The drag-out fight over government spending has highlighted how House Republicans — for all the ideological divisions between their clashing in-house factions — are governed by the underlying effort to appease an audience of one: President-elect Trump.

Trump’s 11th-hour decision to jump into the funding fight — with a big push from billionaire Elon Musk — impelled Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to trash the deal he’d initially cut with Democrats, forced GOP leaders into a crisis-mode scramble for an alternative proposal, and brought the country to the teetering brink of a holiday-season government shutdown.

The exhausting three-day saga has inflamed the subsisting tensions within the restive GOP conference; threatened Johnson’s bid to keep the gavel; and raised new questions about how Trump’s return to the White House next month will affect the Republicans’ stewardship of the House next year, when they will control of the lower chamber with an even thinner cushion than the small majority they have right now.

Some Republicans said Trump’s intervention was inappropriate, particularly his insistence that any spending package be accompanied by a hike in the federal debt ceiling — a toxic idea on the right that infuriated House conservatives and made it only harder for Johnson to usher a bill to the finish line.

“President Trump has a lot of sway with Republicans, obviously, so the things that he says, I'm sure, have influence on individuals. But the House needs to operate as the House, and members of the House have to vote on what the House does, and the Republicans in the House need to do what is right and best,” said Rep. Bob Good (D-Va.), former head of the far-right House Freedom Caucus.

“I think trying to raise the debt limit was a mistake."

Democrats were much more biting in their criticisms, saying Johnson, in heeding Trump’s calls to renege on the initial agreement, had caved to a figure who’s not yet the president and undermined the trust between the parties going forward.

© The Hill