrupt his honeymoon period (as things stand, Congress is likely to decide next step). At some point the debt ceiling will need to be raised (after narrowly avoiding a crisis in 2023). House Speaker Mike Johnson honored the request and added a two-year debt ceiling increase to the bill Thursday.
For dozens of House conservatives, the idea of voting for a spending bill without deep funding cuts that would also suspend the debt ceiling was more anathema than the idea of defying Trump.
No wonder some House Republicans value conservative purity over loyalty to President Trump. But it's surprising that nearly 40 of them have such priorities. During the 2024 campaign, Trump demonstrated a remarkable ability to dictate the ideological terms of his party without provoking sustained attacks from the right, officially abandoning the national abortion ban. President Trump's pivot to abortion, coupled with his apparent success in revising conservative orthodoxy on trade, entitlement spending, and U.S.-Russia policy, suggests that the modern right is a cult of personality first and a cult second. increased the possibility that it was an ideological movement.
It is now clear that for a significant portion of House Republicans, this is not the case. And that will pose a serious challenge to President Trump's agenda next year.
Republicans will control both houses of Congress in 2025, but their majority in the House will be very thin. Assuming a landslide victory in all special elections in impending red-tinted districts, the Republican majority will be at most five votes by year's end. For the bill to move forward without Democratic support, the parties would need to reach a near-unanimous agreement. When it comes to passing an extension and expansion of the 2017 tax cuts, the backbone of President Trump's legislative agenda, this may not seem like such a difficult feat. If Republicans agree on anything, it's that taxes should be lowered, after all.
But some conservatives have expressed genuine concern about the deficit and advocated paying for the tax cuts through spending cuts. Others may come from battleground states and be nervous about agreeing to cuts to unpopular social welfare programs. At least some Republicans are reluctant to even repeal all of the anti-inflation law's clean-energy tax credits that disproportionately benefit Republican areas. It will be difficult to appease all relevant voters.
In theory, Mr. Trump could make this task easier by threatening disloyal Republicans with charges of disloyalty and threatening key issues. But after Thursday, there seemed to be less certainty that the president-elect actually wields so much power over the backing of House Republicans.
It's worth remembering that Trump is a 78-year-old lame duck. If you're an up-and-coming conservative member of Congress with ambitions to run for high office in 10 years, older people interested in the Republican Party may find that the reputation for conservative ideological purity is important. may ultimately prove more useful than a perfect record of loyalty. The party is at risk of disappearing the moment he is stripped of the presidency.
No matter what happens, President Trump is poised to wield a bewildering amount of personal power over the executive branch next year. But he may find that his ability to dictate terms to Congress is as frustratingly limited as the government's power to issue new debt.
