Republicans have just gone through days of chaos on Capitol Hill after tech billionaire Elon Musk blew up a bipartisan continuing resolution by threatening to fund primaries of GOP lawmakers, which forced Republicans to replace it with a slimmed-down, partisan version that cut several vital programs, only to watch that version fail to pass it as dozens of their own members revolted.
And according to Semafor's Burgess Everett, it's settling in for some GOP lawmakers that when they take unified control of Congress in January, things are only going to go further off the rails.
“One of the things that I’ve learned about myself, the older I get, the more sanguine [I am] … because otherwise I’d be a screaming mess,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) told Semafor. “It’s not going to get better, like early in the year particularly.”
The shutdown threat comes at a moment when Republicans ought to be rallying together to plan out passing President-elect Donald Trump's agenda, which includes a border security bill and an extension of certain sunsetting provisions of his 2017 tax cut package.
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Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the incoming Majority Leader himself, had a similar attitude as the GOP flails to try to keep the government open during Christmas. “Shutdowns are never good. I mean, nobody wins,” he said. He raged against Democrats for not securing the funding earlier in the year and leaving them with the mess in the lame duck session — but acknowledged all of this is a problem for the Republican agenda.
Jeff Stein from The Washington Post is hearing similar complaints from his own GOP sources, with one strategist telling him of the failed vote on Thursday evening, “38 [GOP no votes] shows weakness, and it feeds on itself. You either need to bring these people to heel or make an example of them — if you can do this with no penalty, this is going to only embolden people.”