Wall Street Journal Editorial Board: “Speaker Johnson’s Spending Deal”

WASHINGTON — In case you missed it, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board endorsed the bipartisan topline agreement announced over the weekend to unlock the FY24 topline numbers and allow the Appropriations Committee to begin negotiating and completing the twelve annual appropriations bills.

From the WSJ Editorial Board:

“With the top line set, Congress can now move to pass the 12 appropriations bills to fund the government before the looming staggered deadlines of Jan. 19 and Feb. 2. After years of continuing resolutions and blowout omnibus bills, this would be progress for a GOP that promised to restore regular order.

“The House has moved all 12 bills out of committee, and seven through the floor. The Senate has passed only three. A House-Senate conference committee on bills, once they pass each body, is crucial for giving Republicans leverage to end the Nancy-Pelosi-era policy riders that remain in effect.”

Read the full WSJ Editorial here or below:

Speaker Johnson’s Spending Deal

House Republicans have a chance to show they can actually govern

Wall Street Journal

Editorial Board

January 8, 2024

Can House Republicans govern in 2024—even a little—after the lost year of 2023? One modestly promising sign is the budget deal that House Speaker Mike Johnson struck with Democrats over the weekend on federal spending levels for fiscal 2024.

The agreement largely hews to the debt-ceiling deal of last spring, with a few additional fiscal benefits. Fiscal 2024 discretionary spending (through this September) will remain at $1.59 trillion, as specified by statute in the Fiscal Responsibility Act agreed to by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Biden in May. That’s a minor victory by itself since Senate appropriators intended to bust that cap by adding another $14 billion.

Defense spending will total $886 billion, while non-defense discretionary comes in at $704 billion. The rub is that Mr. McCarthy and the White House negotiated several side deals that increased domestic spending by an additional $69 billion. While that number remains, Mr. Johnson managed to offset $16 billion with other cuts. Democrats agreed to surrender $10 billion more of their Internal Revenue Service fillip, bringing that total to $20 billion in fiscal 2024. Another $6.1 billion will come out of unspent Covid-era funds.

Overall, domestic discretionary spending remains essentially flat, while defense dollars increase by roughly 3%. That breaks the Democrats’ longtime demand for parity between defense and social-welfare spending. Mr. Johnson’s team also managed to kill several gimmicks that threatened to make emergency spending and changes to entitlement accounting part of the permanent budget baseline.

With the top line set, Congress can now move to pass the 12 appropriations bills to fund the government before the looming staggered deadlines of Jan. 19 and Feb. 2. After years of continuing resolutions and blowout omnibus bills, this would be progress for a GOP that promised to restore regular order.

The House has moved all 12 bills out of committee, and seven through the floor. The Senate has passed only three. A House-Senate conference committee on bills, once they pass each body, is crucial for giving Republicans leverage to end the Nancy-Pelosi-era policy riders that remain in effect.

House Freedom Caucus members are denouncing the deal as a sellout, but they always do. Could they do better with a three-seat margin in the House and Democrats in charge of the Senate and White House? There’s no evidence they have a plan beyond the futile gesture of shutting down the government.

Meeting the budget deadlines lets Republicans focus on Mr. Biden’s border mess, where a united GOP might extract real concession on security in return for weapons for Ukraine and Israel. The alternative is for the GOP to fracture over this spending deal, threaten a shutdown, and produce more headlines about GOP dysfunction. Could they be dumb enough to defenestrate another Speaker?

The cheapest trick in politics is to pound the table in outrage at everyone else’s failure without offering a constructive idea for doing better. This is part of the GOP’s current affliction, and the Speaker’s deal is an antidote.

Appeared in the January 9, 2024, print edition as ‘Speaker Johnson’s Spending Deal’.

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