As President-elect Donald Trump expresses his support for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), our nation faces a bigger problem at stake for Republicans and for the United States in 2025 — the decision of whether our representatives will unify to help all Americans.
What’s the difference between a unified GOP House and one where members hold out their votes on a mixture of priorities before they are willing to step up and take hard votes together on a prioritized basis?
While serving as House speaker, I worked with a unified caucus to pass two budgets in Michigan under the rate of inflation without a single tax cut or fee increase. This happened in fiscals 2005 and 2006. You might not think this is a big deal, but let me put it into perspective.
For 47 years prior to this, no budget had been balanced under the rate of inflation, and most expanded taxes and/or fees. Most years, the GOP controlled at least one chamber. For decades, they had total control. Since that time in Michigan, division under GOP majorities has led to huge growth in spending most years and policies such as the expansion of gambling and other attacks on families seek “new revenue” rather than reform and cut wasteful spending.
For two years, though, the power of our unified front made former Gov. Jennifer Granholm (D-MI), an unapologetic progressive and now secretary of energy for President Joe Biden, more fiscally conservative than any Republican governor who served before her for nearly 50 years.
This wasn’t easy. We had a two-seat majority, and the Senate GOP majority was undermined by holdouts for years. Michigan was the only state that didn’t recover from the 2001 recession after 9/11 and had a structural billion-dollar hole in its roughly $40 billion state revenue budget at the time.
Granholm was very honest about wanting tax increases, and when our majority was gone, Democrats locked down the government for 21 days of negotiations to get her tax increases through. So, how did we win for those two years?
I explained to our caucus that the governor would want her top priority. To get her top priority, she would have to agree to ours. Then, we could move to our second priority and proceed from there.
We made balancing the budget under the rate of inflation without taxes our No. 1 priority, which meant she got to keep a lot of her priorities in the budget, the same as us, but she would have to agree to the overall spending limits. In short, we did one thing at a time.
What is going on in Washington, D.C., for the past decade has been members of the GOP House conference throwing out priority No. 3 or 2,003 and finding a television host or podcast voice to amplify their excuse as to why they are not voting with their peers to advance their highest priority, and then moving together to their next priority.
In doing this, they should properly be seen as the people who undermined President-elect Donald Trump and robbed him of many of the chances he had for victory in his first term. Taking down and blaming the incumbent speaker hasn’t proven to be a win for conservatism. In fact, in some cases, it has been the reason our budget deficit has ballooned.
If Republicans can put behind their differences on which priority is first and get behind Trump’s and know that their job is to pass his priorities for the next two years as a united front, the squishy moderates will no longer have their cover for all the spending the division and chaos allows. Johnson appears to be willing to fully support Trump’s agenda, but this can only happen if his members do too, and in the order they are prioritized.
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Our slim GOP majority was able to do something extraordinary in Michigan because we understood the chance to serve was a privilege, and we wanted to make the most of it for the people we served. We got Michigan’s budget back on track with a progressive governor who was very popular at the time. Imagine what the House GOP can accomplish with complete control of Washington and Trump to negotiate with instead of what we had to work through in Michigan.
Americans gave the GOP a mandate for deep, structural change. The GOP majorities in Congress have let us down too many times before. A unified GOP has the potential to make history. This time, let’s get it done!
Craig DeRoche is the president and CEO of Family Policy Alliance and was the former speaker of the House in Michigan.