Senate Republicans would give full bargaining powers to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California), who had never negotiated a compromise on this scale before, especially for the state. He holds conferences with very different values than Mr. McConnell on security.
McConnell has repeatedly said Senate Republicans will support whatever McCarthy and President Biden agree to do.
Senate Republicans were shocked when they finally saw McCarthy in action.
“My colleagues in the House, I can’t believe you did this,” roared Senator Lindsey O. Graham, RS.C., who had just completed a visit to Ukraine. Thursday.
Graham said McCarthy accepted Biden’s budget proposal for next year with Pentagon funding, which he sees as wholly inadequate given his continued efforts to support the wars between Ukraine and Russia, hence the pact. In a condemning congressional speech, he joined a group of Senate Republicans supporting increased military spending. .
Not only that, but McCarthy also included a complicated clause written by Rep. Thomas Massey (R, Kentucky), a liberal who opposes funding for the defense of Ukraine. If Congress doesn’t agree, it will force all agencies to make 1% cuts across the board. By New Year’s Day, he had passed all 12 annual bills that funded the federal government.
Funding for non-defence agencies under the Massey Clause may be slightly higher than in the deal McCarthy negotiated. If the plan was to increase the Pentagon’s account by $28 billion, that would result in a substantial reduction in Pentagon funding. This sent Senate Republicans into a panic, believing that liberal Democrats would sabotage the spending process and invoke Mr. Massey’s words to better allocate funds to non-defense agencies.
Sen. Tom Tillis, RN.C., told reporters on Thursday: “Looking at the details of the deal, there are arguments about the implications of the quarantine and the claims that the numbers we are dealing with are not entirely correct.” said. , using the nomenclature of compulsory funding cuts. “There seems to be an incentive to allow quarantine.”
By then it was too late. After an unusually strong bipartisan endorsement, the House of Representatives approved the bill to pass Wednesday and left town.
In a reversal of the usual fate of the Capitol Hill negotiations, the House sent the Senate a scenario of either paying off the debt or defaulting.
Have Senate Republicans regretted delegating negotiations to McCarthy?
“Maybe I shouldn’t comment on that,” Sen. John Thune, SD, the second-ranked House Republican leader and a staunch supporter of the Pentagon, told reporters on Thursday.
“Do I regret that decision? It wasn’t my decision,” said Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the Republican head of the appropriations committee.
In fact, Collins was just one of them. Six Republican lawmakers won’t sign the letter The document, in effect, told Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (DN.Y.) that Mr. McCarthy had their representatives and that at the meeting they were united “in support of the position of the House Republicans.” I told him I was there.
To his credit, McConnell kept his word and readily accepted the Biden-McCarthy deal, praising it repeatedly. He collected enough Republican votes to overcome filibuster attempts from his own ranks.
“No one gets everything they want,” he said in a speech to the floor on Wednesday. “But in this case, it means the American people have made far more progress toward fiscal consolidation than the Washington Democrats hoped.”
McConnell made several similar moves in 2019 and 2020, but each time he left it to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to decide whether the debt ceiling and We postponed the budget deal, the new North American trade deal, and the deal negotiations. Early coronavirus pandemic response measures.
Senate Republicans expressed their outrage each time Pelosi, a negotiating legend, won a major concession from Mnuchin, an investment banker and Hollywood producer with no government experience.
This time the president was a Democrat and the chairman was a Republican, so the Republicans in the Senate suffered the same bitterness.
Some Republican pro-hawks are baffled how McCarthy, whom they consider one of their allies, will agree to the deal.
Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) said in a speech Thursday, “Unfortunately, this bill poses a fatal risk to national security by cutting the defense budget. , I cannot support.”
Just like Senate Republicans, note how the House GOP meeting has moved away from the traditional heavy-handed global stance embodied by President Ronald Reagan, and has instead embraced President Donald Trump’s America First vision. It looks like you didn’t pay.
When Russia invaded in early 2022, Massey was the only Republican voice to speak out against spending billions of dollars in support of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Months later, more than 50 House Republicans voted against the Ukraine aid bill.
The most vocal, far-right Republicans in the House have made clear their opposition to war funding, including McCarthy’s loyal allies such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R, Georgia). and some of McCarthy’s biggest opponents, including Rep. Matt Gates. (Florida Republican Party).
Other House Republicans, including those with traditional national security views, said anti-Zelensky sentiment among conservative Republicans with conservative figures like President Trump and Tucker Carlson voting in primaries. secretly fears the expected vote later this year for more funding. .
McCarthy himself treats the issue with caution. He vowed late last year that he would oppose “blank checks” for the war, but tried to correct that statement in subsequent media appearances. He always felt like he was signaling to the Far Right that he understood their views.
Dozens of other lawmakers have traveled to Kiev to pose for pictures with Ukrainian leaders, but McCarthy has yet to do so. His strongest pro-Ukrainian pledge came during a visit to Israel, when he asked a question on the assumption that Russian journalists did not support Mr. Zelensky.
As such, when negotiations began a few weeks ago, Mr. McCarthy didn’t have the same Pentagon spirit as the majority of Senate Republicans. He has two Republicans with no national security credentials, Rep. Garrett Graves (Louisiana), an energy production expert, and Rep. Patrick T. McHenry, chairman of the Financial Services Commission. (North Carolina) as the top negotiator.
Since their main goal was to cut spending as much as possible, some Republicans wanted a big increase in the Pentagon budget, but Biden’s proposed 3% increase in 2024 and 2025. increased by just 1% and could not even keep up. with inflation.
While Graves and McHenry negotiated actual cuts to domestic agencies, some accounting measures allowed for non-defense funding. almost flat. Mr. Massey provided the crucial ballot to get the entire bill from the Rules Committee to the House plenary session, so perhaps the inclusion of his bill sealed the deal with Mr. McCarthy.
The Republican Senate has just a handful of senators with xenophobic views on foreign policy, so its total buildup has been blown. “We are in a very good position at this point,” Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) told reporters.
But in the end it didn’t. Republicans delayed action in the Senate for hours so they could introduce a number of amendments, including the Cotton bill, which would change the Massey Clause.
I failed in a partisan voteJust like all other proposed fixes have failed. Schumer and McConnell released lukewarm statements that the Senate would seek more funding from the Pentagon later this year, and the bill passed.
Three out of four delegations of Congress strongly supported the compromise, with 68% of House Republicans, 78% of House Democrats, and 90% of Senate Democrats supporting the compromise.
Only 17 Republicans in the Senate supported the bill and 31 opposed it, and those who had full confidence in McCarthy’s hands did not want to participate, but the negotiations ended bitterly. became.
“We said yes.
“Nobody is happy here,” Konin said. “Not everyone, anyway. Some people do.”
