House Republicans just exposed the limits of Trump’s power

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This week’s installment of the long-running saga, “House Republicans cannot govern,” will soon be forgotten. Elon Musk’s decision to blow up a bipartisan agreement to keep the government funded through the sheer power of posting (and the latent threat posed by his immense wealth), Donald Trump suddenly calling for the abolition of the debt limit, House Republican Chip Roy telling his colleagues that they lack “an ounce of self-respect” — all these dramas will surely give way to even more ridiculous ones in the new year.

But this week’s government funding fight also revealed something that could have profound implications for the next four years of governance: Trump’s power over the congressional GOP is quite limited.

This did not appear to be the case just days ago. On Wednesday, Trump joined Elon Musk in calling on House Republicans to scrap a bipartisan spending deal that would have kept the government funded through March, increased disaster relief, and funded pediatric cancer research, among many other things. Despite the fact that the GOP needs buy-in from the Senate’s Democratic majority in order to pass any legislation — and failure to pass a spending bill by Saturday would mean a government shutdown — House Republicans heeded Trump’s call to nix the carefully negotiated compromise.

If Trump had little difficulty persuading his co-partisans to block one spending bill, however, he proved less adept at getting them to support a different one. 

On Thursday, in coordination with Trump, the House GOP unveiled a new funding bill, one shorn of all Democratic priorities. Over social media, the president-elect instructed his party to “vote ‘YES’ for this Bill, TONIGHT!” Then, 38 House Republicans voted against the legislation, which was more than enough to sink it amid nearly unified Democratic opposition. 

House conservatives’ defiance of Trump is partly attributable to ideological differences. The president-elect’s objections to Wednesday’s bipartisan agreement were distinct from those of his donor Elon Musk or the House GOP’s hardliners. The latter disdained the spending bill’s page count and fiscal cost. Trump, by contrast, appeared more preoccupied with the legislation’s failure to increase — or eliminate — the debt limit.

Which is understandable. The debt limit may be the most irrational of all the US government’s institutions. It does not prevent Congress from authorizing spending far in excess of federal revenue. Rather, it authorizes the government to finance the spending that Congress has already ordered through borrowing. The alternative to raising the debt limit is for the government to default on its obligations to American citizens, or to its lenders, or both. In practice, breaching the debt limit could trigger global financial tumult, as the world’s most widely trusted “safe” asset — US treasury debt — suddenly becomes a risky investment.

Although refusing to raise the debt limit would be economically disastrous, many lawmakers are inclined to do so anyway. After all, increasing the limit on how much debt the government can accrue — when the federal debt already sits at $36 trillion — can sound bad to voters when highlighted out of context in a campaign ad. And some conservatives see threatening to sabotage the global financial system as a potential means of forcing through unpopular spending cuts. 

So getting Congress to raise the debt limit is inevitably a bit of a headache. And Trump does not want that high-stakes formality getting in the way of his plans to enact large tax cuts that — if history is any guide — will substantially increase the debt and deficit. 

Trump therefore implored House Republicans to suspend the debt limit for at least two years — or else, eliminate it entirely — so it wouldn’t interfere with his honeymoon period (as is, Congress will likely need to raise the debt ceiling at some point next year, after narrowly averting a crisis in 2023). House Speaker Mike Johnson honored this request, adding a two-year debt limit hike to Thursday’s bill.

For dozens of House conservatives, the idea of voting for a spending bill devoid of any major funding cuts that also suspended the debt limit was more odious than the prospect of defying Trump.

It is not surprising that some House Republicans would prize conservative purity above fealty to Trump. That nearly 40 of them would harbor such priorities is a revelation, however. During the 2024 campaign, Trump demonstrated a remarkable capacity to dictate ideological terms to his party, officially forswearing a national abortion ban without provoking any sustained attacks from his right. Combined with his apparent success in revising conservative orthodoxy on trade, entitlement spending, and US-Russia policy, Trump’s pivot on abortion raised the possibility that the modern right was a personality cult first and an ideological movement second. 

It’s now clear that for a substantial portion of House Republicans, this is not the case. And that is going to raise serious challenges to Trump’s agenda next year.

Republicans will control both chambers of Congress in 2025, but their majority in the House will be razor-thin: They will have at most a five-vote majority by year’s end, assuming they sweep all impending special elections in deep-red districts. The party will need to reach something approaching unanimity in order to advance legislation without Democratic help. This might not seem like such a difficult feat when it comes to passing the cornerstone of Trump’s legislative agenda, an extension and expansion of his 2017 tax cuts: If Republicans agree on anything, after all, it is that taxes should be lower.

Yet some conservatives evince genuine concern about deficits and insist on paying for the tax cuts by slashing spending. Others hail from swing districts and may be nervous about signing off on unpopular cuts to social welfare programs. At least a few Republicans are even reluctant to roll back all of the Inflation Reduction Act’s pro-clean energy tax credits, which have disproportionately benefited Republican areas. Appeasing all relevant constituencies will be difficult. 

Theoretically, Trump could make this task easier by cowing intransigent Republicans with charges of disloyalty and threats of primary challenges. But after Thursday, it appears less certain that the president-elect actually boasts such power over the House GOP’s backbenchers.

It is worth recalling that Trump is a 78-year-old lame duck. If you are an up-and-coming conservative House member with aspirations to run for higher office a decade from now, a reputation for conservative ideological purity might eventually prove more useful than a record of perfect fealty to an elderly man whose interest in the Republican Party is liable to evaporate the moment he forfeits the presidency.

Whatever happens, Trump is poised to wield a disconcerting amount of personal power over the executive branch come next year. But he may find that his capacity to dictate terms to Congress is as frustratingly limited as our government’s authority to issue new debt.