鬼百合
One day we will wake to his obituary :-)
Loading…
www.politico.com
Donald Trump is getting a rude awakening that his grip on the GOP isn’t absolute.
Over the past 48 hours, 38 House Republicans rejected the stopgap spending bill that the president-elect publicly threw his weight behind after tanking Speaker Mike Johnson’s original proposal to keep the federal government running past Friday. Their defiance came even as Trump and his allies threatened to field primary challenges against GOP members who didn’t fall in line.
President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a news conference at Mar-a-Lago, on Dec. 16, in Palm Beach, Florida. | Evan Vucci/AP
By Lisa Kashinsky and Holly Otterbein
12/20/2024 05:22 PM EST
Updated: 12/20/2024 07:03 PM EST
Over the past 48 hours, 38 House Republicans rejected the stopgap spending bill that the president-elect publicly threw his weight behind after tanking Speaker Mike Johnson’s original proposal to keep the federal government running past Friday. Their defiance came even as Trump and his allies threatened to field primary challenges against GOP members who didn’t fall in line.
Then, on Friday night and early Saturday, the House and Senate passed a different version of the spending plan — one that didn’t include Trump’s demand to extend or end the debt limit.
It’s the latest example of Trump confronting the limits of his power, especially over his own party. Senate Republicans already dealt Trump a massive blow when a handful of them made clear they wouldn’t support Trump’s first choice for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, leading to him withdrawing. And that was after they chose John Thune over Rick Scott for Senate GOP leader against the wishes of Trump’s allies.
Taken together, rank-and-file Hill Republicans’ early rebuffs of Trump show the party is far from total lock-step with the president-elect.
“For a long time there were always calls for ‘who in the Republican Party will ever stand up to Trump?’ And now we certainly have it. But it may not be in an ideal way,” said Matthew Bartlett, a GOP strategist and appointee in Trump’s first administration.
“This is an inflection point: How Trump responds from outside the caucus, how he deals with those who are not ready to make deals … this is really just prepping the battlefield and testing the waters for the next four years to come,” Bartlett said.
Trump’s push to get Republicans to accede to his demands ran headlong into longstanding GOP resistance to suspending the debt ceiling. Doing that is a huge ask of fiscal conservatives, and viewed through that lens, it’s unsurprising that the bill went down.
While Trump had hailed the reworked deal as “SUCCESS in Washington” and urged “All Republicans, and even the Democrats” to vote for the bill that he called “VITAL to the America First Agenda,” some in his party broke rank.