Politico reports:

As House Republicans began ripping apart their party’s latest spending proposal on a conference call their own leaders held to promote it, the plan’s two main defenders had to hang up the phone. They had flights to catch.

Reps. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), who represented centrists, and Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), who negotiated for conservatives, thought they had found a deal that would at least unite the fractious GOP — even if it couldn’t pass the Senate and avert a shutdown. Minutes after Johnson and Donalds left that Sunday night conference call, however, their work imploded, with a half-dozen House conservatives railing against it.

More than a dozen Republicans, mostly Donalds’ colleagues in the conservative Freedom Caucus, are publicly torching the spending plan he brokered. With just a four-seat majority, Speaker Kevin McCarthy can only afford to lose a handful of them given that he can’t count on Democratic votes — leaving the GOP bill effectively dead.

But beneath the surface, things are even worse for McCarthy this time around. The faceplant by the two negotiators he’d empowered has exposed a full-on House Republican rebellion that’s officially underway.

It’s bigger than a clash between the centrist and right wings of the party. The Freedom Caucus itself is divided, with many members swatting down a plan backed by their own leader. Many of those conservatives are now openly threatening to try to oust McCarthy if he relies on Democratic votes to avoid a shutdown, but they’re also withholding their support from the only Republican plan on paper. [Continue reading…]