GOP senator: House GOP whip ‘surrendering’ before year-end spending battle

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), chair of the conservative Senate Steering Committee, says House Republican Whip Tom Emmer (Minn.) is already “surrendering” in the fight over an omnibus spending package that Democrats want to pass before President Biden leaves office.

Emmer recently suggested it would be in former President Trump’s interest if he’s elected in November to wrap up work on the 12 stalled annual spending bills in December, to clear the decks ahead of Trump’s first 100 days in office.

But conservatives in both chambers are pushing for those spending bills to be delayed until next year so that a new Trump administration could have more influence on the top-line spending levels and any policy riders added to the legislation.

“Why is the House Republican Whip surrendering in advance of this year’s spending fight?” Lee posted on social platform X.

“This is how Republicans so often lose these fights and our debt continues to spiral out of control,” Lee wrote.

“It’s always ‘we’ll cut spending next time around,’ but that somehow never materializes,” he added.

The Utah senator leveled the criticism after Punchbowl reported that Emmer disagreed with Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.) comments ruling out the possibility of passing an omnibus spending package before Christmas.

“I don’t know that he should set those expectations for the end of this year because I see a world where Donald Trump is going to be inaugurated in January. You’re going to have the Senate, you’re going to have the House,” Emmer said, arguing that a new Republican president and Congress won’t want to get bogged down in the previous year’s unfinished appropriations work.

“That first hundred days … has got to be focused on a balanced budget, so you stop bleeding $1.5 to $1.7 trillion annually. And we’ve got to put in place reforms within government, eliminating different things to get our spending under control so that we can pay off our debt in the next 10 to 15 years,” the Minnesota lawmaker said.

But passing an omnibus in the lame-duck session to give the new Congress a fresh slate isn’t a popular idea with many Trump allies.

Russ Vought, the former Office of Management and Budget director under Trump, has argued for punting the fiscal 2025 spending bills into the new Congress to give Republicans more control over spending decisions for Trump’s first year in office — if he is reelected.

Vought told Real America’s Voice in September that Senate Republicans should pull out all the stops to avoid passing an omnibus in December.

“That’s what lame ducks produce, they produce bad policy and bad bills, one of which is an omnibus bill,” he said, warning that such a bill would fund the federal government at “woke and weaponized high levels of bureaucracy … for a quarter of what I hope to be President Trump’s second term.”

“I’m very worried [if] we have a big bill like this, they put in things that tie his hands,” he said.