Voices: For House Republicans, the enemy is the Senate

As a sometime Democratic leader in the House of Representatives once put it: “The House Republicans are not the enemy. They are the opposition. The enemy is the Senate.”

For the purposes of the current session, that means that House Minority Leader Kevin Leader and the House Republicans are getting squeezed by both the enemy and the opposition – but the man who would be speaker still has an opportunity on his hands.

Late on Tuesday, Senate Appropriations Chairman Patrick Leahy and Ranking Member Richard Shelby, along with House Appropriations Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro, announced a bipartisan framework for omnibus spending legislation, the measure that funds multiple departments of government.

“We’re gonna do the allocations next and we’ll go from there,” Mr Shelby told The Independent. “We’re not there yet, but we are optimistic.”

At the same time, he admitted there are plenty of obstacles. The three leaders want to pass an omnibus bill by 23 December, but Kay Granger, the House Appropriations Committee’s top Republican, did not put out a statement of her own, signaling that she was not part of the discussions.

The unspoken implication is that the Senate and House Republicans simply don’t trust the incoming House Republican majority to pass an omnibus. Republicans will have only the slightest of majorities to work with, and Mr McCarthy is fighting hard to appeal to every faction of his conference as he seeks the gavel.

On Wednesday, Mr McCarthy and Ms Granger, along with a coterie of incoming GOP leaders, made that subtext into text. Specifically, the incoming leader called out the retiring Mr Leahy and Mr Shelby as “individuals who will not be here” come January.

“The Democrats have been in power,” he said at a press conference on Wednesday. “They’ve had the House, Senate and the presidency. They did not do their work.”

Mr McCarthy and other Republicans want the House to pass a continuing resolution, also known as a CR, to keep the government open through the beginning of the year so that they can write appropriations legislation. Mr McCarthy also pledged to friend of the newsletter Jake Sherman over at Punchbowl News that under his speakership, “We’ll pass individual bills over to the Senate.”

In addition, he and other Republicans criticized the fact that the trio of appropriators won’t say what the current baseline number in the still-forming deal currently is.

“We still haven’t seen anything,” Senator Rick Scott of Florida told reporters as he complained about the number of earmarks on the table. “Have you seen the number?”

Mr Shelby, well-known for his prolific capacity to bring home federal money for projects in his home state of Alabama, dismissed Mr McCarthy’s objections.

“I think we ought to do our job, whether we’re retiring or not,” he told your dispatcher – this before offering a remark with more than a little condescension that also revealed why Mr McCarthy is raising these objections.

“I wish the Congressman well,” he said. “He wants to be the speaker. He’s got to put all that together, I understand where he’s coming from.”

Mr Shelby’s words gave away the game: Mr McCarthy will likely lose this fight, especially since enough Senate Republicans – and even some House Republicans – will go along with the omnibus spending bill in the end. Mr McCarthy’s noise-making is not about any number except 218, the magic number he needs to become speaker at the open of the next Congress.

Ms DeLauro, for her part, dismissed Mr McCarthy’s concerns.

“I guess they would like to see the government shut down,” she told The Independent.