House Speaker Mike Johnson is trying, once again, to herd his Republican cats. As usual, this comes to the fore in the form of a budget bill. With a razor-thin majority and several competing factions, the question is whether he can assuage all of them enough to drag his bill over the finish line this week before Congress scarpers off on vacation once again.

The various GOP factions are aligned in opposition to each other, as one side clamors for deeper cuts to the federal budget and another insists that the only way Republicans will have a chance of keeping their majority in the midterms is not to make such deep cuts -- especially to safety-net programs like Medicaid. A third faction hails from swing districts in blue states and is pushing hard to reverse (as much as possible) a tax provision that was included in the original Trump tax cut bill, back in his first term -- one that seemed specifically designed to punish taxpayers in blue states.

Over the next two days these factions will vie for the speaker's ear and draw their lines in the sand. It remains to be seen whether anything can satisfy all of these factions enough to get the bill passed this week. Since no Democrat is going to vote for the GOP bill, Johnson can only lose three votes, and each of the factions is bigger than that margin.

The fiscal conservatives flexed their power first, last Friday, as four of them on the House Budget Committee voted against the proposed draft of the bill. This is perhaps the biggest of the factions raising objections to the bill, and members of the fiscal hardliners have indeed tanked GOP budget proposals in the past. Some members are pretty absolutist, insisting that they'll never vote for a budget that adds to the national debt. This is problematic, since pretty much every single budget (Republican or otherwise) winds up costing a lot of money. This bill is no exception, as it would add trillions to the national debt over 10 years.

So the fiscal conservatives are pressing for much deeper cuts. So far, this is likely to shift at least one of the gimmicks Republicans are using in this budget plan, that of frontloading all the goodies and backloading all the pain. Tax cuts will appear next year, but big cuts to Medicaid and whatnot were to be conveniently pushed off until right after Donald Trump leaves office. The hardliners seem to have achieved moving the latter goalpost two years forward, so the Medicaid cuts will appear in 2027 -- after the midterms, but while Trump is still president. One tangential note here is that all the new goodies in the bill (such as no taxes on tip income or overtime) will only last through Trump's term and will disappear entirely in 2029 (Republicans are betting that a future Congress won't let them lapse, but sunsetting them early now allows them to claim the bill won't cost as much, which is why it's a gimmick). The fiscal conservatives have other complaints about the bill as well, as they would like to slash spending even further on other things.

Then there are the purple-district Republicans, who got elected in very close districts and who thus feel the most endangered in the upcoming midterms. If a Democratic challenger can successfully paint them as being heartless Republicans slashing funds for the poor to shower giant tax cuts on the rich, then Republican control of the House will be at serious risk. Many of these Republicans are in rural districts in blue states, where there are a high percentages of people on Medicaid. Slashing Medicaid by hundreds of billions of dollars is not going to be popular there, to state the obvious. As written, the Republican budget is going to cut over $700 billion from Medicaid, which will kick off at least 8.6 million people from the program (other estimates of how many people would lose coverage under the bill are even higher).

There is another faction fighting to keep at least some of all the clean energy tax breaks that Joe Biden passed in the Inflation Reduction Act, many of which benefit very red states and districts. Some Republicans want to just repeal everything that has any hint of "green energy" to it, on ideological grounds, but that's tough to do when a newly-built factory making green energy products is part of your own House district.

And then there are the blue-state Republicans who are adamant that one punishment in the first-term Trump tax cut needs to be drastically rolled back. The SALT problem (which stands for "State And Local Taxes") is one that their own constituents have suffered under. Previously, people could deduct from their federal income taxes any state and local taxes they had to pay -- things like state income tax and property taxes. The states where these taxes are the highest are solid blue (places like New York, Massachusetts, and California), so the Republicans instituted a ceiling of $10,000 for this write-off. Anything over that was no longer deductible.

There are a handful of Republicans from suburban or rural districts in New York and California who are all at risk of losing re-election if they don't make good on their promises to restore the SALT deduction. There aren't many in this group, but it is still big enough to flip control of the House should Democrats beat enough of them in the midterms. So far, the proposal in the bill is to raise the limit to $30,000, but this was considered an insult by the SALT crew. They're pushing for much higher caps -- perhaps $40,000 per person (as things stand, the $10,000 cap applies to a married couple, whereas if it was an individual deduction then a married couple could write off $20,000 while a single person could only write off $10,000). Upping the limit to $40,000 for singles and $80,000 for married filers would be a major improvement -- but one that will cost a lot of money.

You can see how the priorities of these various factions are in diametric opposition to each other. If Johnson moves the bill closer to one group's demands, then it makes things even worse for another group. Which has been the Republicans' basic problem for many years now.

What has usually happened, in the recent past, is that there is a giant battle between the hardliners and the more moderate factions, which sometimes led to a bill at least passing the House but many times just resulted in gridlock in the lower chamber. Then the Senate (usually under Democratic leadership, but not always) would step in and offer up some much-less-contentious budget plan that even had a few goodies in it for Democrats. Enough Democrats would be convinced to vote for it to make up for whichever Republican faction was in a snit, and the bill would pass both chambers.

However, what often happened immediately afterwards was the ouster of the Republican speaker (in one way or another). But this time around, Republicans control both chambers and the White House, so this year's budget is the best opportunity they'll likely have to pass major parts of their agenda. They're trying to get this done without having to resort to offering olive branches to Democrats.

This week, as mentioned, could be the critical one for the House. Can Johnson thread the needle between all his various fighting factions? He will either manage to cobble together something that can get enough Republican floor votes to pass or they'll all have to go off on vacation admitting defeat (for now). But even if they do manage to pass something, it will by no means be the final word on the Republican budget.

The Senate still has to chime in, and they've got their own ideas and their own battling factions. Nobody at this point knows what changes they will make to the House bill, but it is virtually guaranteed that they will indeed make some major changes. Which is something to keep in mind, as we watch this week's drama play out.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant