The easy answer is to call this an internal conflict between ‘MAGA’ and ‘RINO establishment’… but there’s another lens by which to see this divide.

In an age of ‘for us or against us’ partisan politics, it’s easy to default to the most cynical explanation for every disagreement. With the failure to pass of a second Continuing Resolution and the likelihood of another Government Shutdown (that, to be honest, doesn’t actually shut down the government), knives are already out in the GOP.

With Schumer still calling the shots in the Senate until the third of January, anything that passes with any amendments at all will come at a price of Schumer demanding a pound of flesh to get it passed. The left is a lot better at hardball negotiation in Congress than the right, which is how, without a majority to speak of, they jammed one bloated and radical budget after another down the throats of American voters, sending debt soaring so high that the interest payments on maintaining that debt now exceed our entire defense budget for the first time in history.

And that sets up the point of the conflict in the spending bill. Year after year, Congress has promised to fix the spending problem ‘next time’.

We did well to kill the 1500+ page bill before it saw the light of day. There are two ideas of how to proceed.

Team Trump is looking at the pragmatic side. We are back to where we were in 2023 with a hard limit on the debt ceiling. Any economic solutions Trump or even DOGE can implement will have a lag time in the bottom line. Between then and now, the governemnt will continue to spend more money that it takes in.

Trump wants to have that budget ceiling fight NOW so that he won’t have to waste valuable political capital on that question when he’ll be facing other questions like immigration, trade deals, spending battles and so on.

Fiscal hawks who are feeling like raising the debt ceiling and writing a CR is just another Lucy-holding-the-football-for-Charlie-Brown situation that pushes the problem ahead where it will grow bigger without actually solving the problem.

They have watched supposedly ‘unified’ Conservative government in the past crumble on issues like Border Wall and Obamacare in the past. They’ve learned to be cynical and are taking nothing for granted.

Here’s Chip Roy as one of the key voices backing that position.

In his own words:

Team Trump, on the other side was pushing to pass the second bill.

Further complicating this standoff is the fact that some Republicans won’t back anything that won’t help farmers, and others insist on disaster relief being attached. Since enough Republicans have been burned — many by ‘bipartisan’ backroom deals made by their own party brass (looking at you McConnell) often enough that they will NEVER vote for any CR that does not slash spending, any bill takes votes from both parties.

That’s when the horse-trading comes in, and the pork gets added. And that’s just the demands made within the House. Schumer’s demands as a Democrat controlling the Senate side of the proceeding can make heavy negotiating demands of his own.

That math changes if we shut down until January — the way Schumer did to kill a GOP bill long enough for Nancy to take the gavel and start over after Trump’s midterm. Of course, riding out the negative press of a government shutdown costs political capital too.

Any path forward comes with risk.

Different sides aren’t so much ‘betryaing the cause’ so to speak, they are worried about different risks.

We’ll fight it out, but a decision will be made one way or the other and we’ll move on.

These sorts of fights were exactly the push-and-pull the Framers envisioned as the necessary mechanism to push government to wise decisions that benefitted the public interest rather than a partisan faction.

it’s messy, sure. And this process is not for the faint of heart. But there’s a reason America is the oldest active codified Constitution.

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