Staff Reports
The House is about to head back to Washington, and boy oh boy, do they have a lot to get done! The Republican Speaker, Mike Johnson, has got his work cut out for him as he tries to wrangle up support from the moderate Senate Democrats while also keeping the far-right wing of his own party happy.
.@RepMTG warns @SpeakerJohnson’s ‘grace period is over’ as he returns to appropriations mess https://t.co/CGEgVOsY0e https://t.co/CGEgVOsY0e
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) December 31, 2023
When the House took off for their holiday break, they sure left a big ol’ mess behind. They didn’t make any progress on those dadgum spending bills they need to pass before they expire next year. Instead of getting things done, they decided to kick the can down the road and put off dealing with the spending until they come back in January.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia is fuming mad about the whole situation. She’s saying that Speaker Johnson isn’t living up to the job and has reached the end of his “honeymoon phase.”
Now, Speaker Johnson had this big plan to rush through all those spending bills before a government shutdown deadline, but it all went down the drain when he had to pull five of the bills because his own party couldn’t agree on them. Instead, they just passed a temporary measure to push the deadlines to next year.
The House managed to pass seven of the 12 spending bills, which is better than the do-nothing Senate, but still not great.
Greene is not holding back on how she feels. She’s peeved that the Speaker split up the appropriations bills into two different deadlines without even bringing any of them to the floor for a vote in December.
There are two big deadlines coming up that Congress has to tackle to keep the government running, and Greene’s not impressed with how the Speaker has been handling things. She’s especially steamed about how the National Defense Authorization Act went down. She feels like she and the other folks on the committee got left out of the loop on some important policy decisions, and she’s not having it.
And to top it all off, some of the things that Greene and other conservatives wanted to see in the final version of the NDAA got left out, including policies on abortion, diversity, and transgender service members. And to add insult to injury, more military aid to Ukraine got thrown in there, which Greene was dead set against. Man, oh man, Speaker Johnson is really catching some heat from his own party.
